As you may have heard, I’ve lost my voice on this recording. These things can last a long time in China, but I hope to get it back into shape in a day or two. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Ken Carroll
Archive for October, 2005
Here’as an overview of this week’s lessons and what you can expect to learn.
Monday Oct 31st: Lesson 31 “Tones, Part II”
We’ve had a lot of requests about the tones, and so we’ve put together another podcast on this subject (the last one was #10, for those of you who want to go through the […]
Mr Pinker.
There’s a very impressive collection of articles on the topic of communication over at Forbes Magazine (of all palces). Among the authors is Steven Pinker, a great hero of mine. There’s nothing China-specific about the report, but it has some fascinating articles on the topics of language and communication in […]
“Over 30 million people learn Chinese in world as foreign language”
Published by October 26th, 2005 in About the Chinese language. 2 CommentsFrom the People’s Daily:
More than 30 million people in the world are learning Chinese as a foreign language through various ways, said a Chinese-language teaching official.
I actually think he may be overstating it. The trend is clear, though.
Read it all here.
Ken
ChinesePod uses Libsyn for its podcast hosting. As another blogger put it:
Urgent Message!! I just received word that the data center that hosts the iBryan Podcast files is down due to the hurricane in Florida. The iBryan website remains up as it is hosted by me out of Los Angeles. The Podcast hosting service I […]
From now on we’ll be posting a weekly preview of the upcoming podcasts. It seems that a lot of users are combining the site with their own off-line practice, so the idea is that a preview will help you plan your week.
Monday 24th “Who’s that Girl”?
On Monday we are going to take a look at […]
The Javascript rollover effect should now be bug free for Safari users. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Our podcast hosting service informed us there was a short disruption in their service yesterday (see message below). This might have caused some ChinesePod users difficultly in accessing the MP3 files. We will continue to monitor this and strive to provide the most reliable service possible.
A form of DOS attack hit our data […]
The problem with ‘traditional’ language teaching
Published by October 20th, 2005 in Learning Chinese. 16 CommentsIn the traditional approach to language teaching, the teacher controls everything and explains everything. The students listen, but do very little. This approach is ineffective. Why?
First of all it is highly inefficient. The teacher does all the thinking and all the talking. But surely it is the students who should be thinking and talking. […]
Brian McCloskey has just joined up as head of academics at ChinesePod. Brian is one of the most qualified guys in Shanghai in the areas of teaching, teacher taining, and curriculum design. With a MA in Education and 18 years experience in the field of ESL, Brian brings a new level of knowledge. Among […]
Comments