What to do after Intermediate "Easies"

karlovac
 May 07, 2012, 07:07 PM posted in General Discussion

Hi all,

I'm migrating from being an Elementary learner to being an Intermediate one. I started doing the "Easies" Intermediate lesson set, and am a good way through that:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/sets/view?id=121413

Any tips on which lesson sets to focus on next? I did a couple of the Work and Business ones, but they were a lot harder than the Easies set. (Maybe because a lot of the vocabulary is more specialized.

Is there another intermediate set that's relatively easy?

Thanks,

Antun

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darkstar94
 May 08, 2012, 04:26 AM

I'm not sure about sets, but I can suggest some Intermediate lessons that I found easy:

 

Introducing Oneself to the Neighbors

One-on-One Basketball

Yang Jie's Diary: The Final Episode

Wang Guan's Busy Day

Too Young to be Dating

The Kindle

Online Personality Test

 

What I did to get over this gap was to find lessons that relate to each other, for example I started with computer related lessons, so just search "computer" or "internet" in the lesson search up in the top right for that.  I then went on to do all music relate lessons (well as many as I could find in the search).  Just follow your hobbies first I think.

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karlovac
 May 09, 2012, 07:44 PM

Perfect - thanks for the suggestions.

And that's a great tip about sticking to one subject. It seems there's a bunch of new vocabulary in the intermediate lessons, and sticking with the same subject will hopefully let me just focus on one group.

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iaing
 May 10, 2012, 10:17 AM

you can also use other "transition set" tips nominated by other advanced learners.

Tingyun has previously nominated a good transition set from ellie to inter.

these are all relatively easy: C43-C116 + C813, 817, 826, 940, 969, 973, 1028, 1358.

Also the comment at link below is very valid for transitioning between any two levels.

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/podcast-language-2#comment-121590

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karlovac

Hi iaing,

Thanks for those suggestions. What do the numbers you posted mean (e.g C43). Is that lesson number 43? (By lesson number I'm referring to the number that's shown on the left in the listing of all intermediate lessons: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/all/list/intermediate )

-Antun

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iaing

yeah, the lesson ID number (eg C43 is the first intermediate lesson on cpod)

As a general comment, most people's experience is that there are a few big "jumps" in Chinese : one; is going from ellie to inter, another; is going from inter to UI.

My own view, is that Cpod is actually not a very good tool for efficiently making either of these jumps. The main problem is that there is far too much English in the main podcasts at ellie and inter levels (particularly at inter). My experience was that sticking to the mandarin dialogues at these levels, and then supplement with listening to mandarin only podcasts with full transcripts (from elsewhere), was best for me.

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karlovac

Thanks. I subscribed to all the intermediate C43-C116 ones, and they look much easier than the business-related intermediate lessons I was struggling through.

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helzcurrah
 May 11, 2012, 03:58 AM

Strictly speaking, I think I am at ellie, or even newbie level, but I find the content of the intermediate lessons so much more compelling and fun to listen to! Therefore I am listening to a lot of those lessons, and not worrying if I don't understand bits of them.