Don’t feel like studying today? What if your Mandarin coach was about to call you to go over the days lesson? Yup, sounds tough, but it’s good motivation to study. Meet your new coach - the ChinesePod 8-Week Program.
First, your ChinesePod counselor (native Mandarin speakers with extensive teaching experience of course) will meet with you/call you for a needs analysis. They’ll plan out a personal Study Plan for you with 40 lessons over 8 weeks. You then receive a phone call every weekday for a ten minute session to practice the day’s lesson. This will help you to consolidate, correct your grammar/pronunciation, or answer questions.
Ten minutes? Any one can fit that into their schedule (yes, even you). Schedule your call for your lunch break, the commute to work, coffee break, or any time that’s convenient. (Currently only during Shanghai office hours, but this will be a 24/7 service very soon!)
Frank, over on the ‘newbie’ blog, has been trying it out for a few weeks.
The program is $300 for the first 50 people to sign up ($400 thereafter), including premium membership during that time (already have a subscription? We’ll just extend it two months extra). We think you’ll like your new coach. More info here, or send us an email at chinesepod at gmail dot com.
Colleen
How could you do a 24/7 service in Shanghai ?
I myself like to work chinese between 9 and 11 pm (it’s between 3 to 5 am in Shanghai).
It seems to be an interesting option, but in fact 8 w x 5 d/w x 10 min = 400 min are just about 6 hours. So 300 bucks for phone calls only and no personal face to face teaching seems too expensive for me. I can easily find a teacher here in Germany whom I pay less and will get more value for money.
Another point to add. You would call me in the early morning in Europe and I may be not fit enough to follow the phone conversation because I am not an “early bird”. Any plans to change that?
Hello kmk,
Well, if there is demand, we would just have counselors working in shifts, not that complicated.
hanyu_xuesheng;
Your counselor also meets with you at first for an initial needs analysis, spends quite a bit of time creating a 40 day learning plan for you (and tweaking it as time progresses based on your progress), prepares for each phone call with you (ie. preparing questions based on the words you had troubles with last week.) It also includes premium access during those two months. Hope this clarifies a bit!
I think this is a great idea.
I also think we should set up some sort of Chinesepod skypecast. Maybe this has already been talked about, but different casts for different levels, etc; the possibilities are endless. I’m not sure how the members thing would be coordinated, but all of it would be awesome.
SUPPORT for the SUPPORT - I think this is a great initiative and it looks like you’re building on learnings from the teacher network Cpod first helped to coordinate.
However, without a supportive tech backend I think it will be hard to scale, not generate enough student interest and be very niche oriented. It’s not gonna last.
There are several customer relationship open-source applications that could support this and be tweaked over time, much like Cpod’s use of Wordpress.
These applications take about 10 minutes to install and get up and running. Just copy and paste in your stock Cpod images and info and it’s good to go! Kinda like gmail beta which only now two years later is shipping gold.
You guys/gals could do this now in about an afternoon AND put it to use with the rollout of this 8-week offering initiative.
Take a look at:
http://www.perldesk.com/13.0.html
Cpod’s value-add is in it’s location (and ability to gather up counselors and have a local payment system), current Cpod content, and existing base of customers. (and ability to accept overseas payments).
Tweaking existing customer support software to connect the value seems like a easy layup to me…?
You can toss it if it doesn’t work, change to something better or tweak it, nothing needs to be in stone.
Others include:
Customer Relationship
Crafty Syntax Live Help
Help Center Live
osTicket
PerlDesk
PHP Support Tickets
Support Logic Helpdesk
Support Services Manager
Imagine being able to effectively manage your student-guidance counselor communications. The software would also let you send messages to distributed counselors 24/7 and get responses. Imagine students being able to open up live chats, have an online repository of their questions AND answers, having reports on what students and counselors are asking/answering, looking at loads over time.
You currently have none of these abilities with this initiative. Cpod is using the phone and email to cross the Pacific divide….umm?
The only thing these packages don’t typically have that suits this initiative is some sort of mechanism to rate and get info on counselors, so maybe some other app could be combined to provide this. The rankings and reviews are a great mechanism to maintain counselor interest, initiative and for it to become a self-maintaining quality control system.
If you all hadn’t already thought of this, (and rejected the concept) and go with the idea…I want a free 8 week course!
I find the material to be great quality, and the site decoration pretty. The speakers are enthusiastic. You demonstrate an above average level of professionalism.
However as a foreign expert in China for a number of years now I can say that the price is WAAAY too high. Zhen de. Dui de. Tai do la waaaaay too expensive. If you cut the prices (drastically) I might subscribe.
BTW little detail, the podcast to Itunes link does not work off the site. I use a 60 Gig Ipod, and download from across the globe every day.
Anyway chuan jie kuai le he xin nian kuai le.
Kind regards. I know someone put a lot into the effort and I commend you. I enjoy the intermediate material. You’ve created abeautiful site, attractive like a pretty flower garden.
[bio data - I am a theoretical physicist taught at Tsinghua 2005 and studying on second PhD at Princeton (NJ / USA) presently ]
Todd seems to ask for a 对折 (ref Jenny in lesson 中级35) and is starting to leave.
When in China People really learn how to bargain !
Sorry I’ve just checked and it’s in 中级28 not 中级35.
Hey all,
Thanks for the great feedback! ~ we did toss some of those ideas around but as you know, we are always trying to improve upon what we have got, so we’ll take another look and see what we come up with.
Todd, thanks for the iTunes tip!
We figured the phone would be the most attractive option since you don’t have to be tied to your computer (ie. you’re in a taxi on your commute…etc.) but since we use skype-out anyways, it could be computer to computer.
Lantian, awesome ideas. Not sure what you do by day…but you should come work for us instead:)
Colleen
APPLES AND ORANGES - I think it’s a pretty fair pricing for what looks to me like probably the world’s most effective 8-week mechanism for improving one’s Chinese for the average busy-life working adult.
I think other commenters are trying to compare to methods that generally don’t work very well: cheap language exchanges, two-hour face to face weekly classroom or tutor meetings, going it alone, or $2,000 in Beijing courses plus $1000 airfare.
I can never imagine doing lessons by phone, so I’ve never considered this. It’s also kind of funny to go from new-school pod learning to the phone.
I need to see the face when doing ‘real-time’ lessons. So perhaps video conferencing could work for me.