Scarcity of New, Business-Oriented CPod Lessons?

Yes, I think you have a good point. I do get a lot of business vocabulary from media and advanced lessons though.

What are some business topics that you would find helpful, or what are some Wang's office scenarios that would be most practical? I am hoping that this foreign educated 海龟 runs into some cultural problems and learns to overcome them.

Alternative sources of business oriented Mandarin? Details, please.

Some of this stuff is just vocab/terminology.  For example, we all know "tvan" can read a balance sheet and an income statement.  He doesn't need a whole lesson on analyzing the I/S, B/S & C/F (frankly, tvan could understand Chinese Financial Statments without being able to read a character..I'm figuring he's a little better than myself). 

A page like Clay's "Olympic" Site would take care of it.

Some of the dialog surrounding the analysis would be good.

Maybe give us some mud to throw the big rocks in.

I agree, Id like to see more business. Also more daily life stuff like taking the subway. These are all practical.

And to keep me entertained, Id like more humor and science. Lately the Upper Intermediate topics have been boring.

Sushan, what I had in mind was not so much "office scenarios" but basic business stuff like: reading a balance sheet, analysing an income statement, making cash flow projections, writing a business plan, valuing a business, raising capital, going public, undertaking due diligence, threatening to murder your lawyer, negotiating a joint venture deal, establishing a WOFE, drafting a letter of intent, putting out a press release, presenting to a potential investor, staging a pre-product launch focus group, holding a board meeting, firing an employee, or suing a competitor for patent infringement. Sound too dry or too technical? Perhaps, but I think one Intermediate or UI lesson on each of the above topics could keep things general enough that it doesn't lose the audience. And with the company in the above lessons being in a different industry each time, that would be a great way to drop in a few industry-specific terms.

 Perhaps ChinesePod thinks that these topics don't lend themselves to a dialogue format. - maybe. Or that they'd be too boring to a mass audience - maybe this is better for a focused practiced plan instead, I'm not sure. Or that the vast majority of ChinesePod users aren't at a level high enough to conduct business in Chinese - that I might be inclined to agree with, although I would still love to better be able to "eavesdrop" during business meetings rather than rely on sequential interpretation. Or that ChinesePod staff may not feel comfortable in their ability to put together meaningful business-oriented lessons - maybe, but I'm sure an MBA student interning in China for the summer or a Bachelor of Business Administration student doing a semester abroad could contribute to content. This hasn't been a burning issue to me, rather the dropoff in business lessons has been more of an "oddity". There is still a decent if limited bank of existing ChinesePod business lessons. There are tons of non-business ChinesePod lessons that I still need to work through. The intermediate/UI -level "A Business Trip To China" series of textbooks by NOTCFL come with CDs. The University of Texas-Austin has a series of translated Chinese-language business speeches in writing and in audio on their Website. And if one is content with audio-less ways of expanding their own business Chinese then reading the bilingual Web sites of Western investment banks in China or the bilingual news releases of Chinese companies that have gone public on NASDAQ or AIM is a way to enhance vocab. Still, since a ChinesePod strength has always been its willingness to listen to suggestions from users ... the above is my suggestion.

I agree that more business lessons would be valuable.  However, the problem with a "read the balance sheet" lesson is that somebody actually needs to know how to read a balance sheet... and how that translates in Chinese, not the hack jobs I rely upon.  This might be hard for a linguistic-oriented crew.  Also, the terms used seem a bit arcane for a general audience.

Still, you could have a set of lessons about somebody who is sent overseas to start up a new business.  Only make him a nasty, ruthless American... who can't sing... who drinks too much... who pinches the waitresses...who doesn't speak Chinese... with Chinese talking about him behind his back...  and see who comes out on top!

Tvan, no question there's a threat of it getting too tedious, especially if a lesson was to delve too deeply into individual line items or notes to the financial statements or that sort of minutiae. But how about a lesson with pretty basic balance sheet vocabulary: assets, liabilities, shareholders' equity, inventory, accounts receivable, cash, accounts payable, bank debt, and retained earnings. That's 9 words right there, add a few expressions or unrelated words as ChinesePod has a knack of doing, and boom, I've learned something. Yes, I can find all those words in a dictionary or by finding a Chinese-language balance sheet online, but can't one say that about virtually all new vocab presented on ChinesePod.

Hi lordstanley. I'm with tvan on the need to stay within the CPOD team's ability to handle very specialized vocabulary. 

For example, the recent "Advanced" lesson on 回收垃圾 (#925; Recycling Waste) translated the more technical terms in a way that I felt was "off":

Eg. In the context of the lesson, 焚烧 clearly meant what I would have translated as "incineration", but in the vocab it was translated as "burning".

分类桶 = I would have translated this as "sorting bin"; in the vocabulary section they only translated 分类 (as "classify"). "Classification bin?"

堆放 and 填埋 were translated as "to pile up" and "to bury", leaving me in some confusion as to whether they were perhaps referring to concepts like using landfills or dumping as means of handling waste. 

回收 = "Recycle" in the vocabulary, but I think this emphasizes one aspect of recycling (the "returns" aspect, principally). There are other Chinese expressions related to the concept of recycling, eg., I think that recycled paper is 再生纸 (literally, "renewed paper").

But I was totally satisfied with the lesson, and did not nit-pick in the Comments, because I thought that they did a great job doing what CPOD does best: A sensitive and insightful cultural- (or as tvan put it, linguistic-) oriented lesson for the given subject-matter. 

For example, they capture beautifully some typical Chinese attitudes towards sorting trash: "Come on, everybody indiscriminately throws （乱扔 ）their banana peels into any old bin, I'd be a fool to comply." And they introduced the very Chinese concept of 收破烂的, the very efficient rag-and-bone collector, which is still very important here in Singapore despite our multi billion-dollar incineration, sorting, and water recovery systems.

I hope you can tell that I'm agreeing with you... I just don't want CPOD to wander into areas where they lack sufficient depth to really handle the vocabulary in a meaningful way.

The vocabulary for reading a balance sheet: Any CEO or Country Rep or Full Partner should probably get somebody trusted, from within his own company, to come up with a "house" glossary of the terms which they can then vet to make sure that it reflects the company's understanding of those concepts.

On the other hand, I have the feeling that CPOD would do a brilliant job on the subject of a head office representative asking the local or China-based members of the team the right, even tough, questions in order to establish which official agencies and even officials in China actually have the "signing power" with regard to their specific business plans.

So that they don't waste months dealing with somebody who appears (by rank, or by "reputation") to be "the man", only to discover that somebody in another agency has veto power over him, or that their local associates have forgotten to mention the permits required by another agency in some crucial if tangential area. You know, the kind of language to conduct true "due diligence" in China.

Thanks for putting up with this long post!

I would additionally differentiate between "office lessons" ("send a fax and make ten copies after the meeting") and real hard-core "business lessons" which introduce the terms of the trade (financial reporting, cost accounting, organization related,...) plus the backgrounds of the Chinese economic system. I think the latter could get more weight.

@lordstanley: Your being in partial agreement with me is already enough to make me feel honoured... I do mean it. Like you, I am basically a happy customer. That's the reason why I tried to make it clear, in my super-long post, that I was totally satisfied with the "Recycle Waste" Advanced lesson despite the wobbly areas. 

Now I'm off to do the school run and also to spend the next two hours with the Stunt Toddler (aged 3) singing "Wheels on the Bus" forty times in a row (or watching "Pink Phink" together sixty or seventy times)!

Or he might hit me with another Mandarin question which will have me scrambling for my dictionaries... I only know six kinds of character strokes (heng2 shu4 pie3 na4 dian3 gou1); he came back from nursery with what looks like compound strokes eg. "heng2 zhe2 gou1" etc. Good Lord.

Hi everyone :)

lordstanley, thanks for starting this important discussion, it's good to know what kind of lessons you're interested in. 

You know, the team is happy to take your lesson requests at chinesepod@gmail.com.  

Of course, they can't promise to make every request into a lesson, but I think asking directly for business oriented lessons would get more results than speculating on the reason for the scarcity of business oriented lessons.  :)

That's a good idea, JP, I probably will do so. Although I've been waiting 16 months for the official, unspillable, ergonomically-handy ChinesePod mug and 3 emails about that plus a visit to the old ChinesePod factory weren't enough to secure possession. Same with the official, form-fitting, muscle-enhancing, looks-awesome-in-the-rain, ChinesePod T-shirt that hasn't arrived yet despite my subscription renewal in April and a follow-up email. So it's all a question of my priorities. Coffee first, a shirt on my back second! Business after that, lol.

Hi lordstanley

Regarding your shirt, we sent you an email on April 10 2008 requesting your Baseball shirt size but we didn't hear back from you.  Can you please email me your Baseball shirt size to ChinesePod@gmail.com

lordstanley, you make some important points about not everything in China being about Confucius.  Currently CPod focuses on the general learner, a natural in an emerging market.  However, your question on business Chinese and other questions on specialties (e.g. CantonesePod), suggest an opportunity for niche Chinese language learning products... say, BusinessPod?

Of course, the million-dollar question is the size of the niche and its members' willingness to pony up money.

BTW, your comment re: reading financial statement footnotes in Chinese?  That's scary!

Auntie made the point about ChinesePod possibly not having the background to handle lessons on specialized topics.  I agree, this was very apparent during the relativity lesson, (which I was quite critical of, since I really hoping to learn a lot of specialized vocabulary and not about everyday topics like the vast majority of lessons).   I would like to make a suggestion, which is perhaps naive:

They might want to consider hiring  someone to create or at least verify that lessons on specialized topics are getting the language right (not only that it is literally correct, but they're actually speaking the way people in that field do), and that the subject matter is the most relevant.

Based on the NY Times article I'd be surprised if the market for learners of business-oriented Chinese didn't justify hiring one person.  If not, perhaps charging extra for technical, specialized series of lessons would enable hiring a specialist?  If they offered one on how to speak about science, engineering, and math in Chinese, I would definitely purchase access to such a series, in addition to my existing premium subscription.

Auntie68, I liked your long post. And I do agree, at least partially. I agree with you that knowing how to do true due diligence in China is arguably more important than knowing specific terms in Mandarin. I'll be the first to say that actually doing business in Mandarin is perilous, as I know just enough Mandarin to be dangerous or, even worse, my wife says that I sound like a 7-year old girl when speaking business Chinese! So I rely heavily on translators and interpreters and I always will. I just find from my own experience that sources of information, in English, on how to do business in China, or the cultural differences between Chinese & Westerners, or the ins and outs of negotiating with Chinese parties, are plentiful. Even too plentiful, as it seems that everyone is writing books nowadays passing themselves off as old China hands. So I'm not sure if ChinesePod has much to add there in the example you used about a head office rep asking the correct, "tough" questions to the appropriate person. They do have much to add in the area of linguistics and vocab though, in my opinion. Just food for thought.

 I will continue to be a ChinesePod subscriber and have plenty to keep me busy on this site even if they never produced another business lesson. So in a way I guess it's none of my business, it's ChinesePod's. If they want to stick to their knitting by being the leaders in teaching social Chinese, that would be fine and probably lucrative enough for them, I don't know. I just think that there is a reason that Mandarin is becoming "hot" in universities, and it's not just because people like oil paintings and Confucius. It's because they understand the importance of China as a business market. And so I'd think that if those students are interested in learning Mandarin, they'd be interesting in learning business Mandarin as well, just as "business English" seems to be a popular segment of the TESL sector.

I don't think there's really a right or wrong answer, so I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with you, and I wouldn't even call my post a "complaint" per se about ChinesePod. Just an observation, and possibly a suggestion.