Elementary vs Intermediate

j65smith
 February 10, 2011, 01:47 PM posted in General Discussion

Hi All,

I am new to Chinese and Chinesepod.com.  I have been living in China for about 6 months and for about 2 months now I have been taking class everyday for 2 hours.  I can easily follow the elementary dialogues and the qinwen conversations.  However, the intermediate dialogues woosh right past me.  Should I keep listening to the elementary podcasts, or should I just listen to the intermediate ones over and over again??

Thanks for any input.

Jill

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pretzellogic
 February 10, 2011, 03:38 PM

My suggestion would be to takea more detailed look at the intermediate lessons. Yes, listen to the intermediates over and over, but also start doing the following:

1) write out the dialogues line by line. Do this for maybe 10 lessons, then you start developing a feel for an intermediate lesson and you don't have to write down more.

2) listen to the dialogue line by line, by pausing after every sentence, repeating that sentence a few times, and them moving to the next sentence. Do this for a few dialogues, and then you get the feel of an intermediate lesson.

3) shadowing. more about it in the links below:

http://languagegeek.net/2009/04/22/shadowing-step-by-step-by-professor-arguelles/

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/9946

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Arguelles

4)Pick one interesting upper intermediate lesson and go through it first, however long it takes. Intermediate lessons are relatively easy thereafter.

I made the happy mistake of jumping from elementary to upper intermediate. It took about 6 weeks to get through one upper intermediate taxi lesson ("When the taxi takes the long way"). I went back down to intermediate, and things were much easier thereafter.

Hope this helps.