advanced. media. an honest critique.

"Cpod team - do you want to be right (in your own view), or, do you really want long term customers?"

These days CPod makes decisions based purely on economics, then try to justify those decisions with contrived educational arguments. (Not that I blame them I guess - what business doesn't put the dollar before the customer).

Naturally I don't know the numbers, but the vast majority of Newbie subscribers don't see their studies through to the advanced levels. So from a purely economic viewpoint, which is better - to keep one long-term customer for another 3 years, or to keep 10 Newbie/Elementary customers for one more year. As long as there is a large supply of new customers ready to join the site, they are going to pander to their needs.

I just wish companies like CPod would admit their real motivation for making their decisions instead of treating us like morons who can't read between the lines.

In my case, I am still at the Intermediate level, knocking on the door of Upper-Intermediate, and I am in no hurry to move up. So I will stay here for the time being. But I have my eyes on FluentU for the future.

So today, is my last day before current sub runs out. I won't be renewing. There just isn't any native, natural content on this site, and this is what is most useful, and I can easily get elsewhere.

Cpod, you have my email address. If you ever are interested in regaining your mantle as an innovative, cutting edge, language site - and start doing advanced and media lessons that are natural, native and have a transcript - just let me know - and I'll gladly come back. 

Maybe its just time to graduate ?

If the (old) upper-intermediate/advanced levels don't give you much inspiration anymore you should easily be able to read quite a bit of Chinese texts outside of Chinesepod.

I have never found Chinesepod alone sufficient to learn Chinese. The format is however great if you have like me just an hour or so to study a day.

Somehow you need to continue build that vocabulary.

(All 50,000 words you need to read a newspaper --http://chineselevel.com/words/stats/; makes sense, a beginners Dutch dictionary already has 130,000 words)

Another path is to aim for one of the exams (TOCFL if in Taiwan, HSK in China). At the higher levels the time pressure is a real killer.

I just got a Chinese pod tattoo. :) the tattooists name was jizhou.

But seriously I love Chinese pod. Really do. Im sure you guys do as we'll. And I suppose honest criticism will be appreciated by cp team.

I miss the old intro they use to have. Remember? With like the THX intro. And that song "I sailed away to china on a little old boat to find ya"

Sorry ill go now. :)

I think I qualify as a long term subscriber.  My only problem with CPod's advanced and Media lessons is that there aren't enough of them.  (Well, there was a spate where Cpod thought they could get away with giving us a link to a video, chatting about it, and calling that a media lesson, but that wasn't the practice in the beginning and isn't the practice, now.)  Generally, the media lessons use written materials from blogs or news stories.  I believe the language in Media lessons is what a contemporary Chinese person would write, not the way they would speak spontaniously.  The advanced lessons more focus on spoken language, and although the dialogs are contrived, the language is contemporary and the content is interesting and fun.  There is also spontanious discussion in the lesson banter, but no transcript.  For the lesson content, there are transcripts and recordings of the dialog, or of someone reading the media.  So, they make good study material, in my opinion.  I still pick up new vocabulary from all levels of lessons.

I just took a quick look at fluentU and lingq.com.  For fluent U, their showcase lesson is an elementary lesson which sounds anoyingly stilted to me.  I tried one of their advanced lessons, and I'm not sure what the advantage is over just watching a movie with subtitles.  (I have a collection of ~200 Chinese movies with subtitles in English and Chinese.)

The first advanced lesson in lingq.com's set seemed kind of patronizing to me.  Speech was slower than it would be for a native audience, English definitions were thrown in for some of the harder vocabulary, and at the end the speaker said, "someday you may understand what I am talking about".  Well, I pretty much understood everything he said on first listen.  This is a contrast with Cpod upper level lessons where I catch 80% on first listen and have to listen more times and read the dialog transcript to get the other 20%.

As to alternates or supplements for Chinesepod, I do like Tingyun's suggestion of "5000 Years of History".  There are dialogs with transcripts and history intersects with about every discipline imaginable.  So, I think it is helping me become more literate in Chinese.

Hi iaing, 

I am definitely sharing your concerns, and I am getting the same feeling.  It feels that a lot of improvements to the site have been geared towards lower levels and new services like classes.  I imagine this will only get worse since the bigfoot takeover.

My sub will expire at about the same time I will finish UI (20% through now) and leaving CPod at that time is definitely an option to consider.

Already at UI level you have to complement Cpod with other subs, like skritter and flashcards, but Cpod is still the main source of content.  Not sure what will happen at advanced, once Cpod drops to less than 30%, I imagine I would leave...

I also think that chinesepod focuses too much on beginner dialogues as they publish a new almost everyday it seems and somewhat neglect advance language learners. Also a lot of intermediate dialogues these days seem to be simpler as well as, to a certain extent, upper intermediate.

I can tell just by studying some of the older intermediate and upper-intermediate lessons (like the lili zhang liang series) that change in linguistic complexity.

It does seem a bit short sighted for chinesepod to do this.

Hi Mark, this is the link to the lingq series I was talking about. http://www.lingq.com/learn/zh/library/courses/26942/

Not sure if the link will work for you? Let me know if it doesn't.

It is a brilliant series, mainly just a few friends in Beijing picking a topic and chatting about it in casual language for 10-12 minutes. Then they are transcribed afterwards.

Cpod could do a similar series - just stick a recorder in the lunchroom and record team members chatting at lunch, and then have someone transcribe afterwards.

For a small cost it would be a brilliant series...

The soaps and province-level newscasts are great, the agricultural channel, travel shows and so on. 

CPOD is just a tool and will be used as long as it is useful to me. Really just too busy and lazy to change at this point. I do need to look at the other options mentioned.

Lucky to have a real Mandarin teacher, won't be trading her in anytime soon.

It is fun to look at textbooks from several years before just to see how much progress has been made.

also the issue of media lessons having broken links over time is not something that is going to go away...

I raised this 8 months ago...

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/%E2%80%9C%E5%8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E5%92%B3%E2%80%9D%E4%B8%8E%E5%9F%8E%E5%B8%82%E6%B1%A1%E6%9F%93#comment-253214

I study a mix of intermediate and upper intermediate lessons here and occasionally advanced/media. What I have always done after about a year of CPod is to, in tandem with CPod lessons, read "real world" material, like the nytimes.cn, Chinasmack (a depressing site), which is way above my skill level, but keeps my interest level high as I am reading about subjects more relevant to me. Plus Tweets in Chinese, also movie comments in Baidu - doing this doesn't feel like work and time zips by. I also watch CCTV, which goes way way over my head. IMHO, this is way more material that I can handle and I'm never lacking for new things to learn.

What I found is that my vocabulary for things like transliterated people, company and place names, plus idioms, tech, politics enables me to understand newscasts and everyday conversation.

I am far from running out of new material from CPod (and Popup Chinese which I also use and FluentU as well), so until I do, I'm good for now. 

As for broken links, I've always copied the referenced article to my Dropbox or Evernote account. Anything in the wild can dissapear w/o notice. I dunno about the legal implications, but perhaps a usergroup can C&P the text to a text file and put it on a public group Google/Dropbox account.

I would say that if one is comfortable at the upper intermediate level on ChinesePod, it's time to expand your horizons and start using real world sources.  I've found that when I'm reading a Chinese novel or watching a soap or movie I have no trouble with the grammar or the basics, it's merely a question of vocabulary, which is something that a ChinesePod style podcast cannot efficiently address at HSK levels 5-6 as there are just too many words to cover. For that there's Skritter (I'm currently about 1/3 of the way through HSK 5 vocab) and sites like gurulu.com which drill you on vocabulary depending on your level.

Think of ChinesePod as a really good High School with a few college level courses.  There comes a time when you have to graduate and go out in the real world.  Get a book on a subject which interests you and start reading.  I was pleasantly surprised at how much I understood the first time I tried.  Even at a page or two a day there is a real feeling of progress.  The same with movies or soaps, as a lot can be understood just by tone of voice and watching the action. Best of all is the feeling of accomplishment in dealing with real sources, not just lessons.

Just remember, that any teacher can only take you so far - you have to start using your knowledge sometime, the sooner the better.  I started watching soaps when I was still struggling with intermediate lessons, but I could still figure out what was going on most of the time. 

Start using the real world as your teacher and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much you already know. 

That said, I'll still be sticking around ChinesePod for another year or two because I still pick up some useful stuff from the upper intermediate and advanced lessons.  It's just not the central part of my study anymore, the real world is.