I put together a lesson set of some of my favorite Intermediate lessons. These are the ones I had the most fun doing with Jenny, I guess. Anyway, if you're interested, here's the direct link:

John's Favorites

You can't comment on lesson sets, so if you have any comments, you can leave them here.

So, I bookmarked some lessons.  Where can I see a list of my bookmarked lessons?

Howdy,

I probably missed it, but how do I download WLCP? And is adding flashcard capabilities on the roadmap in the next few months? Thanks.

Dear all,

Is anybody else experiencing problems searching for specific lessons? For the whole day any searches I do come back with no results. Even for regular features that should definitely be there, like "Hungry Traveller". Sent a message to Chinesepod support earlier today but have not yet heard back from them.

In my effort to study mandarin better, I wrote out some sentences. These sentences try to use some of the ideas we learned in Qing Wen (shi4...de, ...bi3..., you3 shen2me..., lian2....dou1 as well as the travel lessons.  I know some of them are totally wrong, but I would greatly appreciate any kind of help in correcting what is wrong with what I wrote.  Especially helpful is knowing why it's wrong.  Forgive me, but I don't really know characters, and my pinyin is not that great, but any help is appreciated.

I'm going to complain.

Wo3 shi4 yao4 qu4 tou2su4 de.

When did you file a compliant?

Ni3 shi4 shen2me shi2hou4 tou2su4 de?

I usually don't set up these kinds of meetings. They're too important.

Wo3 yi1ban4 bu4 an1pai2 zhe4 zhong3 hui.  Ta1men2 shi4 tai2 zhong3 yao4 de.

This road is under construction.

Zhe4 tiao2 lu4 shi4 zai4 xiu1 de.

No one can afford to speak irresponsibly.

Mei2 you3 ren2 bu4 yao4 luan4shuo1 de qi3

Hi there,

I've had some good experiences recently using Chinesepod with a teacher I thought I'd relate. In order to stay on the gravy train I'm still working full-time, but to move my Chinese along I've been investing in daily lessons with a tutor. We chose a book to work through (Schaum's Chinese Vocabulary, which I recommend) but the lessons pretty quickly became hard work - I got bored of conversations about airports, taxis and hotels, and I think the teacher got bored as well, especially when I was lax in doing my preparation. I also had to spend more time memorizing the book's vocab and less on ChinesePod (Erk!). 

I therefore quickly came up with the idea of introducing CPod into the mix, and the results have been very good. We've been using about 4-5 lessons a week, starting out with me reading the dialog. On my own time I listen to the official lessons a few times to absorb the explanations of context, grammar and help it sink in. Then we read the lessons out taking turns as the various speakers. This graduates to reproducing the dialog (not verbatim, but with the gist the same) from memory, with hints in English. Some oral quizzing on the vocab helps reinforce things.

The result has been that the lessons have become more fun for both of us. My teacher totally gets a kick out of lessons involving gangsters, pick-up artists and zombies. I've realized there's an awful lot of value in making the teacher's job more fun. For my part I enjoy doing the voices and roleplaying in Chinese. I'm absorbing all the vocab and patterns much better than before, too. It's totally clear that CPod's penchant for crazy and humorous lessons is very worthwhile, as it benefits students, teachers and no doubt the Praxis staff too.

All pretty obvious observations, I know, but I'm getting more value from ChinesePod than ever before. Of course, I'm lucky to have the opportunity for daily lessons like this (it's one of the reasons I shifted to China) but I'm sure it goes without saying that using the lessons this way would be useful in any classroom setting. Furthermore, I think pretty much any student can find a willing language partner online who would be willing to do the dialogues, etc. on Skype or another method. Actually taking part and recalling the language engages a different and important part of the brain than passively listening - Cpod know this, of course, and that's why the audio review is there for every lesson. Acting it out is however more engaging, which probably helps memory and definitely helps you actually get around to practising. Personally, I've always found listening to the lessons to be easy and fun, and rehearsing the audio review to be more of a slog, so I'm always a little less diligent on that part. (We've also tried some other things to spice up the lessons like field trips and TPR but I won't go on here, I'll expand that on my blog which anyone who cares can find pretty easily.)

It's perhaps a different topic, but not wanting to lose my new progress, I tried to make a schedule for the audio reviews based on a rough guess at optimum spacing. There's no point memorizing everything without reviewing weeks and months down the track to prevent atrophy. Anyone have experience with a good schedule?

Off topic, I'm looking into having a bunch of the PDFs printed into a book (for my review), that might be useful for others as well. Has Cpod considered selling bound copies of, say, 50 lessons? Probably the hassle is more than it would be worth to Praxis, but thought I'd mention it.

A few times I've gone looking for a lesson via the search box, and been unable to locate it without resorting to Google. A current example is the Intermediate lesson "Job Interview" - searching for the term doesn't yield any results. The lesson didn't seem to show up in my own lesson list, either. Is there any reason I should be able find a lesson with a straight-forward title search? Searching for vocab words doesn't seem to make a difference, either - the lesson stays invisible.

Hi, folks,

I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but I wonder if it might be possible to have Qing Wen related exercises somewhere down the line. The new lesson-linked exercises are absolutely fantastic, but I can also envisage that exercises linked to QW episodes that help explore and cement grammatical patterns, would be hugely useful to users, and (if technically possible from your side) would do a slightly different job from the exercises linked to individual lessons. The lesson-based exercises are more focused on listening and vocabulary, but exercises relating to QW episodes could explore more systematically the patterns of the language.

All the best,

Will

I’ve installed the android application to carry my lessons wherever I go but I’ve found some limitations.

When I’m offline and I open the Android app I can see the lessons on the first page, listen to them, see the vocabulary, extended vocabulary etc. but since “My Lessons” can only display 10 lessons (and I have more than 10 on my dashboard) if I click on the “Next” button the application will send an error saying that it cannot retrieve the lesson data (even when I’ve downloaded all these lessons previously) and I am not able to even see anything but the first 10 lessons on the list.

Is it possible to improve this part of the application?  I don’t see a point on trying to connect when the lessons have been downloaded previously