New Topic Suggestions (Part 2)

I'm not sure if these actually have lessons already but I'm having a go. :) Hmm.. how about a lesson on Chinese provinces and cities (or has anyone suggested that?)? LIke what people can see or expect when they go to Xi'an, or to Yunnan, etc. And how about a lesson on music? Like the different kinds of music - pop, rock, hip-hop, house - what they're called, etc..

auntie68: As far as we currently know, we ALL have African DNA as this where humanity came into being eons ago. ;-) As I have asked for some lesson on how to describe people, in my case particularly Asian people, on facial features etc., I do support your intention, anyway.

i agree with sushan on an 'I changed my mind' lesson...how exactly do you do that in a polite way?? there were a few times that i really needed to say that on my china trip!!! since i didnt know how, i just said "duibuqi!" and ran away...ha ha.

lessons on "eating and drinking" are always good....there are a million different things that you can discuss about that...ecspecially in a country like China!

How about 'can you wrap that in a bit more environmentally friendly manner?' It's easy to say that I don't want a bag, but when the incredibly helpful salesperson is trying to wrap things in a dozen layers for you or giving you a separate container + bag for each item of your takeout order, trying to convey that you want the packaging as little as possible for 'green' reasons is a bit more difficult.

Now that ChinesePod is approaching 1000 lessons, I guess they'll need a somewhat systematic approach to content design if there isn't one already. Whatever metric you use, you're talking 100-200 content units, which starts looking like a small encyclopedia (ChinesePodia?). Take lesson count : Newbie 248, Elem. 177, Intermed. 146, Upper 89, Advanced 120, only Media is a little behind with 53 but much richer. Take tagging, 128 functions, 172 topics across levels, albeit with redundancy. I'm sure the User Conversations are reservoir of lesson topics too, with their mix of situations / functions and specialized content / topics, not to mention specific patterns / grammar constructs. I just wonder how it works in practice, does the academic team have brainstorming meetings on this, are they building some kind of roadmap?

I guess what I meant is you now have a multidimensional grid that's filling up (with levels, topics/vocab, function, grammar, etc.) how do you make sure you grow it up in a balanced way?

Thank you guys!! This is required reading for the Cpod team. goulniky, You raised an immensely important issue and in your signature style, offered brilliant suggestions. We do have a process and structure to guide lesson writing developed by the academic team in collaboration with user feedback. Key components are function, frequency, linguistic complexity. These help determine how we write a lesson. Your comment also touches on archiving and searching, which I think is an area with a lot of room for improvement. I really want to know that as a user, how do you find the experience? Do you feel overwhelmed and lost in the face of 800+lessons? What changes do you like to see in the design? Poddies, let us know!

sushan: How about a lesson on plastic bags and (not) wanting one?

I'd like a lesson on sparing water? I can't do it, though, I always take long baths and thoroughly rinse my dishes. I'd like a lesson on India as well, I know so little about them and Chinesepod might be a good cultural guide. the lesson could be a hazard, however, cause you might feel like learning Hindi and never sleeping again. thanks to c-pod i found s-pod and my free time is getting squeezed.

The function tags are a bit tougher to search, but a lesson (even a newbie) on 'I changed my mind' would be helpful.

@ sushan @ Joachim, that plastic bag lesson will not be needed anymore in China in several weeks: http://www.88groups.com/88news/lessons/archive/969 http://www.88groups.com/88news/lessons/archive/961 But that is a topic worth a lesson by itsself.

Possibly a lesson on how to say the right haircut in Chinese when you go to a barber shop... or a salon...'cause I want to find out how to say "army cut/crew cut" in Chinese...:D

hitokiri6993: have you checked those two? http://chinesepod.com/lessons/haircuts/ http://chinesepod.com/lessons/getting-your-hair-done/ Although "army cut" is not in there. Esp. that Intermediate seems to be slanting a bit towards the female part of the audience.

hennig, if the plastic bag lesson will really not be needed anymore, that will be one of the "Weltwunder"! In our area (rural area in Sichuan) they introduced a plastic bag ban twice over the last eight years, and the ways people packed their shoppings for a while, did not exactly change to "environmentally-friendly". and it did not take long for plastic bags to come back... I have little hope

henning: OMG, I didn't see that while searching. Thanks!!!:D

How about a lesson on online privacy? A number of Chinese that have commented in blogs etc. appear to be quite naive by posting their email-address, QQ no, even mobile number. I guess that phishing is a massive issue in China.

Maybe a lesson on "African Americans"? May be delicate, but if anybody can do it, surely CPOD can. Even in the year 2008, a US presidential candidate who has African DNA is being made to tackle questions daily about what it means to be (or not to be) African-American. Yet the delicate, sometimes painful, distinctions behind words like "black", "bi-racial", "negro", "coloured", "African-American" often seem to mean nothing the moment they hit the Chinese mind. Sometimes, everybody is simply “黑种人" (or worse still, 黑鬼). As I write this I am thinking of one of my friends, a West African (naturalized) Singaporean married to a Chinese Singaporean, who in the early days of his marriage used to have his wife cut his hair at home for him because he couldn't find any local barbers with the right tools to handle his hair. His Singaporean Chinese in-laws used to pull up stools to watch, in total awe and fascination! Although my friend is not American, I think this story sums up average Chinese "black awareness" pretty well. For me, "African American" means a whole galaxy of meaning: Everything from rappers to people who attend cotilion (sp.?) balls, summer in Sag Harbor, and have their weddings announced in the New York Times. Just curious...

Well, we have have several lessons plus a Dear Amber about toilets, but does that mean there will never be another one? Those of us who are familiar with most of the lessons are fewer and fewer, right? Seems there are at least two main classes of users - those who live in or out of Chinese speaking environments. I live in China and when I search for a lesson (sometimes with the native search, sometimes with a google site search) it is about something I want to do that day or something that I did kind of badly the day before. I usually find what I need, if it exists. If I was back in my home country using CPod primarily to increase language ability I would be much more focused on functions rather than topics. I wouldn't have cared, for example, that there used to be several lessons on water by the glass but nothing on water delivery (thanks for that!!). However, as has been pointed out the search by function is much less helpful and using Google to site search is little help. I would really like to see the Chinese and English broken out in the filtering as well, even to the level of a separate Chinese search and English search.

I'd like to see an index of the advanced & media lessons in english so people like me who are not up to that standard quite yet or who don't read characters well can find what we want and don't ask for stuff that is already there.