MIT Open Course Ware

Joachim
 December 22, 2007, 11:06 PM posted in General Discussion

Has anyone taken a closer look at the MIT OpenCourseWare Chinese lectures? (See: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/Readings/index.htm)

I quite enjoy video lectures on some other subjects, but I have difficulties in using the material provided for learning Chinese. It pretty much reminds me of the drill patterns used ages ago when I was learning some other foreign language(s).

I get the impression that material used in the classroom was just uploaded to the web "as is" without too much thought ...

But, maybe it's just me being daft. 

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mrdtait
 December 23, 2007, 01:21 AM

I agree it does seem as if they have just published the support material used for the modules taught there but still there seems to be some great stuff! I like the PDF's with the stroke orders at the end of this page: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Languages-and-Literatures/21F-101Spring-2006/StudyMaterials/index.htm

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mrdtait
 December 23, 2007, 01:43 AM

The characters used are all Traditional which personally I would prefer they were simplified. Beggars and be choosers

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mrdtait
 December 23, 2007, 02:07 PM

Just had another look in the light of day and the PDF's have both Simplified and Traditional (S) (T) where they differ.

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Joachim
 December 23, 2007, 02:28 PM

I read a bit of the material provided as pdf and do like the content. It's all just not presented and an appealing way. I was thinking of taking the video lectures provided by MIT OCW for some other topic as an idea to Cpod on probably do some grammar lessons. As grammar is quite some dry stuff to digest, maybe a lively video presentation would help to get things across. Cpod used to have some flash animations for some sort of grammar points, but they were quite crude and the English was a bit irritating.