On Sunday, I met with Pete Lawrence, a guy who has been using ChinesePod for some weeks now. He had a lot to say about the service and I was grateful for his feedback.
Pete described what he called a ChinesePod “wow” moment. That came when (sitting in a taxi) he listened to ChinesePod for the first time. Suddenly he was inspired by the idea that he really had the chance to make progress with Mandarin.
I was delighted to hear this little anecdote. Now, obviously it takes more than just one experience like this to learn a new language, but I’ll take the positive feedback whenever I can get it. Let’s just say he was happy at that time and hopefully it will motivate him to keep studying and learn more.
So now I’m wondering if there have been other ‘wow’ experiences with ChinesePod. If you have had a good experience with ChinesePod, or even a ‘wow’ experience I would love to hear it. To be honest, I’m not really sure what it is that people really like about it. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that people like.
And just so as not to get all soppy, please tell us what you don’t like. What was your most negative feeling towards it? What don’t you like about it?
Ken Carroll 凯恩
Well, my “Wow”-Experience was when I started listening to Chinesepod. I was in Beijing for 3 month to study mandarin and I was quite surprised to find all kinds of necessary stuff in chinesepod which helped me to remember what I already have learned so far.
The next “Wow” thing was when you guys started off with intermediate lessons and based on what I have learned in China and through Chinesepod, I was able to understand sentences which contained words I didn’t know before.
It’s not only that the content of the podcast is great, it really makes sense and helps you through your chinese life (even back home in Germany…).
I hope to get back to Beijing for a few weeks in September or October, so my goal is to improve my skills with the help of CP as far as possible.
Well Jenny & Ken, you can give yourselves another pat on the back for having exactly what, I am sure, many many students of Mandarin Chinese NEED! Being in England, and my friend in Belgium, and having learnt Mandarin for a few years, the only way to keep-up is to hear it spoken: the Radio, movies, or TVs are not realistic options - too fast! So you guys are filling a yawning gap. Bravo etc.
I only discovered chinesepod a couple of days ago. I have been studying Chinese for a year and a half now, evening classes once a week here in Belgium. We use a ‘classic’ appraoch, our textbook is ‘Integrated Chinese’ a well known and, I suppose, a well respected method for learning Chinese.
My main interest is taijiquan. I have tons of videomaterial here with mandarin only explanations and there is a lot of material out there in mandarin and only a fraction of it got translated into English and then there is the fact that most of the good teachers have no or only basic knowledge of English….
I will be travelling to China this fall for taijiquan lessons and I absolutely want to be able to have some basic conversation skills by then. Somewhere before Christmas I realized that the evening classes were getting me nowhere near my goal. Of course I know that you can only expect that much from a 3 hours a week course, but all the criticisms on the ‘normal’ Chinese language courses that I have read here on this website apply, and even more… (1) The vocabulary is not adapted, too much focused to their main target group, university students. (2)Integrated means that you learn to write all the characters and as the needs for new vocabulary are dictated by the lessons, as a beginner you sometimes have to learn characters that are way too difficult, in my opinion, for a beginner (like tiao4 wu3, to dance) that came up in lesson 4). (3) Progress is in part dictated by the class, which means that you get a result that is influenced by the ‘greatest common denominator’. For me this means that progress has been too slow for my needs. After 1,5 years of study, say some 50 lessons of 3 hours, we have reached lesson 7 of IC I, and I have learned approx. 150 character I guess, 200 at the most.
So since Christmas I have been doing some parallel studying
. I have started another course for beginners with a lot of audio material (some 20 hours of recordings) and this has helped me a lot. I have these recordings on my mp3-player and I listen and repeat the stuff over and over. This has helped me a lot, but it is still a ‘normal’ language course, so the vocabulary is ill-adapted and incomplete, there is a lack of idiomatic sentences, etc. I have also used a computer based course, which is fun, but again it doesn’t give me the feeling that I will ever be able to actually speak mandarin fluently. There is something lacking. I have even bought some Chinese TV series on DVD (with simplified Chinese subtiteling) and I have struggled with that, but that is probably too soon. The same is true for news sites (I try to understand some articles with the help of Clavis Sinica, but with my limited vocabulary of some 300 characters, it is probably too soon for that too).
And then I found a reference to this site (an online-add) and I must say that I am very impressed. It all looks a bit overwhelming, because there is already so much material. I have listened to a newbie lesson (that was ok, some new words there) an elementary lesson (still ok) and even an intermediate one (the one about appartments which is labeled lower-intermediate and it was still ok) and for the first time I have the impression to be in touch with the reality of a real-life spoken language. So I’m sold to your approach. Years ago (I’m 49 so school was a long time ago) I learned English, French, German and Spanish with the traditional language course approach (I even tried some Irish, Ken
) . I am a native Dutch speaker. What I want to say is that I have had some exposure to language learning. But trying to learn Chinese I began to despair, doubting if I could really do it. But now I’m sure I can!
It is clear that the internet is revolutionizing the way people should approach a new language. For Chinese, it looks like you play a leading part in this. Keep up the good work guys!
Regards
Marc Heyvaert
Belgium
I started studying Mandarin just over a month ago, and started with 2 sets of CD’s from the local bookstore. I breezed through those in no time, and thought I was doing pretty well. I’ve been buying up every martial arts movie I can find at Best Buy that still has the Mandarin track on it, and after watching a few of those I realized that I still had a lot of work to do.
The best thing about ChinesePod is the breadth of topics covered, as opposed to those tourist survival CD’s you get ( i.e. Pimsleur’s ). Since then I have been listening to chinesepod ~8 hours a day (all day at work and some at night at home), as well as studying the writing system. I realized some of it was starting to sink in when I had my “wow” moment a few days ago: I woke up in the morning and realized I had been speaking chinese in my dream! I’m hoping to move to China around the start of next year, and I’m counting on Chinesepod to be a major part of my continued study until (and hopefully beyond) then.
I guess I haven’t actually gotten to answering the question you asked… the one thing I would like to see improved in chinesepod is a little bit more depth in explaining the grammar involved in the constructions in the dialogues. I know you are on a tight schedule on the podcasts, so this may be a bit better served by a book or some other resource, but that is my one (and probably only) suggestion for improving an already superb service.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Morgan
Michigan, USA
Buzzwords are my favorite feature of ChinesePod. My “wow” experiences are when I can use a buzzword in front of my Chinese girlfriend and she does a double take and says, “When did you learn that word?”
My other “wow” experience is how easy it is to recommend to others where to start learning Chinese. Before, I used to suggest a few books, including Don Snow’s Survival Chinese, which is all but impossible to find at your local bookstore, unless you live in Beijing or Shanghai, and recommend recordings I had produced to accompany Survival Chinese, (http://homepage.mac.com/kevinjamessmith/FileSharing11.html if you’re interested in downloading the recordings), but now I just point people to ChinesePod.
As ODT has pointed out many times before, the podcasting format is absolutely revolutionary for language learning. I have recommended EnglishPod to my Chinese students before, but this semester I’m planning on walking through all the steps in class with my students to get as many of them as I can subscribed to and making good use of EnglishPod. I’m sure there is going to be a lot of “wow’s” from them as they learn that they can practice their English listening in more ways than just trying to get VOA and BBC on their weak shortwave radios.
Speaking of EnglishPod, why don’t you guys start a campaign to get both foreign and Chinese teachers in China to help their students learn about and use EnglishPod. I can’t think of a more efficient way to advertise. You could start with a simple plan in both English and Chinese on the front page of EnglishPod detailing the steps teachers can take to get students interested. You could also have a brief description and link to this on ChinesePod to help make people aware since I’m sure that there’s more than a few ChinesePod subscribers who are English teachers in China.
Hi Ken,
I have a lot of ‘wow’ moments. I’ll just start off with the most recent. Last night I was watching t.v. and they interviewed a father and her daughter at some event, the father said “我觉得很有趣“ wo jue de hen you qu” I think it’s very interesting/fun. In my mind I said “Hey I understood that! Ken and Jenny said that!”
Once I have ‘learned’ the word, if I hear it in context randomly sometime later, and recognize it; I know that I ‘know’ the word and it won’t get learnt-and-lost. Wow.
What’s the difference between this ‘experience’ vs me learning a new word with some other method. 1. I for the life of me cannot remember learning ‘you qu’ in any of my texts. 2. I have been myself using ‘wo jue de hen you yisi’ which maybe is more a foreigners’ Chinese as it translates so well from the English “I thought it was interesting.’ 3. It points out how well you’ve done in choosing ‘high-frequency’, real spoken-Chinese vocab and topics.
Everytime I hear a new word in Cpod that I figure is NOT really ‘useful’ I just ‘learn’ it anyway and it invariably pops up. I’ve learned to trust you guys that you’re not wasting my time. So this is the ‘wow’ for a learning using Cpod ‘in China’, and for those outside of China, they can rest well-assurred that what they are learning is ‘what they will use’!
I suck at learning languages. I took three year of Spanish in high school, and after I graduated, if you had come up to me and said Hello in Spanish, my response would have been, “Huh?” I then took three semesters of German in college thinking that I would have better success because German is more related to English than Spanish is (I think). Nope, still no luck. I studied hard, and I was able to read and write, but I could not understand spoken Spanish/German, nor could I speak it. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to regret not being able to speak Chinese. I tried to find some media that taught Cantonese since my family is from Guangzhou, but everything seems to be for Mandarin, so I decided to try that. I tried two different CDs, but they STINK. They don’t teach you anything. When I stumbled upon ChinesePod on Podcast Alley and listened to the first one, I thought to myself, “Hey, this might actually work!” I think this is because of mainly two things. First, in high school, you go to class five days a week, and you have a real live person teaching you, but you are forced to go at the teacher’s pace. If you didn’t quite catch something, too bad–the next day you move on. With these podcasts, you get to go at your own pace. You decide to move on to the next one when you feel that you are ready. And you can replay them as many times as necessary. In a class, once it’s over, you leave and you can’t press a button to have the teacher repeat something. Second, these podcasts really makes you feel like you’re getting a personalized lesson with real live humans talking to you. They’re very focused and you explain all the components of the dialog. It’s not just a droning, repetitive, repeat after me exercise. Third, the podcasts themselves are free! Wow, that makes a big difference. God knows how many more stanky CDs I would have bought, trying to find the Holy Grail. By being able to listen to the podcasts free of charge, it gave me confidence that it would be worth it to sign up. I only got the basic membership because–even though I think the premium membership is a good overall value–I just don’t have to time to utilize it.
When I first to decided to learn Chinese, I tried a audiobook on itunes. It was called ‘In Flight Mandarin Chinese, Learn Before You Land’ it was only an hour long but it has a quite a lot of useful phrases. It’s basically just a listen and repeat thing though, it’s difficult to actually learn anything from it.
Shortly after I discovered Chinesepod on itunes. After about 4 months of Chinesepod, I decided to listen to the audiobook again and was quite surprised that I could now understand the majority of it, and even recognise that it was done in a Beijing accent.
Every January, I’ve had a different sort of “wow” moment. When my Chinese husband and I go to visit his family for Christmas, I come home and have a “Wow, I really need to learn Mandarin” moment. This year, my sister-in-law recommended Chinesepod. This is my 4th try at learning Mandarin.
I’ve had a very frustrating time prior to Chinesepod. My husband and his family have a “Southern” accent (Fujianese) and I have had a very difficult time assimilating the differences between my husband’s pronounciation and the pronounciation in my learning materials. I can’t even express how frustrating it is to have to worry about whether or not I’m saying something in 4th tone, and also trying to translate the sound that the audiotape makes with the sound the my husband makes with the English translation.
Well, this year I’m making much better progress than I have in the past, and I plan to stick with it. Because I’ve tried so many other methods, my “wow” moment didn’t come when I first listened to the podcasts. My “wow” moment came a few weeks later, when I realized that I had become a source of amusement to my Chinese coworkers, for using words that they didn’t expect from a guai lo, and also because I sometimes guess at using a vocabulary word in a new context and get it wrong. I guess a lot of people would think that being amusing for making mistakes isn’t a good thing, but to me it means that they are understanding what I am saying! Learning the right words for the right context will come with time.
Why am I making more progress with Chinesepod? 1) I spend time with it, and I don’t particularly have to make that time, since I’d be staring out the subway window or possibly listening to The Naked Scientist with that time anyway. 2) You teach very useful, repeatable, and modifiable sentences and phrases, which provides me with plenty of opportunities to respond to something in Chinese rather than English.
What I don’t like about Chinesepod? Well, it’s rather petty, but I have to say that I’m just not a huge fan of Chris Rock, even if “The Fifth Element” was an enjoyable movie, and found a change in the episode lead-ins quite refreshing. Anytime you want to do something new with the lead ins, you have my support.
I took a couple years of Chinese back at Brigham Young University many years ago and have tried to keep learning, but getting the time for serious study has been difficult so progress has been slow. A friend recommended Chinesepod to me shortly after I won a free Ipod Shuffle at a technical conference. I gave it a try, downloaded a couple of your excellent podcasts, listened to it for a few moments - and suddenly realized that this was much better than textbooks and even CDs. And then the real wow hit me: I CAN STUDY AND LEARN EFFECTIVELY WHILE DRIVING TO WORK, WHILE CLEANING OUT THE GARAGE, ETC.!
And you guys are fun to listen to. Wonderful service. WOW!
And then I got another WOW looking at the transcripts, with the fabulous rollover feature and the ability to add words to my study list. Brilliant.
I’m starting my second semester of Mandarin at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and while browsing podcasts on iTunes I noticed a French language learning podcast. “Hmm, I wonder if they have Chinese learning too,” I asked myself. I typed in “Chinese”, and to my delight, I found ChinesePod. I have audio CDs to go along with my classes, but they’re nothing compared to you guys. Keep up the good work!
what means “hen you yisi”? help me please
Wow.
It means “very interesting”.
Hi-
I had a ‘wow’ when I discovered the dialogue expansion in review materials.
Thanks.
I also had a “wow” when I first listened to my first podcast here in november.
To hear John speaking/asking question in english and Jenny answering/speaking in Chinese was magic. One following the other and obviouly understanding each other perfectly sound really new to my.
I was instantly bewitch by this sort of dialogue and get download a bunch of other chinese-podcasts.
But it’s unfortunate that on some podcasts it’s strongly obvious that they reading the text and their interactions on a paper.