I really like it when the audio reviews contain ALL of the expansion sentences. These are perhaps the most useful premium feature for speaking practice. Please keep the good work! 谢谢［xièxie］！！

This thread does not appear on the Conversations page, nor on the Dashboard, although it does appear on the RHS of the Lessons page.

(I am viewing 'All Groups')

I tend to listen to the podcast but pause and listen again to the dialogue to try and translate it before John and Jenny give the translation. Then continue  none stop to the end. Then I try read the dialogue from just the Hanzi.then the vocab , extension and finally the exercises.

Each week I listen to a continuous stream of dialogues. If I don’t understand then I might make a note of that dialogue to look at it again and sort out which bits I couldn’t understand.

I used to listen to the audio review very frequently and I  never listened to just the dialogue , but as I have progressed I have found this reversed. I only listen to the audio review once in a while now.

I try and write something everyday in Hanzi either on a blog or just for my own diary.Just trying to say what I have done or what I think about something is a really helpful way to learn how to think and wrote in Mandarin.

It would be very useful if the PDFs came with the English and Chinese in separate columns, so the paper could be folded and used to do dialogue drills and so on.

Anyways, Cpod is 太好了［tàihǎole］!

amesburygeorge

When I comes to wine I can hardly tell the difference between red and white...

I no longer use the ChinesePod translations(*), but rather, if I have a difficulty, then I look up the individual 汉字 elsewhere. I do the same with the expansion exercises, i. e., turn off translations. I am at the Intermediate+ level, and I find that by studying as I do that my "ear" for the language is rapidly improving. In the intermediate lessons I find Jenny's discussions in Mandarin very useful, and that John adds just enough clarification in English to make the lessons flow beautifully.

I also have a Guided+ weekly session (20 minutes), and soon after I began these my comprehension took a quantum leap forward. The guided teachers are excellent, and learning to understand Mandarin over Skype while at times a challenge with the static, actually begins to fine tune one's listening ability.

(*) While these translations are very good English, they tend to distract me from what is *really* being said in Chinese in the dialogs.

I think the higher quality helps my pronounciation pretty much, my comprehension a little, but the tones not at all.

哈哈，I like your new avatar :-)

speed is ok mate. but i'm always either close to running out of data for the month or do run out of data which then slows my down to slower than dial up [so although the difference in MB between radio quality and cd quality isn't much, ever MB counts at the moment and radio quality has been fine]. ..but from tomorrow have a much higher data allowance so will definitely try it out and let you know. Cheers :)

Yesterday after reading a different post, I found and installed anki on my computer, and will use it as well. All these resources help, and I need all the help possible : )

Yes. It took a while for me, but I finally did get anki configured to display flash cards with English, pinyin, and 汉字［hànzi]. Alas, I don't recall the exact steps, but you can get them at the website. Search the help section for "Chinese" and it should come up. Good luck!

thanks