GROUPS OF WORDS FOR EACH LEVEL
sabre1
January 15, 2011, 01:34 AM posted in General DiscussionI have been using Chinese Pod for about a year - I also studied with the Confucius Institute (Contemporary Chinese Textbooks). There is a good teaching objective with the latter program which would be useful to Chinese Pod. Each level has a fixed 'pool' of words - 325 for Newby level, 550 for Elementary level etc.
One of the problems I have found with Chinese Pod is that new words are continually introduced which are often not repeated in later lessons. when I try to include all the words in flash cards there are just too many to remember. If you constructed lessons for each level from a predetermined pool of words I believer that learning would be more productive.
One more comment - some spoken words in the flash cards are not congruent with the written word and hanzi.
Overall the program is useful and I will continued to use it.
sluggobasher
January 15, 2011, 01:33 PMI like the pool of words idea.
But that doesn't mean Chinese Pod should restrict themselves to using only words that appear in such a list. That wouldn't leave them enough flexibility to continue creating new & interesting dialogs.
Instead, it would be up to us to make sure we become familiar with all the words in the pool - and any words not in the pool can be left until they are encountered at a higher level, if we so choose.
But I think this idea is a little too fanciful for Chinese Pod to consider.
waiguoren
January 15, 2011, 10:50 AMI actually think ChinesePod does a pretty good job of repeating and reinforcing certain vocabulary items at a particular level, especially at the Elementary level - sometimes there is NO new vocab items, but put in a different context, which reinforces learning.
But I think your idea of having a fixed pool of words at a particular level is a good idea...