Kenneth A. Wedin

Absolutely Atrocious Pronunciation of Asian Names

Revisado: 11-18-22

As a speaker of both Japanese and Mandarin, I find Craig G. Benjamin’s pronunciation of pretty much every name and word in Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese either unrecognizable or so irritatingly warped that the entire series is completely unlistenable. It’s not merely a matter of his Australian pronunciation overall since I tend to watch British TV programming almost exclusively; it’s a matter of him as a “scholar” having never bothered to learn the basic pronunciation of the languages representing the histories that he’s professionally employed to teach. It’s even worse than British professors' notoriously poor pronunciations of Asian names due to the lecturers’ typical failure to differentiate the presence or absence of apostrophes in Wade-Giles names and their failure to ever learn Hanyu Pinyin as well as their failure to recognize the differences between Japanese and Mandarin vowel sounds. It would be inconceivable for any Canadian or American professor in the East Asian department of any North American university to be so unfamiliar with how to pronounce words in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. It’s utterly atrocious that he’s getting away with perpetuating such poor pronunciation of East Asian names to generations of students and thousands of listeners on Audible and Great Courses customers.

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Of Interest Even to International Audiences

Revisado: 03-09-21

Every sentence is a tidbit that leads listeners to want even more detail, potentially requiring thousands of hours of further narrative. This is a truly balanced and arguably unbiased treatment of a subject that could easily have been warped by a scholar with a personal agenda. It is of considerable interest even to those of us in the (British) Commonwealth of Nations.

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Monotone, Devoid of Emotion or Emphasis

Revisado: 01-03-21

Usually, I prefer a writer to narrator her own book, but this one is almost completely monotone, devoid of any emotion. It sounds as if she’s whispering in a library, drawing out the last syllable of each sentence instead of dropping or raising the tone at the end. Everything is flat and lacks any emphasis as if she were reading without thinking, which is surprise, considering that it’s her own book. It sounds much more as if it’s being “read” as mere words without underlying ideas, even more than any other book, including even William Golding’s infamously monotone reading of his own “Lord of the Flies” classic.

Some may feel soothed by such a whispered monotone performance, which may be what grieving people are seeking, but the real purpose should be to become informed with useful information, and it’s difficult to acquire knowledge when no syllables, words, or phrases are emphasized, and when there’s no variation in cadence, volume, tone, pitch, stress, etc.

The lack of affect (emotion) makes it sound as if she’s still grieving, suffering from depression, but I think it’s more a matter of not knowing how to read aloud, which is common in modern-day North America, unlike the UK and Asia, which require reading aloud in class from an early age.

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File apparently broken on server

Revisado: 05-15-19

This audio file will not work on any device from Chapter 14 and thereafter even after deleting and re-downloading to each device. I’m not sure how to contact Customer Support, so I’m temporarily leaving a note here in the reviews.

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Appreciably Greater Detail than Similar Intros

Revisado: 01-20-15

Carter's book is superior to any other literary theory introduction I have read, filled with more detail than others that I've purchased, including Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford.

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