Who loves the Audio Review files? How do you use them?

So cool...thanks for this suggestion!

Mmmm, over time I've come to feel that they can't possibly expect sentence generation. (For one thing, I think the Chinese part would be spoken more slowly; but I'm very glad it's not). The pauses are way way WAY too short to actually think (much less even say the phrase, as I've said). And anyway, the sentences are originally generated in Chinese and then translated to English, and the translations are many times pretty distant from any kind of literal meaning; they'll swap one Chinese set phrase for a very different English collocation.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a beef with the translations -- I think they give you a nice sense of how various set phrases "feel." But you simply can't be expected to hear the English and guess exactly which set of Chinese words are going to be the "right" answer in that less. Even at the Elementary levels there's just too many ways to skin the cat, and of course once you get higher up the poor cat is entirely doomed.

So once I came to that conclusion, I took to making sure I didn't even bother with the audio review until I had read through the expansion carefully, and in fact will try to have the Expansion page up to read from.

Re: Pimsleur, yes I sometimes feel that my discomfort with the Audio Review pacing is based on my having gotten "spoiled" by Pimsleur's maybe-too-long pauses, as I completed the Pimsleur course before I started with ChinesePod. But even trying to give ChinesePod the benefit of the doubt pedagogically (maybe the super-fast pacing is based on trying to train us to "stop thinking"; or study under pressure creates better results in the wild, etc.), the pauses are just crazy short. I can't help but suspect that even a native speaker would have to bring a nimble tongue plus their "A game" in terms of concentration to repeat that stuff back or even shadow effectively.

Of course, I theoretically have the option of hitting the pause button, or doing the sentences one at a time from the expansion page. But that's less useful partly because I DO value the enforced discipline of having to respond in an achievably short interval, but also because I'd like to study these hands-free when I'm driving, cooking a meal, slopping the hogs, whatever.

It's a shame, because they obviously put some resources into producing the audio review and making it available for download in the first place (and it's one of the perks of a full subscription, of course). And it just feels like a little tweak in the pacing would make a HUGE difference in useability. Are they significantly saving on server space or bandwidth with shorter pauses???

Oh well, I said I didn't want to complain and here I am whining after all. So much for trying to stay positive! I'm still hoping to hear from someone who DOES find the audio review useful and has some tips.

Rachel, I totally understand where you're coming from, particularly the point about many ways to skin a cat. However, this is the very aspect I like. I like to be forced quickly in my mind come up with a Chinese way of saying the English and then seeing if my guess is anywhere near what cpod came up with. If it is, great. If not, then I console myself that a native might still be able to understand me....

The short spaces are necessary because that's how it works in real life unless you go all clint eastwood and actually think in Chinese, ie when I speak Chinese I am first thinking in English then immediately translating in my head before speaking the Chinese. My problem is actually listening comprehension, I'm a rare breed in that my speaking is way ahead of my listening !

I should clarify that this process of trying to quickly come up with a Chinese version of the English becomes a bit too difficult in the time available at UI level.

Yes, the sentence length at Intermediate was what first caused me to about give up on the Audio Review.

"...now learn to swim, grasshoppers!" LOL very funny. (Of course, that's how I actually learned to swim....) There's something to that actually, with comprehensible input. I think that's most people's experience with graduating levels at ChinesePod -- a little bit of fearlessness will see you through to where it feels comfortable again.

I'm probably cool with ChinesePod keeping a loosey-goosey overall approach to methods, since it's one of the things that makes the whole service "on your terms" i.e. flexible. I just question whether this tool has a particular goal in mind for me to get something from.

Early levels of audio reviews are excellent, short sentences, you can remember them, they are actually much closer to the much hyped "lexical chunks" idea. And they are sort of like Pimsleur chunks -- all imminently possible and very useful to remember. Longer sentences I don't really see the value in remembering exactly. Sometimes I produce a different wording from what they imagined, and then shadowing seems like a bit of a waste. I understand the desire for a "free-for-all" approach ends up being a "no way to use" for me :( I think the freedom to explore should be exactly that -- not being forced to remember a long sentence that is only possible to learn using one place on the website (expansion page).

You make an excellent point about perfectionism, and I know I've actually given others the same advice so I ought to listen to that myself, eh?

That being said, a number that gets thrown around a lot is aiming for 80% of goal (rather than 100%) to avoid perfectionism. With the audio review, I probably manage to get 50% of a sentence out, and unfortunately way less than that if I'm trying to multi-task at all.

It's weird in a way, isn't it, that the Audio Review leaves me feeling more tongue-tied than on the occasions when I get to speak Chinese to my handful of Taiwanese friends here? They're certainly more patient with and generous to me than I am to myself, but then again the situations are less canned so a bit more challenging.

I'm trying to psych myself up to join a combined English / Mandarin Toastmasters group locally; that would help if I can make myself do it.

'aiming for 80%'

that's good. sometimes I get nothing out and I can live with that (low standards.)

A maths teacher used to say to me 'aim for 100 and you'll get 80, aim for 80 and you'll get 60, aim for 60 and you'll fail'. Actually he was wrong about a number of things so don't take it to heart, but maybe you should aim for 100. :)

'to join a combined English / Mandarin Toastmasters group locally'

That's great! All the best with that.

Yep, the context point is incredibly important particularly at the lower levels up to Intermediate. There is little point in learning new vocab or grammar patterns if you can't then put them into context and actual usage.

I agree with you. A little time spent here upgrading the Fix as you suggested would be a significant benefit in maintaining what mandarin we've learned.

It is interesting. The basic structure/format of the lessons hasn't really changed either. That's good for year-over-year lesson creation. Also gives students predictability over all 1800 lessons or so about what to expect regarding lesson content and structure. But yeah, enhanced focus on review would be really helpful. The methodologies already exist, and its unfortunate that cpod hasnt done more in this area.

Root, great summary. Bottom line, ChinesePod continues to do well at what they choose to do well at, i.e., what fits within their mission of providing "lots of great content." I don't think they ever claimed to have much of a focus on (or possibly even belief in) drilling, and this conversation has really helped bring into focus for me the fact that I have been looking for speaking drills to replace actual, you know, TALKING to people! :-)

The large volume of excellent audio and reading content that ChinesePod has not only made available but made easy for me to digest has made a world of difference in my comprehension skills, and I'm very grateful for it. Ultimately suppose I should look at Audio Reviews above the Ellie level as another one-way input tool and NOT an interactive exercise or drilling tool, and consider myself on my own to find some resources to "use it or lose it."

Someone at the top of the thread suggested AI Chinese and maybe I'll take a fresh look at that. Frankly though I'm indifferent to their primary selling point, the feedback from the computerized voice analysis of my accent. I'm not terribly worried about faithfully reproducing individual phonemes (not that I'm perfect, either). I am just primarily looking to improve my confidence and cultivate an ability to blurt out lexical chunks at speed with a reasonably natural cadence. I would gladly sacrifice some pronunciation accuracy on that altar (or perhaps a goat, should one happen to be handy).

I suspect that when I speak Chinese I sound like my 6 year old niece when she's reading (English) out loud phonetically: she more or less gets all the sounds right, but she's clearly producing a stream of isolated phonemes and not yet able to put them together to give them life.

SF_Rachel,

Thank you for starting a very interesting and worthy discussion! You said in your original post that your speaking is far behind your reading and listening and that you need the audio review badly. But I'd suggest that you might want to try increase your chances of speaking than relying on listening. And it might be helpful to analyze and rank the major obstacles to your ability to speak, e.g. is it tones, is it structures, is it vocabulary? Of course, the audio review itself has lots of room for improvement.

This is interesting. As I mentioned above, my speaking ability is way ahead of my listening comprehension. I've just been giving this some thought..... I am fortunate in that I live in SH so have no shortage of native people to speak with. However, because I am so nervous about not understanding the other person, I subconsciously do whatever I can to stop them talking - and this invariably takes the form of me trying to talk for longer to not give them the opportunity to speak. And because I am speaking with natives, they will often be able to understand me even if some tones are off or some grammar not quite right. Over the years, this means my speaking has had far more practice than my listening, which I now think is why my listening lags so badly. I often confuse people by the fact that I can say something quite long and grammatically complicated for a few minutes, but when they reply with something really simple I have to ask over and over again for them to repeat it slowly.

Jenny, thanks so much for weighing in. You're absolutely right. I do realize that I'm looking for a mere exercise when obviously what I need to do is get out and talk to people.

As easy as it is for any of us to talk about any weaknesses of the Audio Review, one huge strength that it has is that *it exists* (thank you!), so I was originally hoping for some ideas so I could actually put the tool that's there to work for me.

I think my primary speaking obstacle is really confidence. I'm tongue-tied in the wild. Thanks to ChinesePod (with a shout-out to Anki) my vocabulary is pretty solid, and I think my tones and pronunciation of individual words are okay, but the words don't jump into my mouth when I want to speak. And even when I read pre-written stuff out loud the overall cadence doesn't sound natural. Obviously a lot of those problems tend to evaporate if you BEGIN and get some practice. So I am looking for some things (like the English / Mandarin Toastmasters group, though I also need something much smaller in scale). A teacher is unfortunately prohibitively expensive for me at this time.

That being said, I personally have always found drilling in private to be a huge confidence-booster. I trained pretty seriously as a musician in my youth and it's possible this training has affected my thinking: once you've drilled all your scales and arpeggios into total submission they're automatically at your command when you're under performance pressure, right? While I'm aware that in a lot of current language acquisition circles there's some skepticism around the effectiveness of drilling, my own opinion is that in combination with other tools it does help.