Does ChinesePod provide your learning framework?

bababardwan

October 24, 2008, 02:57 AM

Ken

This is the most fun and the most effective way I have found of learning Mandarin.While I have other resources ,I rarely use them as I prefer CPod and it provides my framework.The only thing I can think of that may help me achieve my goals better would be to have tests at multiple levels.I know there is a listening test where you can guage roughly where you are,but I would be looking for something more comprehensive than this where you test all aspects of Mandarin and can pass through multiple levels.Just a thought.

lechuan

November 14, 2008, 02:55 PM

Most of my study time is on transit/walking, thus not much time to study while at the computer. Thus my current learning framework is as follows:

1) Conversation and Listening (some vocab): Chinesepod Elementary and Intermediate Lessons.

2) Writing/Vocabulary: Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters (Alison/Laurence Matthews) & Pleco 2 Dictionary

3) Grammar: Chinesepod "Qing Wen" & Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (Claudia Ross)

I have not yet incorporated reading into my framework.

I would make *much* more use of Chinesepod's lesson vocab if there was an easy way to download it as a Pleco 2 flashcard database (I don't have the opportunity to get online much to use the online flashcards and lesson planner, nor do I have (or want to pay the monthly fees for) a web-connected mobile device).

I download all the chinesepod lessons onto my MP3 player and listen to at least a couple podcasts a day.

For me, the ability to download and use the resources offline (and of course the excellent content) is the power of chinesepod. I really like the new "What's the Story" feature and am thinking about getting an MP3 player that can play video.

mark

October 24, 2008, 03:09 AM

Channel Alfred E. Nueman and say, "What me, pass up an opportunity to pontificate on my study method?"

 

Chinesepod has been the core of my Chinese study program for the past 2 or so years.  I'm still waiting to see if it will get me over the hump from knowing some Chinese to fluent.  I still have faith, but I'll let you know how it turns out.

 

macallus88

October 24, 2008, 03:41 AM

Well I am still a Newbie (almost Ele.), so I suspect it will be different for me.

I do think that the volume of topics here is great and that picking which ones to learn is a great thing to be able to do. I still like choosing the new ones and wait for them if I'm still online. I think this isn't a problem, as in Newbie it is normally the same words used but I hope to kick that habit when my Chinese improves. I think the reason behind this is the community. I feel that although there is a lot of help given, the older ones are less likely to be seen. Therefore I choose the lessons in which, if I have a question, it will probably be answered.

I use ZDT alongside CP (although there are errors in both which I have to correct). The flashcard program disappointed me, so I looked elsewhere.

My use of CP now is to listen to the lesson, add the words (inc. from Expansion) to ZDT. To test myself on the Expansion, I rarely use the exercises. Also to read comments.

I would say it was my core but only a core.

light487

October 24, 2008, 06:46 AM

For me it took a few months to work out a decent study routine and even now I am still constantly developing and evolving that routine. I don't know whether that is a good thing or not. I certainly prefer this than boring lectures (not that I have done Chinese formally.. but I meant from my experience with other studies) or page-by-page textbook structure.

The one thing that I can't get from ChinesePOD is speaking practise, at least at an affordable price for my budget. For this I go elsewhere but I feel like I am betraying my loyalty to ChinesePOD whenever I do that even though it's the only option currently available to me.

There also seems to be a lack of Hanzi learning coming directly from Praxis, all of the Hanzi learning comes from the community. I acknowledge that there is only so much Praxis can provide, and that a part of the Praxis PLS is the community involvement. I just feel that that side of things needs a bit of work.

Essentially, ChinesePOD does not really provide any sort of framework at all, and even a lot of the lessons appear to be random and not really leading from one to the next (I know.. that's the point..). When I have learnt other things in the past, I have always built up from a solid foundation on to the next thing, and then on to the next etc. Some of the newbie lessons are much harder than others, and the step from Elementary to Intermediate seems to be quite massive to some people, and not so big for others.

I wonder if this is due to the lack of structure of the lessons, in that some people have "accidentally" stumbled across lessons in an order that gels with the path from Elementary to Intermediate better than some others. While the emphasis to not pressure learners into learning in a linear way is a good one, it leaves this potential gap in the learning.

Often I have found myself listening to a Newbie lesson and wondering why I had never learnt that up till that point. It's usually a very important thing that makes everything at higher levels much easier to understand. So may be Praxis needs to think about "mapping" out the lessons a bit more. That is, providing a kind of road map to learning, not a linear page-by-page (lesson-by-lesson) map but a general path that includes essential lessons in order to move forward in a more beneficial way.

 

qizlo

October 24, 2008, 02:11 PM

Chinesepod is a very entertaining way to learn Mandarin, I've found.  As a newbie, I've been following the lessons in numerical order from the beginning, though I'll jump to any interesting topics that come up. 

I took a Mandarin course about 30 years ago at university, but I've learned more of the language & retained the vocabulary just by listening to podcasts for the past few months.  I like the explanations of life in contemporary China, and the amusing banter between the hosts.

 I hope to make it to Shanghai & Beijing next year, & hope to be able to use the new language skills. 

Keep up the the good work!

tvan

October 24, 2008, 02:41 PM

To add to comments of others here, I think CPod can provide a core, but it's up to the user to provide a framework.  If you need speaking practice, but can't afford the practice plan, either get out in the community of find a Skype partner.  If you envision a future in bilingual journalism, start memorizing all the radicals, write characters, and get a grammar book.  If you want to impress your friends at a restaurant, grab menus/food vocab lists and study them.  

I think that if you use Cpod as a focal point, the key is to set goals and design a structure around those goals using CPod and appropriate external resources.

helenaoutloud

October 24, 2008, 03:09 AM

 I'm not 100% sure of how to answer this, but I'll give it a go. I've been coming here for just about a year and can survive any chinese conversation. I'm not saying I'll understand everything and talk at the speed of light, but I can explain my point of view and ask enough questions to get a native speaker to explain him/herself.

Basically, Chinesepod is the backbone in my oral Mandarin studies. I gain vocabulary from several other methods of study too, but this is where I come to really learn how to use the language. Everything here is alot of help but my favorite show is Qing Wen because that's where I find key ligament's to my learning structure.

I often watch chinese T.V. and take note's on sentence pattern's I catch that I haven't seen in the past and seem difficult to remember. Also, I like to translate Chinese music on my own from Hanzi to Pinyin. Karaoke helps me learn more characters. However, if I take Cpod away and just do these other thing's I'll severely slow myself down and probably get frustrated.  I really count on all of the explanations and cultural points from Cpod.

pchenery

October 24, 2008, 03:17 PM

The study framework depends on the learner's objectives, which relate to the separate skill sets involved; (i) listening comprehension, (ii) speaking, (iii) reading and (iv) writing.

CPOD provides an excellent framework for (i) listening comprehension.

However, for the other skill sets, I use a combination of CPOD and other sources.

 

jdavidmurray

November 05, 2008, 08:50 PM

I love the idea of incorporating some kind of formal testing for levels of proficiency into your program, as a way for users to formally chart their own progress and celebrate incremental successes.  

baifameizhong

November 05, 2008, 09:36 PM

I think my input goes a bit into a similar direction as tvan's and pchenery's posts.

Chinesepod gives me a great (!) core of key aspects. Mainly I hear relevant vocabulary and terms and how to use them (until I found Chinesepod I so often studied and used a term and my wife just started laughing and laughing because that term was so outdated or "countryside" as she would say).

Two areas where I can't quite find a framework on Chinesepod are for writing characters (by hand...because if I write them on the computer I will forget them within a matter of hours/days...就是没用). For that I just pick some from the dialogues and sometimes I do some HSK writing exercises 太没意思了.

The other area is grammar. I am currently around Upper Intermediate and regularly think a bit more grammar input would be interesting. That it isn't a priority at the beginning I can fully appreciate and I do appreciate the explanations for some patterns in the lessons, but it's not quite the same. I currently don't have another method for grammar. I do, however, occasionally trip over a gramatical explanation of something and will then meet that very pattern quite frequently and wonder why I hadn't found out earlier...

 

Reading through the comments above I have to say I like the idea of a more in-depth test to determine the Chinese level. Your goal could be to create a recognized CPHSK: Chinesepod 汉语水平考试. 好玩儿.

David

sebastianhelm

November 06, 2008, 09:54 PM

I built my framework on frequency lists (I basically started with self-programmed flashcards based in information from the web).

The big problem for me is that ChinesePod does not seem to take word or character frequency into account. 

Although my experience is based on the intermediate lessons, it's easier to explain at the elementary level. (Which reminds me of my first English school book which had us learn the word "gown" in one of the first lessons. I don’t think I ever used it since.)

Take e.g. the latest elementary lessons, which feature characters such as "胡", "椒", "脱" and "鞋" that all are not among the 1000 most frequent characters. This goes against the 80/20 rule (see lesson D0975), which for Chinese means that with the 1000 most frequent characters you can understand 80% of all normal texts. Why focus on less frequent characters or words, when we don’t know the frequent ones yet?

Moreover, teaching infrequent characters makes learning harder and less rewarding than it needs to be. Infrequent characters are less likely to occur in subsequent lessons (which is aggravated by the fact that ChinesePod lessons rarely build their vocabulary on each other). We probably will forget a character like "椒" before we see it again, which means that it will not stick. Thus, we miss out on the encouraging feedback that comes from seeing words one recognizes.

Sebastian

sparechange

November 07, 2008, 03:28 AM

Ken says:

So, my question is, (1) how did you create your framework for learning Mandarin? (2) How does ChinesePod fit into that? (3) Does ChinesePod provide a framework in itself? (4) What could we be doing in order to better enable you to develop a learning framework?

1) I started with ChinesePod, and worked my way out from there. I made friends with native speakers at work (although my fear of sounding like an idiot has made this less productive than you might expect). ;-)

2) Like helanaoutloud, ChinesePod is the backbone of my framework. Probably 80% of my study time is spent at the computer going over CPod lessons.

3) ChinesePod does not yet provide a complete framework within itself. It probably comes closest at the Executive subscription level, due to the daily speaking practice with a bona fide teacher of Mandarin. Any level below Guided, however, limits the learner's ability to build vocabulary over time, due to the non-linear nature of the lesson content (see sebastianhelm's comment above). Various attempts at lesson series were, in my opinion, quite successful in weaving a thread through related subject matter. The repitition of key vocabulary across these lessons allowed me to memorize them without really thinking about it.

This isn't to say that ChinesePod doesn't cover a lot of bases, I'm just pointing out what I perceive to be the gaps.

4) Flesh out that Grammar Guide. I understand and agree with your inductive approach to learning a language. But if you're going to take this approach, you're going to need more examples that tie in to each other (same principle as the vocab mentioned above). Many times (especially once I got to the Intermediate level) I have been on the verge of understanding a particular pattern or structure, yet I could get no verification because either a) I had no decent reference material; or b) there were no additional examples from which to infer the rule. What I find particularly frustrating is when a grammar structure is mentioned in the lesson, and we are simply told that we'll understand it over time. Please...either explain it, give more examples, or don't mention it at all.

It would also be nice to have more support for learning to write characters. The characters are one of the main reasons I started learning Chinese, but I've had to rely mostly on resources outside of ChinesePod for this kind of thing.

antony73

November 11, 2008, 01:16 PM

How did you create your framework for learning Mandarin?

This has taken me two years of experimetation, trial and error to create a framework for learning.

Originally I waded, painfully, through pimsleur's 90 lessons sticking strictly to the Pimsleur method of learning. Next I joined a class, dabbled in Chinesepod, used flash cards, books and experimented with such things as the Mozart effect and learning through Play.

At this point I began to feel frusterated, I realized I needed some structure because although autonomy is ok and works for some as does a classroom enviroment, I need a balance of autonomy and control over my learning. I am now using the Guided Plan and so far have found this to be the ideal.

This process was, I believe, necassary to finding my ideal framework.

How does ChinesePod fit into that?

Chinesepod's Guided Plan has now become my sole learning tool at present and for the foreseeable future. It's the most fun, interactive and easy to use tool I've used, although I hang on to my own personal methods for processing Chinesepod, these are:

1. Always repeat aloud. For me, a little louder than normal speaking volume, using all gestures, facial expressions and modulation that go along with the dialogue. Living it, creating emotional responce. A great tool!

2. The Pimsleur Method. I repeat the dialogue throughout the day, the next day, fifth day, a week later, two months etc.

3. Write down the dialogue.

4. Make my own flash cards for the Hanzi.

5. Use what I've learned asap with native Mandarin speakers.

Does ChinesePod provide a framework in itself?

Mostly. Premium and above subscriptions are best.

What could we be doing in order to better enable you to develop a learning framework?

Maybe by adding features such as providing users with an on-line/site 'Learning Method' Test and Chinesepod giving recomendations following the result.

Putting more features in the 'Me' section for the user to develop a personal framework such as:

Adding the option of lesson review reminders. Part of my framework is using a diary reminding me to go back and review lessons, words and phrases studied/picked up months before, even up to two years before. This is really useful for me when trying to transfer a subject from short to long term memory.

Being able to save own personal new words and phrases in the 'Me' section that have been learned outside of chinesepod. For example, while talking to a native Mandarin speaker picking up a new word or phrase. Thus, helping to make Chinesepod a complete framework.

Video 'Vocab' for Newbies (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qS3IYhkOr-0) so that Newbies can see those sounds being made rather than hearing them only. 

Obviously, the more features, the more you have a one-stop Chinese learning centre, however, simplicicity is always the key.

 

 

sebire

October 24, 2008, 02:49 PM

Hmm, I'm at the awkward elementary/intermediate stage, and whilst using CPod alone was great for getting up to elementary, to make the jump, I think other sources are necessary. Currently, I think my problem is vocab. I just haven't put in enough effort to learning common vocab such as clothing, sports, jobs, etc, and then there are all the words such as "almost, probably, apparently".

Although the podcast format is great for introducing new vocab in a particular context, I find that there is just not enough words associated with a particular topic for it to stick. e.g. Don't Walk on the Grass was a fun lesson, and I learnt the word for grass, but it'll be hard to remember unless I learn "tree, flowers, bush", and "walk, run, jump, skip, swim".

So as of this week, my resolution is to learn lots of vocab, and thankfully I have managed to dig out and old book "500 Chinese words for children", complete with happy colourful pictures!

However, those words such as "quite, almost, already" will have to come from somewhere else.

As for speaking and writing grammatically correct sentences, I haven't really solved these problems. When I can afford it, I will have to get a teacher, because I don't know how else to solve these issues adequately.

So I guess CPod doesn't create my framework, it is just one part of it.