ChinesePod has come a long way. A very long way, and they’ve done it in such a short time, too.

Case in point…

Yesterday, for my Octagon training (here on “The Ocho”), I was supposed to dive into the lesson 初级16 Connecting with Email. You could tell from the intro that this was an early lesson, but I was shocked to see what a difference a change in their format could make to my learning process.

You see, in this lesson (one I would consider vital, by the way), Ken and Jenny seemed only to translate the dialogue… once? Maybe twice? And I don’t think we heard the dialogue as often as we do now. What’s more, at the tail end of the program, Ken and Jenny just start rattling off in Mandarin. No translations. Just two people having a conversation. That’s a lot for an Elementary learner.

On the plus side, while I can’t boast that I understood every word they said, I did get their meaning. My listening comprehension has been geometrically improved over the past four weeks. Xie xie, Aggie!

Oh, and for the expansion areas? Like all the early lessons, there’s no side-by-side English translations. Ouch.

I won’t lie to you, folks. It was hard for me to get through without the usual tools I have at my disposal. Those who think they don’t get their mileage out of the Premium subscription features simply aren’t using them. They’ve helped me enormously over the last few weeks (and the last eight months!).

So, hey… Ken? John? I’d love to see you guys revisit this topic with the format and features you have in place now. It’s such an important topic, but I struggled with it to the point where if I hadn’t been expecting a call from Aggie to test me on it, I probably would have skipped it.

The other side of that, of course, is a big thumb’s up for the progress you’ve made! Kudos!