The listening component of the Contemporary Chinese course is a necessary companion to the books for a native English speaker like me. It is helpful that everything is read out by both a male and female speaker one after the other. It was the only way I could "triangulate" some pronunciations, and this brings me to the issue I found with this the Contemporary Chinese course as a native English speaker. It would have helped me if the books and audio made COMPARISONS of initials' pronunciation with familiar English letter combinations. As in "qi sounds like chi" etc. I had the same problem in my Chinese class and had to ask the teacher to clarify the pronunciations of initials using similar sounding English letter combinations so i could comprehend the sound my mouth was meant to be making. Of course exact phonetic representations aren't available for all the initials, but for initials like "zh", "q" "x" it would have helped me wrap my head around the sound I was meant to be making. Due to my difficulty with this I had to repeatedly listen to some initials to simply guess the way the speaker was saying it, only to find out when speaking to a native Mandarin speaker that what I thought I had heard was wrong! A second issue that stemmed from the first was that for me some of the initials are so similar sounding to one another that I could not understand how to make them sound DIFFERENT as they are meant to be. These issues slowed my development down considerably, but apart from the immense irritation I felt at these 2 issues, the listening component is an adequate companion to the course content and does still help everywhere else. I still recommend this, but attention given to comparative pronunciations using English letter combinations would have helped me learn a LOT quicker.