I guess I’m having a philosophical week. Here I am wondering about the big broad questions. I came across this little anecdote in a book and it got me started.
The railroads collapsed because they thought they were in the railroad business, when really they were in the transportation business.
They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.
Theodore Levitt, “Marketing Myopia”, Harvard Business Review 38 (July-August 1960)
Interesting. (Although I say this is a ‘little anecdote’, Theodore Levitt is actually a giant amongst business academics.) Anyway, thinking too narrowly about what you do is probably a mistake for any organization. So, er, where does that leave us? If, on a narrower definition, we’re in the business of teaching Chinese, what are we in the broader context?
For some reason I feel sure that Lantian will have something very insightful to say about this. In fact, I ‘m sure many of you will have stuff to say about this. So, feel free to pile in.
Ken Carroll
You are in the business of reinventing learning. Chinese and English are just your working examples, but CP is building up a know how and insight into how to deliver knowledge in a format which is convenient for learners who want to be in the drivers seat of their own learning process. I really think the capacities you are building up by learning from your customers, seeing what works and what doesn’t, can be tranferred to other material, and I don’t just mean other languages.
Frankly Ken, when I hear the Saturday-Show or some lessons like “Feeling Nauseous” I should clearly link Chinesepod to the entertainment business.
[In other words]
Frankly Ken, with the Saturday-Show or some lessons like “Feeling Nauseous” you should clearly link Chinesepod to the entertainment business.
I think you’re in the communication business. By providing efficient tools to bridge language barriers you are helping people communicate.
I don’t think entertainment is your primary business but the humor definitely helps get the message across.
How one separates the train business from transportation business is, to me, marketing speak. Wouldn’t technological advancements, both in carriers and infrastructure, have had the biggest impact?
So by the same token, it has always been clear what your business is. To provide instruction in different levels of spoken Mandarin in an idiomatic, entertaining style that includes cultural context. Not very narrow at all.
Definitely working for me
Ron
The flip side of the coin - there are risks associated with diversifying so much that your business loses its focus on the main mission : to deliver an effective system for your customers to learn the Chinese language.
There’s nothing wrong with finding your niche and improving your service within that niche. However, if you try to be “all things to all people”, such as expanding non-core business services, the end result could also be similar to the railway.
Hope you manage to keep Chinesepod on the right track.
Individualized language learning tools; mass language learning advice.
Ken,
I think you are in the hobby and spare time business, competing with other things people do on their free time such as watching TV, playing sports, collecting stamps or surfing the web. You need to demonstrate that listening to Chinesepod, and working with Chinese Pods Learning Center is more rewarding than those other things. By using tools to extend the available window for hobby activities, such as iPod listening when travelling, in-car listening etc etc, you allow us the users to expand our time for our hobbies. One way to increase the value to us, would be to look for how we could find more openings in our awakening hours to use chinese pods. Small breaks during work hours could be used and also if we coud do Chinesepod while doing other things at the same time, would help too.
Ken,
Allow me to disagree with you ever so slightly here. I think that teaching Chinese is your broad focus. The narrow focus is how you deliver that product to the customers, your students. Right now you use podcasts and a website. Those are the rails for your locomotive. I’ve been around here long enough to know that when the the time is right, and a new viable methodology presents itself, you’ll willingly jump the tracks and build something that can fly.
You are already in the transportation business. No worries, mate.
You once described ChinesePod as the application of Web 2.0 to language training. The concept is huge - replace classrooms full of low-paid teachers with a web of native speakers (celebrities, even!) and topical material. The business model for web 2.0 is flexible - first you build a community, then you figure out how to service it. So “What business are we in?” becomes “What does the community want from us?”.
The CP community is all about learning Chinese and sharing experiences. I think it “wants” more structure and metrics, and those can be delivered with web 2.0. But like it or not, you’re in the business of teaching Mandarin to the Online world!
Levitt would ask “why stop at Mandarin?” Because of the importance of the Community, and it’s uniqueness. Maybe you can cookie-cutter CP to teach French, or German, or Gaelic. But those communities would have many other options, and different needs. If Bazza were studying Walloon, he’d be a different Bazza. So stick to the knitting! Teach the Online world Chinese.
Is go n-eiri an bothar libh.
I have the same feeling as Paul and Frank about this. CPod is in the business of teaching Chinese, not in the business of podcasting. That’s what Levitt’s lesson is trying to teach. I don’t agree that we are in the business of entertainment, 2.0 communities, or inventing new language learning concepts, etc etc etc. ChinesePod generates revenue from users who want to learn Chinese. We use things like podcasts, web 2.0, and entertainment to advertise and deliver the product. Nobody pays for the Saturday Show, it’s free. Nobody is says “I don’t want to study Chinese, but I love the Saturday Show so much I’m going to buy a subscription!” That show is there to get people excited about the website and the language in hopes that they will want to study Chinese with us because that’s our business, we teach Chinese. The same goes for our other features. We’re not in the business of inventing strategies. We don’t hold patents on our ideas and sell them. How much does JapanesePod101 pay us for our ideas? We’re not in the business of 2.0 media, communication, etc. If so, we’re doing a really terrible job because we don’t have a single revenue generating ad on our site!
I’ve seen this little lesson before, and I think it gets confused often. People take it too far. Levitt could have said, well actually what people want is wheat and coal, so we’re not in the business of transportation, we are in the business of supplying wheat and coal, so lets mine coal. But actually they don’t want coal, they want energy, so lets look into building hydro plants, but actually they don’t want energy they want heat and light, so lets start making lamps…
I don’t think this particular lesson is meant to get you thinking outside the box. Its meant to help remind you to understand the immediate need you customers have that motivates them to buy your product and then be sure your product is the most effective way out there to satisfy that need. In our case the immediate need that drives a sale is to learn Chinese, and yes, our product is the most effective way out there to satisfy that need. haha
I agree with Frank in that the business of Cpod is teaching Chinese, and the narrow focus is how it’s done. Though I dearly wish there was something of Cpod’s ilk available for German and French (though FrenchPodClass is OK), I think that Cpod’s community is what makes it what it is — just look at the difference between Cpod and its cousin, English on Demand.
Also, a bit OT, I don’t understand the negative response that the “Throwing Up” episode got. I happen to have been in a taxi recently with a certain Cpod employee (I won’t name names) when such vocab would have been useful :). Throwing up isn’t the most fun thing in the world, but it does happen, and when it does you ought to have the vocab to deal with it.
wow what a great thread. All great comments, even tho there are a few that I don’t agree with, particularly Rian the Cpod interns’.
Christian and Conrad, I like the way you think, and could not agree more. Applying web 2.0 learning platforms to language learning IS revolutionary; it’s totally disruptive to a stale paradigm that has been around for thousands and thousands of years.
I think narrow business is “language teaching” and broad context is “web service”.
(I doubt these words are suitable, cause my English ability is so poor!)
iTunes! What is their business? “music”?
YouTube! What is their business? “audio visual”?
Google! What is their business? “information & knowledge”?
I think their business is “web-service” making the most of web2.0 on their own service (music, video, information..)
Then specifically how is this context?
1)Not “publish” but “blog”
2)costumer’s participation, synapse of wisdom (its good! to call us Big Brain)
3)how to utilize costumer’s data (like napster)
4)open directory, networking like SNS
maybe so many key words can be listed up and you can make-up competitive business model IF you think you are in the “web-service” business.
But if you think you are in the “language teaching” business…?
I feel Cpod is “web2.0 service-oriented”, but still a little bit lacking of costumer’s data utilization..
I’m not sure I completely agree with Levitt. The railroads collapsed for a lot of reasons, and I don’t think a better business strategy would have changed that. Anyways, trains still exist.
OK, so let’s imagine that we are all on the Chinesepod train. We all want to get from point A to point B. But we all have totally different attitudes and reasons for being here. Is there a more effective or faster way to actually teach us? Yes. There are probably several ways, but Chinesepod is a slow and steady train. It’s a safe, friendly, quality way to travel.
I agree that Chinesepod probably needs to keep changing, but then
don’t go out of the railroad biz. Just make the train better. And student discounts would be nice. Because I feel like a hobo in one of the cold and empty storage cars, just hitching a free ride
LITTLE THINGS - I think Cpod, Ken and the whole team has no problem thinking big and taking in the big picture. But I’ll have to back Rian the intern b/c I think he’s closest to the mark. Cpod often times executes on the details rather poorly.
Whether it is the fact that the zh. site still has a Error 404 - Not Found link for the Chinese blog which ultimately screws up the search optimization, or the occasional non-insightful expansion or podcast, or the sudden collapse of the J-pod site or E-pod site, there’s plenty to go around.
Google also has big thinkers, but their money was made when they took the ’search’ away from Yahoo’s manually created index and retired them to becoming a ‘directory’ by creating an automated bid system. The Google money came/comes from their automated ability to bid and match prices and advertisers, a virtual money machine that scales.
Both GM and Toyota think big, but money was made in the details. I remember being invited to test-drive a new GM car, I made a bunch of comments and all of a sudden the trainee-guy that was just along for the ride sitting in the back asked me to come back, he was actually an engineer. You know what most of my comments were — the plastic is cheap on the air con vents, when I look down at the dash it looks like a toy car dash, there’s no power when I go thru a turn on a hill, etc. I didn’t say ‘hey GM has to think big and go all electric cause fossil fuels are destroying the land’.
I just got back from Hong Kong and you know what I noticed, and this was different after having spending a good amount of time on the mainland, Hong Kong people walk fast, have clean shoes and are obsessive. The shop clerks were dusting, the windows were shiny, the waitress waited for about 20 minutes knowing I would eventually ask for them to scoop the baked crusted rice out of the pot, she scared the heck out of me when she appeared all of a sudden as I was about to do it myself. HECK, I have to yell three times (In excellent loud Chinese I might add) to get anyone’s attention on the mainland.
So let’s talk about Cpod. I’ve never met the extended staff, I’m just pontificating… but I suspect that part of the team is good for stuff like accounting and project timelines, and others are good for stuff like good jokes and interesting stories. How many of them are non-compulsive about some of the tasks they do?
Aric I would argue is probably very compulsive about vetting poor canto-pop onto HIS show. Your logo guy/gal wasn’t getting a chance to show off their compulsive cool logo I bet.
Find the passion in each of them and give them the tools to pursue. Nobody sweats the details like an obsessive-compulsive emotionally attached maniac having fun doing what it is they ‘do’. And getting PAID (this is the vernacular P-A-I-D as in giving me the Benjamins, money honey, the buck stops here meaning) to do it.
These happy employees and partners will figure out solutions to my problems with learning Chinese. Like a happy Yahooligan, Google’ee, and C’podder I’ll be happy to tag along for the ride!
So think bigger, it’s not what business I’m in, it’s what life am I living? Time is money, save me time, add value/joy/passion to my time and I will give you money. Every obstacle in between takes away from money I can give to you. I’m in a hurry to learn Chinese.
PS. Your business is not protein analysis. Ken as great as he is is no Steven Hawking. Jenny — she’s got potential! Aric, well he’s middle-aged now. LoL, and the plumber — I rip on him indirectly because I am jealous. The 25 others …only talked to Aggie so far, would love to meet the rest one day.
To my opinion your business is teaching Chinese - fastest success with maximum fun and minimum time effort / using any small spare amount of time. That is where the innovation or revolution lies.
Podcasts are a tool for that, but not necessarily the only one.
I appreciate to be given the choice what I want to learn, I would need a little bit more support to make the phrases stick, though: after the podcast and the premium exercises I would want to download the pure dialog phrases plus the expansion sentences as mp3 file in one go: same as the button “add all vocabulary to my wordbank” via a button “download all as mp3″, maybe each phrase 3 times plus silence for my own speaking it once aloud - to be repeated ad nauseam or just as background learning, subconsciously as Step3 of the Birkenbihl-method.
For improving Hanzi it would be a good first enhancement if the flashcard program could let me toggle through 3 versions (pinyin+hanzi+english).
Before you are worrying about these general issues you should better take all the improvement suggestions of your community concerning “My Studies” and implement the technology (label words in the wordbank, freely arrange the sequence of lessons and also label them) - this feature is disappointing to me. Progress there will certainly determine if I will extend my premium subscription beyond Nov 2007 or reduce it to basic: current functionality status does not deliver sufficient added value to me.
As others have stated before: I do not care if a feature at CP is new, I want a pool of best methods available exactly there. I do not want to have to search for a better flashcard program somewhere else or spend time to edit audio podcasts on my own to get to the pure dialog.
Mobile devices are of less importance to me as I have access to a laptop most of my time.
It’s good to see Rian the former intern back on staff. This time I really agree with his point of view.
Cornelia, I’ve posted a bunch of mp3’s on my site with podcast lesson dialog and pauses for practice. I’ve done the last month or so of lessons.
Why not offer the return fare. You have the track. You have the crew. You do not have to look for other destinations.
Have been looking for any similar program for my Chinese wife, because we both se my improvement by the week Mandarin to English pod. You guys can do it with a minimal effort, and also improve Chinese pod, by the reverse engineering.
Could make you learn to fly, and us with it
Well, I disagree.
You are not in the business of teaching Chinese.
To find out what business you are really in, you need to identify whom you hurt and who hurts you (get those “elasticity” values). The forums provide you with you some indicators: You are by no means a competition for schools or private trainers. Much the opposite: Schools and teachers can become more effective and thereby more competitive because of you.
What CPod really is: CPod is a supplier or learining and teaching *materials*. Your competitors are publishing houses for (mandarin) learning materials, their products are called “Rosetta Stone”, “Assimil”, “Linese.com” etc.
A good teacher or a good school will utilize CPOD - they need good suppliers. But teaching is an individual experience with interactions between teachers and students. Of course you can do it the autodidactic way - like most of us here, and of course you can very well use CPod on our own. CPod is well suited for autodidactic learning. But this does not make it a school. It only makes the student the teacher.
Now with the “Guided service” this would change completely. As far as I have experienced it you would be entering a complete new business model there: It costs scale different, the pricing is different, the target group is narrower, the value for the user changes, the demands on the students are different. The guided service *is* teaching and it *is* competition for all those teachers out there. The more individual and interactive services you offer, the more you are becoming a substitute for a school.
Now reagarding that comment on “entertainment”. Well, I love the entertaining elements at CPod as they provide extra motivation (and BTW kmk: “throwing up” is not entertainment but bitter reality).
But there is a point in that: Looking from a ressource perspective entertainment & media companies might become a threat to you one day - they have tons of cash, equipment, actors, media designers, experience with media production etc. They could easily decide to produce a Chinese-learning-TV-show (think of Happy Chinese). What they still lack though, is a clue about what learning Chinese is all about.
Salute!! to Ken and all those who are making efforts to learn and to spread Chinese,in a broader sense,to get to know a culture seem ever so alien to most of you.
As a native, I can tell that some(a slight portion) of the CP materials are a little old fashioned though, CP is the best among other FREE sources teaching Chinese. Here is a typical Chinese saying,”心急吃不了热豆腐” (xin1 ji2 chi1 bu4 liao3 re4 dou4 fu4)–literal meaning:be enough patient to eat tofu.(tofu is delicious but, watch out, it may burn your tongue if is just fried)A metaphor telling us what you want deserves time and your patience. I really think Chinese learning is a long way to go and speed doesn’t necessarily mean excellency.
Most ungraduates in China have spent 10 years or so in English learning ever since they entered junior middle schools,though, many of them could not speak fluent English,so think about it,what we need here is more time in learning, more communication,more confidence and less doubt.
Personally, I like train trip journey which allows more time in planning your next step, enjoying different window views,wandering in your own world of mind……
It makes me sad to see what you have to say Henning.
I have tried Rosetta stone (gives me a headache after an hoer) I have no time to sit in front of a computer. Or on a school bench. I do not yet want to learn reading and writing. I want to be able to understand and speak mandarin.
Do not come and say, that I can’t learn without grammar. I have already learned 2 languages fluently that way.
English took me 7 years, living in Australia.
If you are in the teaching business, which I think you are. Then do the reflection that it might not be your teaching skills, make your students leap, if you are using Cpod.
I have in 9 month gone from nothing to being able to have a light conversation on the phone. And the faster the speech is, the easier to understand.
But it takes 5 hour a day 7 days a week (while working, driving, walking) and an urge to learn, to get there.
To make it harder for you to argue, I can tell you.
I am a dyslectic and I have seen my 51 st birthday. I have no time for your way of learning.
Leif Erik, I guess I did not transport my point clearly enough - please excuse my limited means to express myself in English, this is not my mother tongue. First of all I am definatly not a language teacher (if I was - poor students; languages have always been my weak point).
More important is that I did definately not argue in favour of any of the above mentioned alternative materials nor of any certain learning approach or method (actually I am convinced that the preferred method is highly learner dependend).
My point was that the business Chinesepod is in is *not* teaching but providing teaching materials - CPod has the role of a supplier for teachers and schools (in the autodidactic case the teacher and the learner are the same person).
CPod provides the best teaching material for Chinese I found so far. I have tried lots of others before, but they all started to gather dust in the shelf after a while. So those are competitors that are definately hurt by Chinesepod (and who - if they come to grips - might try to fight back in the future).
If you take a look at the forums there are several Poddies here who use the CPod materials together with teachers. That is no contradiction - in fact I am convinced a good teacher can leverage the effeciveness CPod by several magnitudes (I experienced that for a month myself). Unfortunately like many here I do not have the time slots available for a teaching-arrangement so I have to do without.
To wrap it up: No, I was not voting in favour of “classic Grammar school” approaches. I just tried to answer the question where the potential competition of CPod might hide.
I have to agree with Leif Erik.
I had to read his post by reflecting my computer monitor in a mirror, but upon reflection, it is perfectly clear to me that CPOD is superior to traditional learning approaches.
It seems to me were falling into something like half a dozen more or less defined categories. I urge you to consider the following: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4651524651477591115&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=en
Christian,
Google video isn’t actually available in China. Can you tell us the idea?
Ken Carroll
From the google video discription: “Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author ofThe Tipping Point and Blink. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 18:15) From http://www.ted.com/tedtalks”
In the video the speaker talks about instead of trying to find the one product (the best spaghetti sauce) people want, find the right sauces. Make different offerings of the same basic item for different tastes.
Remember that there was one transport company that realised what business they were in: American Express. As I recall, they were originally an express courier, but realised as the market shifted that they were in the business of giving people access to the resources that they needed.
How you frame the core strategic question of “what business are we in?” is a critical issue for businesses of all levels. The answer changes. The answer depends upon the external environment, the competitive market and internal factors… most generally, the answer depends upon where you can best use the skills that you’ve developed within your company to make more money into the future. If you get fixated on the ‘vehicle’, you’ll get run over by the next new thing that comes along. As Web3.0 starts to evolve, ChinesePod will either have to be flexible to reinvent itself, or it will be run over by the newer model. Such is the beauty of the creative destruction in capitalism… gotta love it!
Henning you are brilliant! I don’t know if the people at Chinesepod realize it, but this does seem to be the business that they are in. And it explains why I get no response when I complain about coherence in the program - they don’t have a program. What they have is materials. Still, I can’t help thinking that a structuring the materials to fit a program would make the materials more appealing. What I mean by structure and coherence is that the lessons don’t have any ordering, so they don’t reinforce each other in a progressive fashion. Anyway, keep up the good work - excellent insight there.
further to Henning’s point, I wonder what % of people only use CP to study?
Yeah, great thread, raises a number of questions. :
- nothing wrong with being product-focused, you need good products. The issue is to think making great products is enough, there are many examples of superior products and visionary companies being eradicated by lesser ones : as much as engineers and scientists would like to believe, even great products don’t self themselves.
- who are the ChinesePod customers, those who download the free podcasts (and corresponding transcripts for the technically-oriented subset thereof), the basic subscribers, premium subscribers, the few dozen of active participants to this blog, not all of them subscribers? I obviously have no idea what the respective numbers are and whether ChinesePod is profitable or just building market share based on innovation.
- great way to conduct primary market research, but not knowing the business model, how do you decide whether these posts are representative of paying customers (and prospects) who are going to keep you in business?
- also agree with an earlier post re: little things, or as I believe they say in German, the devil is in the details. Frankly, apart from a core group of early adopters, geeks even, you don’t need to constantly innovate. You shouldn’t count the trees and miss the forest either, all innovation is not technical, even some of the vocal bloggers print and physically copy/paste in notebooks of the paper variety, so forget web n.0.
- you don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel and that’s unlikely to happen, but you don’t want too much change and confusion either, that can lead to overdose. You’ve introducted much innovation as it is, much enthusiasm too, great programs and people. Never mind what business you’re in, you (or s.o. else at ChinesePod) should focus on integration (e.g. blog and forum) and operational improvements of all kinds now, as was often suggested.
Yv
Sorry about that, Ken, I didn’t think about that detail. Anyway, as James pointed out, it’s a talk Malcolm Gladwell gave at TED2004 about research done by pepsi and spaghetti sauce companies to improve their products. What they would do is produce different formulas, and test them on people whom they would ask to state their preferences. What they saw was that people liked different things, but seemed to cluster around certain combinations. The moral to the story is that there is no single perfect sauce and no perfect pepsi for everyone. Rather, there is a really sweet pepsi, and a less sweet one, you have chunky, traditional, and thin, and so on for pasta sauce.
But the really interesting insight, I felt, had to do with spaghetti sauce. No one knew people would like chunky spaghetti sauce, and people never asked for it on focus groups. Its viability as a product didn’t become apparent until someone tested it; son consumers don’t always know that they want what they want.
So to come back to ChinesePod, what I wanted to stress was that you probably shouldn’t try to make a “superchinesepod” destined to be everyone’s perfect product, but rather leave some room for personalization so that people can turn it into exactly what they want. We’re all here to learn Chinese, but some people want to master pinyin while others are only interested in talking and so on.
I forgot to add that you have an advantage many other businesses don’t. By being an online service, your users leave a paper trail on your site, you can watch patterns emerge in your logs and probably learn a lot from them.
Ken,
I’d like to turn this around: what is your vision for CPod? People mentioned Google as being in the “information and knowledge” business, which I think misses a point: Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Stuff that does that or makes it possible is (potentially) their business. Stuff that does not, is not. So Google buys youtube to organize video information, keyhole to organize geographic information, etc.
Apple’s mission, while badly worded, is about “bringing the best personal computing *experience*” to people. Note their use of the word experience, which I think is key to their vision, their aesthetic, and even Jobs’ failures (Lisa, NeXT). Now, I think it is a moderately bad idea for us to tell you what business you are in, it is a horrible idea for us to tell you what your vision should be. I think you already know what it is.
That said, I’ll give you a hint what I *think* it is ;-). In your writings and interviews, you show a passion for how people learn, or fail to learn, a new language. Your particular passion, from lengthy personal experience, is learning Chinese and teaching English. You want the process to work better for people, and see certain technologies (podcasting, web 2.0) as being a disruptive innovation (a la Clayton Christensen) that (i)changes the experience of learning language, and (ii) dramatically expands the scale at which you can effect change.
Your vision, if I were to guess it, is to radically improve the experience of Chinese language students, and of Chinese speakers learning English. Like Jobs at Apple, you want them to have the best *experience* possible.
So you are not (confined) exactly in the Chinese language teaching business, though that is your major focus. And you are certainly not confined exactly in the Chinese language materials business, though your revenue may be driven primarily through materials. You are in the business of providing the most successful chinese language learning experience possible. People pay for that experience. Today you see that as through podcasting and Web2.0, in a year or two it might be different. I don’t think you will hesitate to adapt, because the technology is not your vision, the technology just enables your vision.
Before I end this long ramble, I’d like to add a word or two about Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation. I think this is a part of your vision, whether you are familiar with it or not. Many people (Lantian in this thread, myself and others elsewhere) have griped about this or that shortcoming in your web sites. Why does login not persist longer? Why aren’t things more integrated? Get me a waahmbulance! Etc. But it seems perfectly reasonalble: in Christensen’s model, the early portion of of a disruptive innovation is both bumpy and the least profitable. These bumps are to expected; the great value of the Big Brain, I suspect, is that it helps you realize your vision, and reach the higher value portion of the curve that much faster.
These are some amazing ideas. I think Christian’s anecdote is terrific, but I must say, Greg T K’s incredibly perceptive response is blows me away.
I won’t give away with my dieas right now because I think there’s mileage left in this discussion from your perspective. I’m keen to hear more, more, more!
Ken Carroll
Ok Henning. My apology if I was a bit ruff.
English is not my native tongue either.
But the fact is. I learn mandarin faster than I ever thought was possible.
without video, grammar books or a teacher. Therefore keep Cpod clean from video.
video teaching was around already in the sixties by Tv. If the platform change will not make much different -Interaction! You still have to sit on your back.
I believe in a straight brainwash. One thing at a time.
Structured lessons? Daily speech is not structured. It comes in chunks, at the most unusual time and places.
Funny enough, last month I come a cross a text with pinjin, and could read and understand a little. Structure and sound come via listening? Even when the syllable pronunciation differs. Interesting.
Now, have to get back on the track.
The best way to serve me Ken, and what I think many other people. It is a word and sentence expansion to your daily pod cast. But you have to find a way to get paid for it. I can think of having it stream lined from my computer. Sometime I am home, but do not want to be tied down.
Keep to your concept. At the moment you are 2 years ahead of your competition.
Ps. You can not try to feed the whole world like Pepsi. Concentrate on the one million people who can have interest in learning mandarin
Love this discussion. With all the great ideas coming out I thought I would revise my previous efforts.
Business C-pod is in:
1. Making language learning easier and more enjoyable.
2. Helping free individuals from a reliance on teachers and particularly schools for language education.
Means:
1. Create superior language learning tools. There is a lot of room to develop new tools in the case of Chinese.
2. Offer explicit language learning advice and give people a place where they can talk about language learning and others issues of interest.
3. Create interesting materials that are pregnant with meaning. Traditional materials are dry, dull and opaque.
4. Offer vivid and personable presenters. This is star power!
5. Don’t do anything that isn’t seemingly scalable.
6. Employ people who can understand our sense of purpose and mission.
Limits: For now limit what we are doing to language learning because it is what “we” know best but also because language learning presents a somewhat special case of learning. Language learning is the one form of learning that has an explicit “listening” component (Oops, how about music).
1. Create superior language learning tools. There is a lot of room to develop new tools in the case of Chinese.
This can be translated as:
1. State that it is possible to create superior language learning tools.
2. Magic Happens
3. ChinesePOD makes lots of money …
Maybe, you are in the public radio business. “If you like our service call in and pledge now so that we can continue to provide the fine programming you expect.” (I don’t know how familiar you are with American public radio, but periodic pledge drives are a big part of how they raise money, and the stuff you produce is beautiful enough to inspire a few philanthropic hearts.)
Very important question. I “vote” that Cpod is in the biz of teaching chinese (and culture necessary to that teaching) language (primarily spoken / hearing) to english speakers.
I would suggest that a larger goal could be adopted (or maybe is implicit): to facilitate global commerce, the exchange of ideas, and the harmonious / mutually benefitial growth and prosperty of both china and the “the west”. In this larger context, I would like to see cpod grow by a) adding “business chinese” lessons at the high elementary level, supplemented with information that provides a cultural understanding about how chinese do buiness; b) adding chinese learning institutes — two to four week full time chinese learning academies targeted to students, business people (by type: law, IT, medicine / public health, marketing, etc), artists (writers, singers, musicians, etc), and c) developing a series of materials to support the focused study of the written langauge (stuff like lchinese.com and dLtool are cheap or free and indespensible and coule be incorporated into a program). I for one suggest that simply focusing on my field, Information Technology, could generate tons of interest as euro-americans shift to offshore in china from overtaxed, weak infrastructured India…), but that is a different soap box for a different day.
The reason this question is important is it helps define the ‘direction’ of the business, and I sure hope you are going to add both an on site learning program (or choose an affiliate! share revenue! grow the pie!) AND some written language learning tools.
more to say next time; sorry for the long post. but cpod has really accellerated my learning and is now the glue between many other learning activities and modes. thanks!
To throw my two pence in, I largely agree with Frank above: “…teaching Chinese is your broad focus. The narrow focus is how you deliver that product to the customers, your students. Right now you use podcasts and a website.”
The obvious areas of expansion are away from spoken Mandarin to written Mandarin; from Mandarin to other Chinese dialects (and then perhaps other languages); means of delivery (you now have enough material to produce several CD+books like Peggy Wang’s “100 Putonghua Situations”, i.e. the transcripts in book form with podcasts on the CD - actually, that would be quite convenient, I lack a backup at the moment…); online presence (positioning yourself on the sites of others); and offline presence (branded local groups).
However, the analogy with the railroads is slightly misleading: you have not built the infrastructure as such - that would be the internet.
Did you know that you are also in the business of providing teaching materials for the English language - and I am not talking about Englishpod. I learned tons of vocab, phrases, and sayings here, some in the podcasts, some in the transcripts, and a lot in the Discussions/Forums/Blog. I even learned some from CrazyEd here.
Just a couple minutes ago I learned the highly relevant noun “ardvark” from Lantian (and Wikipedia).
Why just have one? You’re into Entertainment, Language Pedagogy, Internet Business, Chinese Culture, Multimedia Infotainment, Personalised Mass Media and more.
That involves at least one fluffword (infotaiment) and an oxymoron (personalised mass media) but you get the idea. Diversity is another catchword, but it’s an appropriate one. If you’re doing things like ‘our terms’ and moving in new areas, you have to be prepared to take it where it heads, because you’re not necessarily the one who’ll direct it there. It’ll just go…