Hello C-pod community,

I see so many posts with Chinese characters, and would really like to do that myself, but I do not have a program to do that.

Could someone recommend a Chinese typing program to put on your computer, that is good and cost-effective.

Thanks!

Hi, i'm getting ready to move to Beijing.  I am wondering what type of home internet access cpodders are using in Beijing or Shanghai. I've casually done internet searches, and unfortunately, it appears that VDSL is the (emerging?) dominant method for connecting to the internet.  I had a bad experience with DSL in Lanzhou in that big powerpoint files (like 5MB in size) wouldn't download, and Sametime Connect wouldn't work.  If the only available method is VDSL or DSL, then I guess that's what I'll have to use, but then I wonder if cpodders are having success downloading large ppts or large files in general. Thanks for your thoughts.

I've come up with an idea that I'm just now starting to use and am really optimistic about.  It is a way to figure out which is the best ChinesePod lesson to study next.  I've written some very rough programs (bash scripts) that make an informed decision.  In a nutshell, it figures out which lesson's unlearned vocabulary is the most frequently used.

To do this, it requires 3 things:

1.  An exhaustive list of your vocabulary, not an easy thing to get unless you use pleco, anki or some other program that can track your vocabulary.

2.  Chinese character & bigram frequency data, freely available online.

3.  ChinesePod vocabulary lists for each lesson that you want to choose between.  (this is not easy to get, it would be nice if they would make this available to us in a more straightforward manner.)

So the script reads in your vocabulary, the frequency data and then looks at the vocab list in each lesson.  For each lesson, it figures out which words or characters that you have not yet learned, and then looks all those words/characters in the frequency table.  it then adds those frequencies up and then divides the total by the number of new words.  The results can then be sorted to determine the highest scored lesson, which is the lesson you should study next.

Currently, I'm using 2 separate programs to do this for single characters and bigrams.  I don't have a frequency list for words of arbitrary length, but it sure would be useful if I could find one.

Has anyone else done anything like this?