ChinesePod Turns Five!
suxiaoya
August 12, 2010, 04:05 AM posted in General DiscussionChinesePod Turns Five!
On Sunday 5th September, it will be a full five years since the first ChinesePod podcast was published. Hooray!
Back in the earliest days, we were just five people, namely Jenny, Ken, one sound engineer, and a couple of tech staff. The studio was half of the size it is now, and it usually smelt like lunch.
Five years and hundreds of lessons later, we're all grown-up (the studios still smell like lunch though), and it's time to celebrate!
Celebratory Fun
Amongst other celebrations, we are planning to put together a little anniversary montage to showcase the people who have made ChinesePod what it is today; that is, our loyal users plus past and present members of the team.
Send Us Your Stories!
For this montage to work, we are calling on YOU to send us your ChinesePod stories and birthday messages in video, audio, text and/or photo form (even if that's a five-second unscripted video you shoot on your phone!)
Suggestions for your message content:
§ How far have you come with your studies since subscribing?
§ What does ChinesePod mean to you?
§ Share your funny or inspirational stories about learning Chinese
§ Share your funny or inspirational stories about using ChinesePod
§ What's your all-time favourite ChinesePod lesson?
§ "Happy Birthday!" (learn how to say Happy Birthday in Chinese here).
We encourage you use as much Chinese as you can in your messages! Let us see/hear all the Mandarin you have picked-up on ChinesePod over the years!
To get involved, please email us with your ChinesePod stories before Friday, 27th August. Video, photos, MP3 recordings or written accounts are all welcome.
Email: sarah.edson@chinesepod.com
Prize!!
We'll be giving away one of these awesome "smartpens" to the most creative or most entertaining message, so get cracking on your message without delay.
Note: we reserve the right to judge this completely subjectively!
谢谢大家!
suxiaoya
simonpettersson - thank you!
We would LOVE to see you put that "Congratu-figgin'-lations" message into photo/video format. Are still in Foshan? Maybe you could incorporate some gongfu into it...?!
Either way, thanks so much for your support :-)
suansuanru
August 12, 2010, 03:12 PMI 've been a member of Cpod for just a few months,but I really loves here!
祝Chinesepod生日快乐！
pretzellogic
August 12, 2010, 04:02 PMI take it the rerecording of all those early lessons are now complete, and there no longer exist any of the real first lessons ("do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?"). But it would be really cool if Cpod could reintroduce the very first lesson created back on Sept 5, 2005.
KokaTiger
I loved that "do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth" tagline on some of those early lessons. Whenever I hear that I still crack up.
trevorb
Ah Rush Hour, I enjoyed those films....
bababardwan
yeah, me too. The whole intro was awesome and gets you excited. I never tire of it.
bababardwan
yeah, I agree,good suggestion, time to crack the first lesson out of the locked archive vault.
Hey,I've just realised it's you pretzell with a new avatar.
suxiaoya
ooh, nice idea, pretzellogic! I am not sure whether or not those lessons were stored away for prosperity. I can do a little digging...
Joachim
posterity = prosperity? That's quite some connotation. Sounds very Chinese to me. ;-)
suxiaoya
ha - i meant posterity, of course!
bababardwan
August 12, 2010, 10:51 PMHey, this is awesome. 恭喜恭喜CPod. I love a good celebration and we all have a lot to celebrate. I love that you're doing it in style. Jiayou ! :)
suxiaoya
Thanks for the support! Does this mean I can look forward to a message from you, bababardwan? Maybe you could record a short video of you and your daughter speaking some Chinese together?! ;-)
jennyzhu
August 13, 2010, 09:37 AMWe'd love to hear from you guys! It would be so nice to put a face/voice to the avatars!
xiaophil
August 13, 2010, 10:07 AMEven though I sometimes complain about this or that, I do, oh so do, love CPod lessons, and I very much love the community built around the website, and I especially am thankful for all the help that CPod staff has given me.
Actually, I do feel a bit nostalgic. I just realized that the first time I used CPod coincided almost exactly with when I first came to live in China five years ago. I remember sitting in my room googling for Chinese lessons. One of the sites I looked at was of course CPod. I remember thinking that it seemed to be the best resourse out there. Little did I know that it was only a week or so old. At that time CPod allowed users to download the mp3s for free. At that time I knew almost no Mandarin. I took advantage of a few freebie downloads, but didn't really use the website other than that for a while as I had a tutor, and that seemed enough for me at the time.
After eventually becoming frustrated with my slow pace of learning Mandarin, I started studying at Shanghai Jiaotong University. However, I soon encountered a new frustration--the language instruction there seemed a bit stale, somehow didn't feel entirely natural, and avoided many topics that would have been useful in daily life. I came back to CPod and started being a paid user.
For a long time I didn't do anything more than just download files from here. I'm not sure why. But as I said above, after getting involved in the community, I have learned a lot from both other users and staff.
Although my Mandarin level still frustrates me, I have come a long way since I first heard Ken and Jenny. For the longest time just about every Chinese person with an education could speak better English than my Mandarin. Now, it is definitely the other way around. I also can follow most of the instruction parts in the podcast lessons that are spoken in Mandarin.
CPod has also come a long way. Recently I have been listening to some of the oldest intermediate and higher lessons. I keep thinking to myself that they are still much better than half the stuff I learned at Jiaotong, and as far as I know, are still better than the competition. That said, after comparing them to the lessons from the past two or three years, it is hard to have patience for the earlier ones when the newer ones are so good. I hope this doesn't sound bad. I just want to emphasize that CPod has gone from very good to light years ahead of anything else out there.
So congratulations CPod! Thank you for your hard work! Thank you for making my Mandarin better!
xiaophil
Wow, what is happening here? No pictures on the avatars, and I wanted to edit the above, but there isn't an edit button. I guess I'll stay tuned.
xiaophil
Okay, I see Peter's post. The main server is down.
suxiaoya
xiaophil - thanks so much for taking the time to share this. I was a ChinesePod user before coming to work here, so I am feeling really quite nostalgic too :-)
trevorb
August 13, 2010, 12:40 PMHow about a what are they doing now article? It would be interesting to know what people who were podcasters & teachers are doing now as well as about the students.
As someone learning Mandarin outside of china CPod has been invaluable and I suspect in a couple of hundred years (i.e. once I've mastered了 ) when I am proficient I will still be using ChinesePod to help me stay that way.
Congratulations on surviving,growing and evolving despite the setbacks. I look forward to seeing where the next five years take you.
suxiaoya
I like that idea, trevorb! There's plenty of people who we can get involved, so hopefully we can rally a few familiar faces (voices?).
simonpettersson
August 12, 2010, 04:24 AMCongratu-friggin'-lations, CPod! That's al I have time for, for now. But yeah, keep on rockin', everyone at the Pod. I know we complain sometimes about technical issues, but you guys are truly not just the best Chinese teaching system out there, but, I can honestly say, the best language instruction system I've come across.