I am curious, what will be the most common (chinese) words we will come across during the Beijing Olympics this year?

Will there be a special ChinesePod Olympic edition?

Dear all,

after trying all sorts of keyboard drivers on my windows laptop and discussing with IT nerds, Chinese and Laowei firends snd considering psychotherapy instead I still have found no way of displaying the 4 tones in the Pinyin writing.

I am not very fond of writing numbers behind every syllable.

Anybody has any ideas for a software / Keyboard driver?

How do you folks in CHinesepod do it?

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.

For awhile now, I've been wanting to practice writing the characters that are in my ChinesePod vocabulary lists, and have wanted a practice writing grid which I can print out to practice these characters.

I've been working on developing a web tool that takes my ChinesePod exported vocabulary list (an XML file) and then creates a PDF file with a writing grid for those characters.  Here is a screenshot of what the final PDF looks like:

If you're interested in using this tool to create your own vocab writing PDFs, I've put the tool up at:

http://www.miryclay.com/chinesepod/vocab2grid.php

I hope that this tool will be helpful for you!  It has been for me.  If you have any comments or feedback, feel free to let me know.  Enjoy!

I'd like to hear from others, both more advanced and at my same level, how many chinese characters they are learning each day. Or trying to learn, at least.

    I am currently living in Chengdu, attending Si Chuan Da Xue, and our class so far averages about 100-125 characters per week. I'm starting to think this pace is just too much !  I can retain many of these new characters short-term, but the older ones fall out of the back of my head as one ones are added up front (!)

    Not looking for excuses here - I'll probably switch classes to a more moderate pace. Just looking for comparisons.

I'm using a combo of my chinese textbook (Ok, I guess) and Wenlin software to create flashcards, which I find very helpful.

thanks,

Bob

大家好！我在国防语言学院学习中文。因为我快要毕业，并且我快要考DLPT5，我要对你们替一个问题：在一个很短的期间以内，最好的词汇学法是哪一个？我的意思就是，我要很快的提高我的中文词汇。怎么办啊？

     I have somewhat of a problem. When I first started on Chinesepod, I didn't know any written Chinese. This made the process of finding Chinese words I didn't know quite easy. Now, when going through the newbie lessons, I find that either I can read almost everything, or at least understand the words in a sentence.

     Because of this 'problem', it is taking me quite a while to find new vocabulary words to learn. I wish the speaking part was going as well. What I have done is moved to the elementary level for new words, where I can find abundant words that I don't know. This solution is working for now, but I suspect that I will begin to find the same problem with the elementary words as well. I guess what I would like to know is if there are any vocabulary lists someplace where I can just add words without having to comb through all these lessons.

Just some useful reference sheets I compiled to help study Chinese. Hope they help.

Here it goes my two suggestions:

1- Provide a search function in order to find a particular word in the personal dictionary; Similar to the one you have in Resources/Glossary page);

2- In the Flashcards exercises (a tool that I found extremely useful) it would be great if it was possible to mark the words that we failed with some special label so that, later on, we could easily select them and launch flashcard exercises with those particularly difficult words.

Don’t miss interpret me… Chinesepod.com is the BEST!

Thks!

A joke on a Chinese site lists 40 Chinesewords for "wife" and 27 for "husband."  Check it out:

http://www.zhangjiang.cn/bbs/2009-7/2/200972173013215100.html

I'm sure you hard-working people are fed up with us wanting more features. ChinesePod is awesome, but there's a slight thing that would make it even more so.

Is it possible to enable the possibility of adding entire sentences to your vocab? As it is now, you can add words and sometimes phrases, but there are also lots of complete sentences with every lesson. Sometimes it's great to be able to review entire sentences at a time with flashcards, so you can get a lot of words reviewed at the same time, as well as seeing them in context and getting some grammatic patterns down.

I'm not a programmer, so when I say it doesn't seem like it would be much of a hassle, that doesn't mean much. If it is, just disregard this. But if it's not, it would really help me, and maybe others, to get reading practice and grammar training.

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. 

Do you put entire sentences on your flashcards? I've just started, and it's great stuff. Here's my new guideline:

When learning characters, study words. When learning words, study sentences.

I never believed in learning the characters in isolation. Seemed like a waste. Why not learn the words, instead? You'll have to learn the characters to get the words, anyway. Now I'm feeling the same way about words. However, having entire sentences on flashcards won't work very well if you don't know the characters. That's too much unknown stuff to put on a flashcard.

So right now, when I encounter a word where I know the characters, but didn't know the word, I make a search for it on nciku, find a good example sentence and add the whole thing into the vocabulary tool in CPod. This usually gives me a grammar construction and sometimes several new words (and if not, overlearning on old words) for free. Also, getting to know the word in a context really helps me to know how to use it (to avoid using it just like its English counterpart is used in English). However, I always make sure I know all the characters in the sentence. I never add a sentence with unknown characters.

Just thought I'd share. Do you work with memorizing sentences? Why or why not?

It's been brought up here and there, but have we had a specific thread about it? Probably, but I can't remember seeing one, so I'll make one now.

Seriously, why aren't you using Spaced Repetition? I keep seeing all these comments about "I study each lesson this much, but then I forget half of the words" and I can't help thinking: "Why?" It seems to me to be a terrible waste of time to learn words and then forget them. Then you have to learn them again! And then maybe forget them once more. Isn't that annoying? It sounds very annoying to me.

So why aren't you using SRS?

Hello, lurking for a long time, thought I'd pop my head up and add something.

So, I was a reading of a pretty interesting technique to help build understanding of different "families" of words using degrees of distinctions.  Using a dictionary to do this is pretty tedious (and probably not accurate as far as actual usage), so I thought I'd throw a post up and see if people wanted to contribute (I say this not yet having a contribution...yes, I know, lame).

The idea is to add words in an array of degrees of intensity, approval, disapproval, weight, or any other characteristic using the "minimum," "average," and "maximum" of that group or family.  A few examples might be (in English):

creek, stream, river

pebble, rock, boulder

big, huge, gargantuan

dislike, hate, detest

pink, red, scarlet,

etc.

I'll try to add some some more later (in Chinese, of course).

What about it?  Know any?

To anybody,

ChinesePod place in "Ad Ons" which allows you to check a box so that you can turn Pinyin numbers ...i.e. wo3 into the tone marks. But I can't seem to find an explanation as to how to actually physically do this. It just say you can do it .....did I miss something somewhere ?

Also can someone please tell me how I can download my vocabulary list onto my I Touch if that is possible ?

Thanks, Wesley