Interaction with ChinesePod

I like your approach - though i would review lesson dialogues even more frequently. Id make a playlist pr the dialogues, and listen to the playlist nearly every day for about a month, and then every couple days for another month. The dialogues are so short, and its easy to do this in otherwise unused time (doing chores, walking somewhere, eating, etc). I found it really burned not only the vocab, but also all the grammer patterns, pronounciation, rythm, etc into my brain. It only got unwieldy once I started digesting large volumes of upper int and advanced, with the longer dialogues and adding many a day, the playlist got a couple of hours long...but even there i kept it going, as the dialogue review is so quick compared to initial study.

Although its not really based on study review principles, i still review many, many times my current ipod playlist ( more or less http://www.amazon.cn/有声•上下五千年/dp/B00118OIIA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343144533&sr=8-1 , which is an awesome 700 or so 5 to 10 minute long histoical stories, which i highly recomend to anyone at the cpod advanced level or above), as i like to repeat along with the recording in real time, and i can match the intontion and such better the more ive worked with it (and also ots hard not to fall behind the first couple of times)....in general, i think its often faster and more productive to review learned material, and it really is hard to d too much review.

+1 to what tingyun said. Listen, listen, listen! Listen until you're dreaming about the dialogues. I wasn't quite as structured as tingyun when starting out, but I do remember listing to those newbie lessons time and time again. I never consciously tried to memorize any of the dialogues, but even after 4 years, I could probably still recite many of them from memory. Out of anything I have done, I think this is what has helped me most with my pronunciation, especially intonation and rhythm.

One more agree from an old user here. When I first started using Chinesepod, I'd download as many newbie and elementary lessons as possible and just listen to them whenever I had to wait for train, do the dishes etc.

Then I had to take a break from learning Chinese and I think it's been 3 or 4 years since I really spend any time on it but recently I decided to take it up again. It's now been 10 days and everything is just snapping right back into where I left off. I'm pretty sure it's because all the basic patterns have been driven very hard into my head by listening to the dialogues and review lessons over and over again.

ye, I agree the dialog mp3's are very useful, and i have never quite figured out how to use them in a structured way. Just listening to them back - to -back is about the only way it makes sense. I usually try to cram as many of the review mp3's into the daily playlist, not to exceed the golden first half-hour per day. This doesn't leave much room for dialogues :( But this way dialogues big playlist you can just do once a month -- you can fit about 40 of them in a half-hour session, so it works out well ! And then the half-hour daily playlist should be sustainable for a long-term study. Now, if only there was an easy way in the ipad app to do all this scheduling, I would be so much further ahead ;)

and if you have more time in the day beyond the first half-hour, it does make a lot of sense to listen to dialogues in the background. The absorption quality is already way down anyway, so it's not too critical what you are listening to, as long as it just keeps refreshing. Good idea for the immersion !

I tend to believe most everyone can find an extra hour or so a day, when walking, brushing teeth, doing laundry, chores, driving, bathroom, shower, etc...that belief is strongly tied into my recomendation of daily dialogue review.

Hmm, you find your first half hour most productive? On the days when im not studying japanese, i tend to put 10-15 hours into some kind of chinese activity, and iI usually find the first few hours are the least productive. That probably has something to do with ot being that much of a morning person....though if i, say, study japanese for the morning and then turn to chinese in the afternoon, i still find i need a good hour rampup before i start heavy study, usually in this period i just jog while listenng to my audio files, or watch some tv or something. But im not really 'studying' anymore, i mean there is no vocab to memorize, so perhaps its a different issue, but i do find i speak, write, and read much smoother after a good hour or more of settling into the language.

Im curious, what is this first half hour you mention? Is there some research showing better vocab retention? The stuff i remember from psch 101 in college was mainly 'you best remember what you did first and last', and that has seemed to hold true with my japanese vocab work lately (the last few lessons at night in particular, i always remember perfectly). I am really curious, always looking for new things to try, and especially now that im spending all ths time learning beginer japanese (not entirely by choice, its a departmental requirement for students of chinese or korean history)

I think the pimsleur people mention it, and I remember hearing it from one other source, but I don't have it right now. Or maybe it just fits with my idea of how much time I can actually concentrate on learning per day, hard to say. And of course, noone ever said time beyond the first half-hour is not useful, just the ROI is a bit lower. And yes, this was for the period of active study of new material, rather than osmosis.

I am just hoping that I can invest this half-hour into different areas of study -- half hour of audio training here at CPod, half-hour of character typing practice, and later maybe half-hour of writing characters.

Hmm, I wonder if this might be the 'take short breaks or switch activities frequently' type of research. I do find that is often helpful. Though if that is what they are getting at, there it is not a daily limit but rather something you can reset over and over in the day.

ja i hear switching activities is great, we are lucky studying chinese is so hard on several different levels !

oh wow, good idear. I've always been very frustrated with how bad the glossary search function is here at CPod, and this method does compensate for that a bit, hooray !

I also find that finding a good sampling of example sentences rather than just one example can be really helpful. For some reason (probably my browser) the plus icon doesn't work for me, but I have two other resources I use frequently to get sample sentences: Jukuu.com and nciku.com.

If you use the pro version of Hanping Chinese app on your smartphone, samples from these two sites (plus Yellowbridge, which I don't find as helpful for challenging words but is probably great for someone like richardjcuomo at a beginner's level) are actually integrated into the app.

I know the original question was about using CPod but on the specifics of example sentences I couldn't help from butting in .... ChinesePod is indispensable for providing lots of comprehensible input for me to absorb, but the paid version of the Hanping Chinese app is a heck of a lot of bang for a couple of bucks.

yea, the expansion pages never cover enough of the juicy lexis, and glossary search here is not that great :( I never find myself in the endless cycle of glossary-sentences-breakdown-glossary-sentences-breakdown-... anymore, except when using the now defunct CPod quickreview iphone app. That was the most awesome use of the content here, and I really wish they could bring it back. Been waiting 3 years, must be any day now somebody will wake up and finally figure out how to organize all this content here

glad to hear, I do fully recommend the Pimsleur starter kit, if only for the study method introduction, for example here http://goo.gl/jKM6z

just reading the instructions, and listening to the first few lessions on a daily basis has helped me a great deal to make sense of all the things being offered at CPod.

So awesome, thanks. I'll never leave CPod, but I would be a fool to not use every tool at my fingertips!

Just goes to show that any learner of any level can still improve his or her method!