From an article published yesterday, here's an interview with Ken talking about learning languages over the web.

I noticed Ken's relaxed voice is much more Irish sounding than his podcast voice.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed and my brain feels like a soggy gym sock. Does anyone have any personal study methods which worked for them? I'm crossing over between newbie and elementary lessons (which is great) but I want to improve so much that sometimes I listen to several lessons in one night and try to jot down vocabulary and sentences in addition to reciting them. It's like I either listen to one lesson once or twice a day, or I listen to five of them in two hours.

I was never good at studying when I was in school, so any suggestions at all will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Hello ,

    I am Golden Chen from China.

    I am looking for some English teachers to teach English in Chinese College, University and school.

    So if you have interesting to teach English in China.

    Please contact me. My email is : sinojob@foxmail.com

    My msn is e3588473747@hotmail.com

    My mobile is 0086-13588473747

    My tel is 0086-591-88989022

    Ofcause if you have any question in leaning Chinese ,you can contact me, I will to help you in my best:)

Hello everyone,

The progress this week started off a bit bumpy, but the last few days have been average. I would say that the progress of this week, like last week, was either average or a little bit under average. Here are the specifics;

Currently, I have flashcards for 640 terms (more or less) and I have already selected 60 terms for next week. I have started the term selection for the following week, adding a handful of terms that are repeaters from words that I learned previously. This is a delicate way for me to admit that I had forgotton some of the terms that I had learned. My stack has gotton so large that I review only half the stack each Wednesday instead of the entire stack. This is after carefully shuffling the entire stack to attempt to get random terms, which can be quite the task.

Using the flashcards, I had a good week besides Friday. I am averaging 10 words or so getting added to the stack every day, which is good because I am adding 10 words to the pile of words that I am learning each day. This means that I am keeping pace. I find that when I add words, I learn them at roughly three times going through them, which is good. This means that I am normally done with the flashcards for the night within an hour. 

Speaking and listening started out a bit weak, but the last three or four days have been average to above average. On Wednesday, I did two podcasts instead of my normal one podcast. As I have pointed out in the past, the speaking and listening is more difficult for me than reading. I add 10 words to the flashcards everyday (except wednesday which is my review day), and the podcasts have about only 5 - 10 words each. Being that I do only one podcast per day, it is necessary to conclude that the speaking will continue to fall further behind the reading.

While speaking and listening are difficult, I have found one strategy that seems to help some. When listening to the audio review, and encountering a new term, I try to think of an english word, or sound that is similar to the term. Once I do that, I memorize the sounds and words instead of trying to memorize the word. On the next pass through, I focus on the sounds and words for the pronounciation. This ensures that I get the term correct. Soon, I don't have to remember the sounds and words anymore, and I acquire the new term in Chinese. Subsequently, I repeat the word to get as close to the model as possible.

I hope this is helpful, also please feel free to leave comments if you have any strategies for learning how to speak the language.

I've been on the hunt this morning for people who are learning Chinese and blogging about their experiences. Good blogs seem to be hard to come by so I'm giving you a chance to shout about yours here.

If you are learning Chinese (any level) and blogging about the experience then I'd love to hear from you. You can always send me a message if you don't want to promote your blog here.

Many thanks.

Hello, all

This post is intended as a place where people can exchange their thoughts on translation as it relates to language learning. Please share your own suggestions and experiences in learning Chinese or any other language. Here are a few suggestions for discussion:

• Is it effective to literally translate every word in an article or story as you read? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
  
• How do you choose the appropriate meaning, when a given character has many interpretations?
• What is the role of cultural knowledge in understanding a phrase or story?
  
• How do you preserve tone and clarity? 
• How do we deal with profanity and slang? For example, a recent discussion dealt with the curse word 王八蛋 wángbadàn. Would a literal translation be effective here? How do you store the word in your mind?

This discussion is open to everyone, at all levels of Chinese. I'd be very interested to hear from people whose native language is not English. How did you learn English? How did that process differ from the way in which you are learning Chinese?

I hope that this discussion will shed some light on the ways in which we learn and, ultimately, master, foreign languages. I have my own opinions and methods, but I want to hear and learn from you.

Any thoughts you share will help me and the CPod team to understand your thinking better, with the goal of helping you learn Chinese.

In the approximately 1300-1400 lessons or so that cpod has put out, how many different words would a student have learned, assuming they listened to all the lessons?

I don't expect that someone actually go through all the pdfs and count words manually.  But i'm thinking that a word macro could count different words in all the lessons, and spit out a value.  I'd be willing to try and write a macro (for free,  of course) and have cpod use it to count words. 

Here's a very good article from Venture Beat - 'Web technology is about to change how we learn'. The author, Russell Moench, references us with some positive comments.

Here on ChinesePod, of course, it already has changed how we are all learning. 

The article is well worth a read.

I can offer help in your Chinese learning. Free of charge :)

I would love to learn Chinese. I am in the last form at school now.Is it very hard ? Could I speak to somebody who wants to study it or already knows it?