Recently we casually put up a poll question about how many levels users regularly listen to. The results surprised us. Here is the original question and the results:
How many different levels of podcasts do you regularly listen to? (choose from Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, Advanced)
- One: 17% (83)
- Two: 36% (179)
- Three: 27% (137)
- Four: 9% (47)
- Five: 11% (57)
Total Votes : 503
The amount of levels learners regularly listen to might be influenced by a number of factors, among them:
- Enthusiasm for learning Chinese (Can’t get enough!)
- Desire for security (Don’t like to listen to something above one’s level)
- Desire for challenge (Like to listen to something above one’s level)
- Desire to review (Like to listen to something below one’s level)
- Desire to get one’s money’s worth (If I’m paying, why not get the most for my money?)
- Time set aside for learning Chinese (Listening to as many lessons as one has time for, actual difficulty level being secondary)
There are a lot of variables there, and they differ for each user. How, then, do we interpret the poll results?
A while back, some of us were discussing how the current ChinesePod format emphasizes new content. The reverse chronological listing on the main page promotes what is new. You’ll almost never see an Intermediate and an Upper Intermediate lesson on the main page at the same time because of the way the lessons are spaced over time. If a learner is at one of those levels, isn’t this chronological bias an inconvenience if not an outright problem?
Some of us at ChinesePod had this idea: If we give the learners enough lessons to fill their Chinese study time, they will stick to one level. Once we have abundant, new regular content for each level, we can encourage users to stick to their level. But there’s still another problem: what if a user is at that “bridge” stage? Should they then have to monitor two level pages? You could combine two level pages, such as Elementary/Intermediate, but even then, an Elementary-high learner might find many of the Elementary lessons too easy, or many of the Intermediate lessons too diffcult.
We take these issues very seriously, and these were some questions we were tossing around when we put up the poll mentioned above. The poll results made us reconsider. Maybe users really don’t want to be pegged to one level (or even one combination of levels). And we don’t want to force users to do anything; we want to provide excellent content that users can use in the way that suits them best.
We have come up with a solution which combines the convenience of the “multi-lesson page” approach with the insight into user behavior gleaned from the poll results. Hank (”the Plumber”) is engineering some awesome stuff. Don’t ever think that ChinesePod is “resting on its laurels;” far from it!
In the meantime, what do the poll results above mean to you?
Personally I listen to all except Advanced now, but I still subscribe to the advanced feed and occasionally listen to them. I think if I skip any I’ll wonder if there’s something important that I missed.
I listen to Newbie, Elementary and Intermediate levels because I think I’m in the bridge between elementary and intermediate, I mean I can follow very easily elementary podcasts but i cant understand intermediate’s (I wish!). And I listen to newbie lessons because i dont want to miss the new vocab. My 2 cents. I suppose, once I’m able to follow 100% intermediate, then i’ll start listening to advance classes.
I find I am stuck on elementary and Intermediate is just that bit too hard.
I just don’t have the vocabulary to make the jump, however often I try.
I feel there should be a lower-intermediate where the style is the same with mostly chinese spoken, but the vocabulary and grammar is more restricted to allow less-able bods to get their ‘ear in’.
…that’s my current feeling.
Or maybe I have reached my limit and just won’t be able to make the transition.
I listen to multiple levels and here is an explanation…
Your level distinctions work for me on one level. The material in each level is consistent. There is more spoken Chinese and less Engish with each increasing level. Higher levels assume greater vocabulary. Etc…
However, on another level, this does not always work. There are holes in my vocabulary based on topic/area. For instance, I can talk extensively about my major at university, EE. I would say that this is very advanced and specific vocabulary. On the other hand, there have been Newbie and Elementary lessons where overall the lesson is simple, but the vocab is new.
As for the poll results, in general I would think that others are listening to multiple levels in order to increase listening throughput (learning better to hear the individual words/sounds vs just hearing a stream of unintellible sound), increasing vocabulary, and/or to bridge the gap from one level to another.
I started ChinesePod with a basic (elementary) level of Chinese. Whilst I am living in China the availability of elementary “input” was still very difficult to find. Conversations with colleagues or in various real life situations would, after a few simple exchanges, either dry up or quickly develop to a point where I lost the plot. TV, radio and movies were, and still are, beyond my capability. ChinesePod addressed this problem with a daily input, regardless of level, which was to some degree or another understandable and meaningful. I started in March by quickly catching up with the beginner and elementary lessons. I have since then slowed up to just keep pace with the intermediate lessons but still listen to all the new beginner and elementary lessons. These don’t necessarily provide me with too much new input but they certainly keep refreshing vocabulary and sentence structure and indeed provide a certain ammount of entertainment value, like a radio show, but at my level of understanding. I use the intermediate levels as the learning material. So for me it is 1, 2, 3 and occasioanly a 4 to see how I’m doing. I personally see no benefit for a lower intermediate since without a challenge I won’t learn.
I listen to Newbie and Elem. though I am a newbie. I choose according to my interest in the subject. Sometimes I am disappointed to find a subject I’m interested in is in the intermed. level because that is too difficult for me. I will however look at the transcript and listen so I can see what I can pick up from it and am excited to find that I can understand some.
You say “Hank in engineering some awesome stuff”. I guess you’re talking about redesigning the front page?
If so, my feeling is that the front page is getting too cluttered, too much space is taken up for each lesson, so I often have to muck around in the archive to get to the content of a lesson from last week.
You could save so much space if you got rid of the witty intro part. But then what would Aric do? You could introduce a new level called “Remedial Chinese with Aric”? Jenny would be contiunously disapointed with Aric’s slow progress, Aric would keep getting the tones wrong. Am I taking this too far? Sorry.
Well, I listen to every level now.
To really get something out of Advanced (zh_chinesepod), I still need lots of time: It takes me about two hours to understand both lecture and expansion - I just have to look up too many words and think through all those weired sentence constructions (don’t even get me startet on all those evil 成语). This was fine in my vacation but now I am back to work so I will only be able to fight through very few of those in adequate depth. The effort is really worth it: the vocabulary there already often helped me a lot - both in “real life applications” and for understanding the banter in Upper Intermediate. And I really like the topics in zh_Advanced, the depth in that they are discussed, and the very Chinese perspective they transport - even in seemingly “global” topics like logistics, online games or horror movies.
On the other extreme: In the Elementry lessons I often find subtleties discussed that I have never been aware of before - because here every little 的 is analyzed. I feel I get a deeper understanding and more confidence in using the language (my speaking level is way below my reading level).
I also listen to the Newbie lessons now because, well, it does not consume much time and effort and once in a while surprisingly even a new word pops up.
I also like Connies additional vocabulary and *really* appriciate the discussions between Mike in Jubei and John - they became something like a “second expansion” for me - a Grammar expansion.
Oh, and there is another irrational motive: I feel somehow incomplete when I skip lessons. I hate to go to bed with the feeling that I might have missed something important…
Michael: Some of Arics comments are real highlights - there have been some real classics. I would miss them. The only negative thing there is that they sometimes promise more than the lessons can deliver…
But I like really your idea of an “Aric learns Chinese” level (although I suspect that he is actually in perfect command of the Chinese language - he is just a modest guy).
Ken,
I am clearly not an intermediate student, but I very much enjoy listening to it anyhow. The music of the complete sentences and the relaxed dialogue. Once in a while I pick up a chunk of words I actually understand, at it gives me a great feeling of satisfaction. I am also supporting the theory that just listening to a language will improve your understanding and ability to speak it, even though you don’t understand a word.
I think Aric’s Chinese is probably improving now that he has added brains to his diet!
Perhaps there should be a page-a-day for each level, it would avoid the “today is not my day” feeling when the level for the day is not your own. It is a curiouus thing, people’s behaviour of sliding up and down the ladder of levels - I do it myself with Intermediate being the least visited as it is a bit of a stretch. CAn the factory churn out at a higher rate to make the 6 per week for each of the levels - costs in China being so low it is easy to ramp up. Can John repsond to all the queries in the discussions. Would the die-hards still float around from level to level paranoid they might miss out. John is good but only in response to the great questions that get pitched at him from the most diligent - Mike in Jubei springs to mind. Would raising the walls between levels hurt the sense of community? hope not. It seems that the behaviour of the Cpodders reflects the toughness of learning this langauge. Even as you are advancing you are never above getting something out of doing an easier level. Perhaps it is the nature of the users, starved of real-life Chinese interation - living outside China mostly, any chance is taken. I’d imagine even at the factory that the default language is English cause that’s the lingua franca when things need to move at the speed of business. So even if you are living in China, you probably only get to use Chinese out of necessity - that’s why I found the Taxi podcast so useful. Anyway, I digress, keep spinning gold out of straw but don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs - if you’d allow me to mix my fairytales.
Ed
The levels do not only differ in difficulty, but also in structure.
An idea would be to give each lesson a ‘difficulty number’ and a level indication (Newbie, Elementary, etc.). For example, if the grades run from 1 to 25 or something, Newbie lessons could run from difficulty 1 to 5, Elementary from 4 to 10, Intermediate from 8 to 13, etc.
Two advantages to this:
1. It allows you to make pages that show “Newbie lessons only” and pages that show e.g. “levels 7-15″.
2. Learners who think their level is ‘around 5′, can choose to do 4-5’s in Newbie lessons if they prefer slow explanations and much repetition or 4-5-6’s in Elementary lessons if they prefer a slightly more intensive approach.
I listen to all except Advanced regularly (suffer withdrawl symptoms if I’m too busy to get connected -I don’t have a portable player yet!)…I feel I really benefit from the Elementary explanations & can understand that dialogue easily-but most of my learning is at the Intermediate/Upper Intermediate levels. Time is the only inhibiting factor…I’m sure that I will glean something new or remember some forgotten vocab.every time I tune in. With other commitments (at the moment vistor from interstate) preventing me from getting my daily input, I really feel as if I’ve missed a lot & will need to spend longer later on going through the podcasts I missed.
Here’s my theory.
For each learner there are several types of listening material:
1. Can’t understand at all, or maybe one word every two sentences. e.g. a complete beginner might hear some easy sentences as:
X, X X X shì X X X X X. X X X X hěn X. X X X X X X bù X X X X, X X X X X tā X X X X X X. Tā X X X X X X.
2. Understand one or two words per sentence.
X, nà X X shì X dà X X X. X X dōng xi hěn X. Zài nà lǐ X dōng xi bù X X X X, X X X X X tā mén de X X X X. Tā men X X X X X.
3. Understand about half the words, struggle to get the gist of it.
Duì, nà gè X shì yòu dà yòu X X. X X dōng xi hěn duō. Zài nà lǐ mǎi dōng xi bù X X shí X, hái X X yīn wéi tā mén de X X X X. Tā men hái X X X X.
4. Understand more than half, fun to work it out.
Duì, nà gè X shì yòu dà yòu X X. X X dōng xi hěn duō. Zài nà lǐ mǎi dōng xi bù X shěng shí X, hái X X yīn wéi tā mén de jià gé hé lǐ. Tā men hái jīng cháng X X.
5. Understand what it’s saying right away, except maybe a few new vocab words.
Duì, nà gè X shì yòu dà yòu gān jìng. Lǐ miàn dōng xi hěn duō. Zài nà lǐ mǎi dōng xi bù X shěng shí jiān, hái shěng qián yīn wéi tā mén de jià gé hé lǐ. Tā men hái jīng cháng X X.
Everyone is likely to use podcasts that sound to them like 4 and 5, maybe 3 as well.
Ambtious students will throw in some of 2, and 1 can be used for study by masochists or as auditory wallpaper to get used to the sounds.
Everyone will benefit from newbie level.
Everyone at elementary and above will benefit from elementary.
And so on.
The higher the cpod level, the less the podcasts will be used.
The less advanced students will use fewer levels.
When you start learning from scratch, everything is a total blur and podcasts at newbie level sound like example 1 for a very long time, then hover at example 2 for even longer, so other level podcasts aren’t very useful at all. Elementary lessons remain wallpaper, until finally a few words pop out and those elementary lessons get into the newbie’s wishful listening category, where the most confident newbies will enjoy the challenge.
The self perception of success plays a big factor. If you think you’re doing fantastically well, you’re more inclined to get a buzz out of listening to the first three examples. If you don’t reckon you’re doing so well, lessons that sound like example 5 will be ample challenge, and too much of example 3 can cause less confident people to give up the whole thing in despair. As noted above, it’s a very long time before anything sounds like that to a newbie. (Newbie lessons have recently started to sound like that to me.)
The podcasts are so short, I don’t think time is a limiting factor. Not-my-desired-level podcasts (whether easier or harder) will not get the same study time spent on them, but they’ll still be listened to and pondered over for a bit.
Probably like most I have differing abilities depending upon whether you are talking about speech, hearing or reading. In my case I can read much better than I can hear. So in my case binning into one category doesn’t fit.
Another factor I experience is time availability. I am occassionally forced to reduce my time studing CPod when I travel back to the US or my wife comes to Taiwan. She really doesn’t want me to spend so much time with Jenny, Aggie and even John when she is around.
So I can imagine even devoted CPoddies who have wife/husband and kids about often have to make choices of how much time they can devote to CPod. When I am alone in Taiwan, I have the luxury to spend as much as I wish.
Lastly it seems to me that all levels have become more interesting either in terms of useful vocabulary, sentence structure which may or may not be different from grammar. I think I am like Henning once you get to a certain level I find there is something that can be learned from levels above as well as thankfully all too often levels below my own assessment of my abilities. I don’t spend as much time as I wish I would/should with the z-Adv. only because I wish they had English in the pdf.’s and not pinyin. Its only my opinion and for selfish reasons but I think there are many tools out there to extract the pinyin from the Hanzi but it can be very difficult to interpret correctly the English or non-Chinese meaning of the sentences. I understand maybe much of this user base maybe more comfortable with Korean or Japanese but I wonder how well they can get the nuances that are expressed in these dialogues without one other language translation posted.
But I am happy because everyday the “Campus” gets more interesting. We talked about this even one year ago but I think my understanding is even more confused now. I wonder how easy is it for a new person no matter their level to jump in and fell comfortable among all the longer times listeners.
Mike in Jubei
Ken,
I am glad to hear you guys are not resting on your laurels, but not sure why you guys are so concerned about whether people are listening to one level or two. Most of us pull the content off an RSS feed anyway. If you read the comments on this thread, you might note that there is not a single comment about how difficult the site is to navigate. Why fix things that aren’t broke? There are more important things that need improvement. Here are just two:
1) The text on your website does not resize to the browser window. To read any of the pages, I need to either run my browser in full screen mode or spend a lot of time mousing the the scroll bar back and forth, both of which are pretty annoying. I don’t know any other web site with this limitation. For a specific example of how to do it correctly, take a look at www.chinese-forums.com
2) There is still a significant gap between Elementary and intermediate. At the elementary level, the hosts rarely speak mandarin; at the intermediate level, they almost always speak mandarin. It must be a difficult challenge because you guys have been saying you will address it for three months and nothing has changed. Some specific suggestions are: have Jenny make some alternate examples of words and grammer in mandarin, have some simple mandarin exchanges with Jenny using words from the lesson, and introduce some of the infrastructure words like 词，句子，发音， 第一声， etc.
Hi Erik,
have you checked those 3:
Intermediate No. 3 / You got schooled:
http://www.chinesepod.com/podc.....-schooled/
Intermediate No. 45 / Studying Chinese:
http://www.chinesepod.com/podc.....g-chinese/
Intermediate No. 25 / Podcasting:
http://www.chinesepod.com/podc.....7%ba%a725/
You will find a lot of the “Meta Vocabulary” in there.
But I agree that a separated page with a collection of this kind of vocabulary could indeed be helpful - it should reduce the time to enter this level.
So far, the discussion has been around daily intake of new podcasts, among all the long times listeners as Mike said. For me there is another time dimension, which is repetition of previously published material.
I joined about a month ago, and I decided to first go over as much of what was there already. I listened to all Elementary podcasts and went through all expansion material, then again for Intermediate. I skipped the Newbie podcasts, but may still listen to Elementary to I there’s way too much English for me. But perphaps for compulsive reasons, I still check the comments section and do all expansion drills. For the rest I concentrate on upper intermediate, with forays into advanced (not zh yet I’m afraid).
The point is, yes, fresh content is great and I wouldn’t want to miss new stuff, almost of all it is exciting. But however thoroughly I go over the daily lesson, I know that most of it will be gone (or of little practical value in real life situations) unless I review it regularly. And as I spend over an hour in the car every day, I have a review pattern that includes at least four previous lessons. Same with the review material.
Yv
Yv
Hi Henning,
I will take a look at those lessons, but as you noted they are lower intermediate, not upper elementary. I have found a handful of the early intermediates right at my level and I think they are great, especially Intermediate #13.
Now that you mention it, I think there are a couple recent elementary podcasts that pushed the level in the right direction. I really enjoyed Elementary #64 “My Computer Froze”. So, I overstated the problem my previous post, because there is definitely progress being made.
But, I honestly think the gap is just too wide to fill with a couple lessons here and there. After using this site for the last three months I recommend an Upper Elementary level. There already is Upper Intermediate, so it would be a natural addition.
Ken, why don’t you take a poll on this? Maybe it would look something like this:
Question: What improvements to Chinesepod would benifit you the most?
- Lowering the cost of premium with advertisements?
- Providing new Upper Elementary level?
- Providing transcripts of Intermediate lesson host banter?
- Improving web site navigation?
- Making the web site text windows resizable?
Eric,
Actually, John wrote this thread but forgot to sign it. He is the official ‘levels guy’ so I won’t speak for him.
The polls offer only a very impressionistic picture . I don’t think they are specific enough to be actionable. We couldn’t rely on it to make decisions about the service.
John;s poll was done to get an impression of how people use the levels. He couldn’t use it to select choices or eliminate items. Learners dont need to trade off one feature for another. Even if they all chose one item, for example, would that mean they didn’t want any of the others? These are qualitative choices - very relative and context-based. Nor does choosing from a list tell you about the motivations behind the choices. You need very in-depth information before making such decisions, or you can get yourself in to serious trouble (with your users).
Even if you had co-equal items within a category, you’d still only get an inpression, and relative to the options. Without the category, you end up with unmanageable variables - ‘apples and oranges’. Your 5 items might also differ entirely to those of every other user, which would leave yoi with a statistical non-starter.
We do have some fairly scientific methods (qualitative, and therefore subjective ) of testing - test subjects, no less!
Ken Carroll
I answered 4 levels on the poll, but I spend the most serious study time on the Upper Intermediate level. I listen to the Newbie and Elementary lessons, because they sometimes contain usage or cultural insights that are new for me, and it doesn’t take much time, and I usually do something else at the same time. For example, I wouldn’t know to call babies 宝宝 without one of the lower level lessons. If I lived in China, I’d probably discover this quickly, but I don’t.
Intermediate lessons often contain new vocabularly for me. So, I listen to them, but don’t study the transcripts, etc.; some gain for little pain.
I used to listen to the advanced lessons, as well, but its not as convienient now that they are on the new site and lack English translation. So, I reluctantly concluded they weren’t the best use of my limitted study time. (They used to be more like bonus Upper Intermediate before).
The time I have to study Chinese lessons in a focused way is limited to about one lesson a week. (It would be two if Chinesepod were my only source of Chinese lessons, but I also like to study one 成语故事 a week and go over my understanding of it with a native speaker I’ve hired to tutor me.)
There are other times when I am doing household tasks, driving, waiting at airports, browsing my email, when I like to study Chinese in a more casual way. Lower level lessons, especially one level below, are very good for that.
The other reason for listening to lower level lessons is simply that they are entertaining. You guys put on a good show and I’m hungry for any Chinese input I can get, especially, if I can understand it.
Mark
I would say I am at the high-elementary to lower-intermediate level, but I listen to all podcasts at intermediate and below. I almost always pick up an new word or two from the elementary level, and I enjoy the satisfaction of being able to understand the newbie-level dialogues (though I occasionally pick up new words there as well).
I disagree with Eric Grimm who said that he hadn’t noticed much of a change in the intermediate lessons. I have definitely noticed that there is more use of English. The pattern seems to be that Jenny speaks almost exclusively Chinese and Aric speaks mostly English. That seems to be a good balance, as you understand at least half the conversation, and get enough clues from that half to decode much of the other half. At any rate, it has made the intermediate lessons just about perfect for me. I still don’t get all of the banter, but I usually get just about all the dialogue after a couple of listens, and quite a bit of the banter.
I listen to whatever sounds interesting on the Intermediate, High Intermediate and Advanced levels, but sometimes I’ll listen to an Elementary or Newbie if it’s on a topic I’ve never learned vocabulary for, I guess filling in the gaps in my knowledge, things like getting a haircut, etc. How much I get out of the Advanced depends on what I already know about the vocabulary and subject, but I like the challenge of listening, but I usually try to mix my weekly (or bi-weekly if time is scarce) CD with a variety of levels so I don’t get fried with all Advanced. I like to stick some of the mid-range poscasts on with an Advanced or two, plus a Word on the Street or other shorter segment to fill in the minutes. I usually don’t read the transcript first but go through it after listening, then if time permits, I listen to the podcasts with the transcript. I wish I had more time for the Learning Center, but so far I haven’t. One interesting thing I notice about my use of Chinesepod is the pressure I feel seeing a ton of new poscasts added every week on a variety of topics I’m interested in or merely curious about, so I have a hard time spending hours and hours on a single set of podcasts. I do more of a hit and run exposure, and surprisingly, some of the vocabulary is sticking in spite of that.
strictly newbie, over and over and over again. i listen at bed time, in the car for hours…i ve listened to many of the podcasts over twenty times. and i dont get tired of them…someday it will stick.