At the end of every chapter we’ll be offering review materials. Since Integrated Chinese focuses so heavily on vocabulary, we’ll be helping you review all the vocabulary using ChinesePod’s own “the Fix” audio review.
Usually the Fix comes once per lesson, but we’re going to be trying some new things for the IC blog. That means we’ll not only be offering multiple Fixes for some lessons, but we’ll also be offering cumulative Fixes which cover multiple lessons. (Your first taste of that will be in the Intro-1-2 review week beginning September 24th.)
This week has multiple Fixes as well. First comes the Fix covering the Useful Expressions (page 26) section of the IC Intro, covering both “Classroom Expressions” and “Survival Expressions.” We did two of them, a long one and a short one:
IC Introduction: the Fix (short)Please let us know which you found more useful, or if you use both.
We also have one other special fix for the Intro. This one reviews the Chinese numbers 1-10. This is absolutely crucial vocab, people, so make sure you get it all straight!
As always, we would love to have your feedback. Experimental features that prove useful can make it onto the main ChinesePod site, but we need to hear from you.
That long fix is truly gargantuan. If someone STILL has problems with the numbers after ploughing it, they might want to switch to SpanishSense.
Have you been able to copy and paste the audio from other Cpod lessons or do you do new recordings for each and every fix?
You guys should have quite some database of audio snippets to be recycled and used in different contexts …
@Joachim - we have a pretty big archive of sound files. All audio is recorded separately for each fix though - we don’t want differences in speakers or ambient noise levels to distract from the language practice.
Hi,
These fixes seem quite useful. The long ones might be too long just to listen to without anything else to do. (Kind of like the Pimsleur tapes). However, what I like about it, is that it is review, so you can be doing other things, not having to give the lessons your undivided attention, while at the same time, really benefiting. So, in short, it seems this is a good idea for Chinese Pod to pursue.
I love the long Fixes! The longer the better. After all, if it’s too long you can always turn it off after you’ve had enough.
At the start of listening my brain is thrashing around for the answers, and it’s nice to not have to put it away while in that state. By the time it’s finished, everything’s falling into place, maybe even easy, and real progress is experienced, almost guaranteed to be felt, before walking away. A shorter Fix doesn’t give that experience.
Some people take the lesson input - listening, written, explanations - and absorb it right then and there. Amazing. What they need next is a “test” I suppose. But for us Normals who need to put a long hard study session in between the show and the test, we’re on our own. So how do we fill up that time to get good results? How do we make it sink in and be ready to come out again?
The Fix, when a long one like this, can be used for that personal learning session, the time when the words are getting converted from “somewhat familiar” to “mine to use whenever I want”. If sufficiently long, the whole thing can be repeated without any chance of answering by remembering the recorded sequence, and some of us slower learners might need to do it twice before it gets boring.
An occasional glimpse of boredom is a good thing, because in the absence of other feedback it is the sign of something being well learned, indicating that it’s time to stop thrashing yourself here and to move on to harder material, right now. Anyone lucky enough to experience that signal during the first part of the Fix, can simply give themselves a mental tick and hit the Next button!
The last two Fix files (Numbers short and long) are incorrectly linked. The “Numbers 1-10: the Fix (short)” file is linked to “IC Introduction: the Fix (long)” and the “Numbers 1-10: the Fix (long)” file is linked to “Numbers 1-10: the Fix (short)”.
The actual links for the two numbers files are:
Numbers 1-10: the Fix (short) - http://s3.amazonaws.com/chinesepod/ic/0000/chinesepod_IC0000rv3.mp3
Numbers 1-10: the Fix (long) - http://s3.amazonaws.com/chinesepod/ic/0000/chinesepod_IC0000rv4.mp3
Thanks for all of the work putting this blog/correlation together. I am re-learning Chinese (I took 1 year in college long ago) because my daughter is in Chinese Immersion School. I took an adult class at her school that used IC, but only explored the first 4 lessons. CP and this Blog are a great help in moving further with my re-education and hopefully will take me even further than my past studies.
Thanks again
Blacksea,
Thanks for calling that to my attention. I have fixed it already.