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'the penalty is 40 lashes and a one-way ticket to Perth.'

Now you make sense to everyone except Perth residents. :)

"This makes almost no sense at all to an Australian where it is a pleasant summer-like climate all year round."

露馅儿! My Northern Hemisphere bias led me to forget my upside-down friends. I'm told the penalty is 40 lashes and a one-way ticket to Perth.*

*Example of smacktalk.

Funny you should say that - and it is interesting, if there is something in it. Is there a decline (not just in posts on ChinesePod boards) and, if there is, what is the causal link? Yes, there was a decline in interest in Japanese that seems to track the decline in their economic fortunes - but that is not the case with Chinese and China. China has been steaming ahead for at least 15 years or more.

BTW I would say that despite Australians being over-represented in number of comments here (and it used to be worse, with Matt & gomanly & our mate from Chengdu, etc.) we have never been that interested in learning Chinese. The closer trade & cultural links in recent years have not brought a commensurate rise in language learning - we are disappointing (to me). So our enthusiastic posting does not really reflect the interest in Australia. We are just statistical noise here.

time to weigh in with another giant hypothesis. This time going against my previous fun disco hypothesis. The theory is that we are seeing the gradual decline in interest in Chinese language study post-worldwide economic downturn. Much as interest in Japanese language study declined in the US after 1990 or so and as interest in the internet increased over the 90s, we are witnessing the same thing with Chinese.

I love your Rule 34.

'During the summer I imagine that you lose a lot of activity from people. Partly since school is literally not in session, and partly because the days are longer, so some people are actually outside playing rather than indoors squinting at monitors.'

This makes almost no sense at all to an Australian where it is a pleasant summer-like climate all year round. :)

But as I have said elsewhere, I am being educated by ChinesePod, and by spending a month in Norway, where the sun really did not quite go down, the whole time I was there. My body clock is quite broken; I am sleeping till 3:30 pm and staying up all night - and in my daze spending more time on ChinesePod. I think that is what you call a contra-example.

"bite his tongue"

那，你多久没吃肉了？

"Rules are made to be broken"

....well you are a self professed spunky [see Chris's neighbours reference] monkey ..so for both reasons you might not get too many complaints [just be careful with the vowel in the first word], hehe.

"I think Rachel may well be in line for the CPod sense of humor of the year award, and if there isn't one then we need a new rule!"

wo tongyi :)

"haha, well this is an education...had to look up urban dictionary again for rule 34.

"Maybe the best way to end the next barfight is for someone to break in asking "So, what are you wearing right now?" "

haha, too funny :)"

Rules are made to be broken... unfortuantely... lol.

I think Rachel may well be in line for the CPod sense of humor of the year award, and if there isn't one then we need a new rule!

Ha ha, thanks Chris, I'm glad if my spunk (lol) has brought some life back, but trust me, the monkey's gonna bite his tongue a little more often from now on. No more bar fights for me!

As for Transcripts with Tal, it truly is a lasting joy for me that the seed I planted so long ago has sprouted into a lusty bush, and has helped and inspired so many. That group belongs to all of you now, whatever name it bears.

Anyway today I'm off to Guangzhou for 10 days to teach English in a 'summer camp', so if things slack off again you know why! Try and manage without me! I'll be back!

lol...hadn't quite got there yet danshi 6666666666667 ♠

It is mandatory silly! Covered under Rule 179.

NO EXCEPTIONS.

it has also led me to this interesting rules of the internet site, which I had never struck before...why was this not brought to my attention when I first got on the internet..shouldn't it be mandatory or something? here it is:

http://rulesoftheinternet.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

haha, well this is an education...had to look up urban dictionary again for rule 34.

"Maybe the best way to end the next barfight is for someone to break in asking "So, what are you wearing right now?" "

haha, too funny :)

haha, I like it!

In terms of postings, I noticed a very significant slump during the first few months of this year, following quite an active christmas/new year period. Personally, Jan-Mar is my work busy season so I was certainly down in terms of postings myself. However, there has definitely been a big pick up the last couple of weeks. This seems to have coincided with Tal's return, so the man certainly has an impact (going back a while he was also the one who created the Transcripts with Tal group, one of the most popular groups on the site!).

I think pretz has brought up seasonality a few times, so I wouldn't worry too much about a summer slump. During the summer I imagine that you lose a lot of activity from people. Partly since school is literally not in session, and partly because the days are longer, so some people are actually outside playing rather than indoors squinting at monitors.

Barfight is a good analogy -- otherwise peaceable people get drawn in, and anyone who tries to calm things down is liable to get a chair busted over their head. :-)

But no sex? This is the Internet, after all. I invoke Rule 34. Maybe the best way to end the next barfight is for someone to break in asking "So, what are you wearing right now?"

Ha ha - there are those things. I have to say that I have learnt a great deal about American culture since I joined ChinesePod, that's something. Your Studio 54 reference is a case in point. And actually, I have many more American friends since I moved to China. So that's all on the plus side. Even the language is starting to irritate me less. :)

'FAQs'

That's funny - yes, people do tend to ask the same question over and over. But that is how language is learned.

'barfights'

Yes, we've had some of those, ouch. There's always a few peacemakers and more loving souls as well, pulling people away from each other as they continue to swing. Punches that is. (eg. Money Laundering Operation).

An average of 10 you think - based on pretend calculations of course. In that case we are currently in a slump. As someone above said - it's somewhat dangerous to focus on averages, better to look at the richness of the whole topography if its available.

Dare I take the opposite approach from my data centered universe. My working hypothesis is that across all approximately 1800 lessons, there are an average of 10 comments or less that actually center on the Chinese content in those lessons. Most of the time, there are musings, cultural exchanges, quests for friendships, FAQs, and barfights. I'm changing my mind; this is no longer Chinesepod High School, its Studio 54 with Chinese Characteristics and no drugs. And no sex.

"Gotcha, good advice"

...no no, got you...in your own trap...so got yourself...just reflecting your own self advice...just kaiwanxiao'ing mate. Actually, I knew what Rachel meant and it sounded somewhat familiar but I must confess I urbandictionaried it myself just to check for any nuances I might pick up on.

"But I am not sure that they would be into smack talk"

...yeah, well that could be a problem.

hehe, yeah exactly, "aw, he's such a spunk" ...though I've never watched Neighbours...the only one's I've known to watch it are the Brits...I was so surprised at how popular it was when I went to London town. Seemed to me they were just longing for the sunny days as they bemoaned the local rain, hehe.

Heck I've kicked off a few threads in my time, didn't realise I was being spunky...if only that made me a "spunk" haha, I could be like the electric lounge lizard, Bryan Ferry on my shafa's , hehe.

Ah, baba, this brings back memories of watching Neighbours as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. Almost every young male character was at some point described as a "spunk" by the girls. Certainly a word that didn't translate too well for a british audience at the time!

Yes, sorry actually it was bodawei who asked if it was 黄. I admit I wasn't quite following what you meant by asking for a description. :-) Because so many of the native English speakers on CPod speak different regional variations of English (see "aeroplane" discussion above), and many, many people are here because we love parsing words in ANY language, I'm quick to assume someone is serious when they ask for clarification of meaning.

Heaven help me if there's ever a conversation that references a certain lightweight metal for which the chemical symbol is Al http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/al.html -- my head might explode with frustration and inappropriate judgemental-ness.

You don't have to feel spunky to kick off a thread, but it does increase the likelihood.

Hey Rachel,

I never thought you meant 黄 and I knew what spunky meant [but thanks anyway]. I just was amused by your comment and trying to picture it. Didn't know you needed to be feeling spunky to kick off a thread and wondered if you could describe what you were envisioning. To me also, spunky kind of his a more funky feel to it than plain old spirited. By the by, back in the day where I hail from, spunky was often used to describe someone who was very attractive.

Baba -- thanks. I didn't mean anything 黄 by "spunky" though I have occasionally heard the word used with that flavor. I just meant "con brio," spirited.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spunky

Bodawei -- yes, feel free to call me Rachel.

Hi bodawei, you're right that "airplane" doesn't sound right to these English ears, I guess we more commonly use simply "plane" or "aeroplane". However, as far as I know the movie was released as "airplane" in the UK (it was marginally before my time.....). When it's subsequently been aired on TV it's certainly been called airplane and the DVD has the same name. I had no idea it was called differently in Australia, but I suspect being in the state of that title would certainly make it a more entertaining viewing experience ;-)

'so out you go mate '

Gotcha, good advice. I just noticed today on my Maps app that there is an 'old age' university just near me - maybe I should try and enrol. But I am not sure that they would be into smack talk. :)

'if you could be kind enough to describe for me just what such a particularly spunky feeling might be like'

That might be 黄 in Chinese?

Rachel didn't invent smack talk so out you go mate :)

chris - I am surprised that 'Airplane' slips so smoothly from your lips. As you are a self-proclaimed Englishman can I take it the film was released in the UK with this name? For reasons nothing to do with the UK/US English thing, I like the Flying High name they used in Australia, it added something to the original name - it made me think of Cheech & Chong.

Rachel (may I call you Rachel?) - like Baba I too really like your turn of phrase. You have made some good points based on what we all know is bodgy data and yet you have taken us along with you. You are a master of the meta (I would suggest that we call you a MOTM except for my well-known dislike for acronyms on these boards.) Acronyms are indicative of cliques, tools of divisiveness, but they are also fun sometimes.

'smacktalk' - I love it, and if you did not invent that word I will have to admit that I don't get out enough.

totally agree chris. Yeah,

"Surely you can't be serious", "I am serious and don't call me Shirley"

is a line I'll never forget and pulled off as only Leslie Nielsen can pull off. I'm a huge fan of his comedy. I was in tears, pretty much literally rolling on the floor watching Naked Gun series of movies.

Rachel, whilst I'm certainly no movie buff, I must admit to liking the Airplane movie. I think I'm right in saying it was the first "spoof" movie ripping off others and so many of the gags are delivered perfectly, it still makes me laugh even now. I think it's fair to say that Leslie Nielsen got most of the best bags ("Surely you can't be serious", "I am serious and don't call me Shirley", etc, etc). Many subsequent movies tried to do the same thing, e.g. Hot Shots, Naked Gun, but Airplane was the one that started it all.

haha,

Rachel, I like your turn of phrase and enjoyed particularly this bit:

"one or two people just happening to feel particularly spunky when they encounter a particular lesson"

..and am wondering if you could be kind enough to describe for me just what such a particularly spunky feeling might be like...I wanna be on the lookout for it, hehe

Chris -- impressed at your identifying Airplane (and Lloyd Bridges). Not just that the movie was from a long time ago and hasn't aged very well, but that's not one of the better known gags in the film. Props, man. Surely you must have seen that movie many times.

I love the community. To my meat-world friends who are interested in my journey to learn Chinese, I tend to refer to you as "my classmates." The transcripts group is a fantastic way to work on a "group project." And personally I find the community very useful for discussing meta issues like learning strategies or for cultural insights because these things interest me particularly. And just as often I'm there to enjoy the BS and smacktalk when it's genial (and roll my eyes when it's not, sigh). And as you and several people have pointed out, nowadays when you ask a question about 中文 chances are the response will come from a particularly helpful subscriber, not a teacher (though Jenny, John, Connie and Liaojie have all helped me out at one time or another).

I really love your idea of wishing there were a way to filter or lookup comments restricting to teachers or at least staff. That is a neat idea.

My guess would be that to the extent that CPod cares a lot about what's going on in the comments, it's probably on two basic levels: 1. primary concern: what is good for the company financially and 2. secondary concern: the secret slurry of love, professional pride, intellectual curiosity and ego that drives business decisions made by humans more than many will admit.

The second one is easier for us civilians to wrap our heads around. Not having enough real information about the company isn't going to stop me from speculating on the first level though. I would suppose that financial impact from activity on the boards is going to be mostly about what happens at the Newbie and Ellie levels since I'm guessing that's where most of the bodies are, that's where most of the churn is, that's where they probably spend their marketing dollars for new customer acquisition and existing customer retention, and that's who they're primarily thinking of (that and corporate clients) for new content and technology development.

I just did a quick scan of a handful of comments in recent Ellie lessons and a couple of things struck me (I'm not backing this up with numbers because it's not a valid sample and I'm too lazy to count anyway):

* staff participates more regularly

* a large chunk (more than half) of the commenting activity is coming from the same veterans who are posting in Intermediate and UI.

* even though it's mostly the same people, the conversations have fewer infusions of crankiness (for whatever that's worth) than I've seen in the higher levels.

If this pattern holds out over more lessons than the few I've sampled, it suggests that actual Ellie learners are not so much actively participating in the comments. THIS trend would bother me if I were CPod because if it's a change from the past, I'd be asking myself about the implications for customer retention. I will put on my veteran's cranky hat for a moment to say "in my day" (2 years ago when I was new) Ellies participated, but perhaps this was an illusion. When I was new, how was I to know who was a veteran and who wasn't, beyond knowing that I myself was an Ellie?

I'm not convinced that the lesson topic is a primary driver of comment volume. Intuitively, it seems like it should be, but a lot of the most lively discussion seems to have a pretty loose, stream-of-consciousness connection to the lesson topic. This suggests to me it's often driven by one or two people just happening to feel particularly spunky when they encounter a particular lesson, and thus kicking off an active discussion. I know I was talking about on-topic and off-topic conversation earlier, but in the end this distinction is pretty subjective. And for myself, the marginally off-topic stuff is often the most interesting, if not necessarily pedagogically helpful. I think what I meant by that in my earlier comment is lessons with the highest comment count often achieve that with one or two really long threads, and those long threads are often flame wars and not useful to anyone.

Going back to my admiration for pretzellogic's interest in the data, I think that to the extent that number of comments is a meaningful proxy for measuring poddies' engagement with specific lessons, my guess is that the rubber would hit the road on finding some way to discount the weight of long threads and give more value to lessons with a larger number of "shallow" threads. And in agreement with everyone here, the data isn't structured to allow that because it would require doing a detailed manual tabulation first. And believe me, no one enjoys methodical drudgery more than I. :)

I'm not inclined in the least to complain about CPod not sharing 商业机密 data or not adding more functionality to the boards. In 2010 and 2011, I saw enough system instability and dysfunction apparently resulting from technology and functionality changes (ugh, Android app from last year I'm talking about you!) that I'm very much in favor of CPod's recent apparent approach to being more careful and considered with changes. I think we've all benefited from that lately with improved stability. In short (too late! ha!), I think I get my money's worth.

No, of course agreed. Even IF Cpod were to release data, the data isn't flagged for on-topic versus off-topic. And even if it were possible to flag that way, it wouldn't mean anything since the definition of on- versus off- topic is, by definition, subjective. Just a bit of data fantasizing.

Ah, thanks chris; then I have seen it (titled Flying High because we don't call them 'airplanes'), yonks ago.

I think the movie was Airplane and those immortal lines were said by Lloyd Bridges.

'I sure picked a hell of a week to give up heroin.'

Hey, good one, I don't know the film (having a nearly 8 month old grandchild about half my viewing is 喜羊羊) ...

Actually, that content can theoretically be evaluated, but ChinesePod is unlikely to put resources into that.

Speaking of what ChinesePod is likely to invest in, while the mission is language learning, the business model constrains the product. ChinesePod could introduce some features that are beneficial to learners and as a consequence lose revenues; it's not going to do that. The way I figure it, they are not absolutely clear about what to do with the community boards - they have invested considerable sums in the board functions in the past, but the focus now is on mobile applications that are not conducive to learning in a community. They know they have something valuable but they are cautious about how many resources to pour in. It seems to me that when the poddie community fell away somewhat, they threw a few teacher hours into conversations, answering questions, but to some extent the teachers' involvement tend to close discussion. Usually this is because the teacher provides something valuable, a solution, but perversely it may limit learning opportunities at times. Jenny's role in particular in this respect, is interesting, although they all have pretty much the same formula - they rarely get involved in an 'exchange'. Quite often someone posts a follow-up question or comment for Jenny but she doesn't return (okay - her time is valuable - we are fortunate to have her commenting on the boards at all.) That said, I always read any comments by the other two native Chinese teachers because they provide most of the language models. John necessarily seems to have a slightly different mode - about half his contributions are straight language learning, and about half cultural observations, more light-hearted.

Being a book kind of guy, I would love there to be a point of 'look-up' for all of the teacher contributions - really they are the only fully reliable Chinese language models on the site, for expressions, situational language, grammar points etc. Or, and here's an idea, those on-going learning opportunities could be incorporated into the grammar tabs.

My original post was, as per usual, only half serious - the 'flummery' I refer to is one of the reasons for ChinesePod's success. Perhaps not 'money laundering', but hair dresser cards, and being random and reckless, I am definitely into those things.

What your comments suggest to me though is that a great deal of learning occurs via the community, and it should be nurtured. One way of nurturing it would be to do some of the metrics on a regular basis, and [I return to a theme] make it searchable. So much valuable material is 'lost' - we simply forget where it is. (Despite the fact reinventing the wheel is also where a lot of learning goes on. I think we should have the option of re-inventing, or looking up previous discussions.)

One interesting thing about QingWen is that they are grammar-focussed - ironic, hey?

Yeah - pretzel really likes delving into the data, I've noticed that too.

Oh, ... don't worry about being wordy. :)

"But wouldn't it be interesting to see a pivot table tabulating that by lesson channel, level, poddie vintage, and date?"

Boy, I would love to see this! I suspect that at the end of the day, either the data doesn't exist, would be multiple steps to pull out of a database, or is something that cpod wouldn't release. But I also suspect that at the end of the day, there are no silver bullets (lesson topics) that will consistently increase the number of subscribers.

SF_Rachel, you and I might have the same sense of humor.

It might be a few consultancies that have coined the phrase, but i've noticed that pretty much everyone in IT is talking about "big data".

SF_Rachel, thanks for your thoughts/kind words! And I thought I was the only analyst here. Looks like there are at least you and I.

Yes, I've asked these questions here before. Bodawei did a good job with his survey of top-ranking topics. The part that is unfortunate is that we both know my questions really require digging up more data MANUALLY that doesn't exist on cpod. Bodawei would have to actually go through each of the lessons and count new posters, old posters, total number of comments, then characterize for us flame wars, polite conversation, etc.. Of course, that would only beg other questions around seasonality and broader year-over-year trends. All in the quest for actionable data......

Data Analytics turning into a huge business these days with the sheer scale of transactional data that is increasingly easy for companies to access. I think some consultancies have coined the phrase "big data".

wo tongyi

By the way of nothing at all, Pretz, I can't tell you how much I enjoy it when you ask questions about delving deeper into the numbers (if I'm not mistaken, I've seen you do it several times before).

In my last job I had to produce a lot of analysis. I've worked with a lot of people who didn't intuitively understand the importance of distributions in understanding data. It broke my heart so often when bosses especially dismissed meaningful analysis and asked me to just boil something down to an average. So it makes me feel weirdly joyful to see your interest and questions in a non-professional context where someone just wants to understand something better.