C-Pod Lesson Study Strategy

This notebook thing is a great idea. I'm compiling mine right now.

eupnea, i've ended up doing something similar to your taking your notebook with you to the gym.  I 've also created a notebook of sentences.  I'm in the mode where a regular review of my notes (sentences that i've written based on dialogues, as well as sentences that I tried to create on my own from the dialogues) can be reviewed at the gym. I'm doing a few long runs on a treadmill, and that might be a good thing to try. My main concern is sweating all over my notes :-)

This thread is pretty old but I'll post my latest strategy for not letting what I have studied sink to irretrievable depths in the quicksand of an old brain. Lately I copy and paste the dialogues and expansion sentences into my word processor, format them for easy reading (for me that's a large font and plenty of white space) and with margins to easily fit an inexpensive spiral notebook. I print my document, then physically cut the paper and glue it onto a page in the notebook.  Little by little that notebook gets fatter and fatter, and more and more worn as it is what I look at while doing cardio at the gym. I turn to any page and just start reading. Somewhat mindlessly at times, but it works. If I had to play the waiting game, say, at the metro or doctor's office, I would use it there as well. If there is a character I tend to forget I just write in the pinyin.

Calicartel, Ultimately, to address your two valid points, I agree with you about there possibly not being a "finite set of words for fluency". But I should say up front that this can be gotten around by using approximations. By that I mean that it ok to say that there might be 2000 english words that correspond to 1750 mandarin 2 character words, and then make certain assumptions about when people are using 1 character for a two character word.

Additionally, the problem you mentioned regarding reinforcement, cpod could have gotten around that by merely stating up front an assumption about the student's starting point, and outlining which lessons from that starting point their word counts start. 

I agree that the Chinese use of 1 character words for 2 character words is problematic.  But that means you make different assumptions about modeling this behavior and move forward. It doesn't mean that you give up because word counts can't be modeled accurately from the start.

But as I outline this, I realize this metric kick i'm on is potentially valuable, but not the kind of thing that cpod is going to spend money and resources on in the short term.  My argument for cpod would have been to view this as a path towards creating a competitive advantage against other language schools.

Calicartel, you made the post below regarding metrics.  I probably should have put my original post into this study strategy thread, or maybe created one separately. But I wanted to respond to your thoughts.

Regarding the metrics, it should be pointed out that  there may be no such thing as a "finite set of words needed for fluency" in Chinese. At least not a finite set that can be ascertained. This is because you can't run a software on Chinese texts to find out which words are the most common since words cannot be recognized by computers in Chinese (hence the difficulty in developping a spell-checker for Chinese). You can only work on characters. Ideally, the more common a character in Chinese, the more prominence that character should be given in a course. This also ties in with the problem of reinforcement. When you study with CP you have to work out for yourself which lessons are more likely to reinforce the ones you've studied. In a traditional method with lessons numbered 1 to XX, words learned in lesson 6 will be reinforced eg in lessons 8, 13 and 16, all of which you have to learn in sequence. This is not possible in a podcast where learning and learners come in and go in all directions. Of course, with time you will have learned enough words to reach critical mass. Usually you will have done so long before you are able to understand Chinese, because what stands in the way of understanding is not the number of words but other things. You listen to Chinese and fail to understand most of it. Then you get presented with a transcript. To your amazement, the whole thing contained only a few words/characters you haven't learnt. Failure to recognize, not failure to know is the problem we contend with at intermediate level and above.

simonpettersson, having been where you're at regarding the Fear, I suggest that if you haven't already looked at quite a few taxi lessons, that you start doing so and getting them under your belt now.  Unless you have your hotel/friends ferrying your all around China, you're going to be telling taxi drivers where to go, and they'll be looking to you for guidance. I went through this the hard way, but I can get myself around now.

For comprehension study I think it is important to keep in mind that repetition is the key while recognizing the need not to get bored. I resist the temptation to forget about past lessons to keep discovering new stuff. I'm convinced refreshing older stuff is the key to long term memory. I think it matters little whether you first peruse a new lesson to get an idea of the new vocab or whether you listen to it "blind" several times. Even if you "cheat" by reading the new vocab first, the podcast will give you plenty of pure "listening-first" practice. Sometimes reading, as opposed to listening, is important because in a character-based language such as Chinese, it is not unusual for reading ability to lag understanding ability. It is the other way round with alphabet-based languages.

Definitely. That's how I approach most languages as well. Passive comes first, no doubt (though I'm now stressing the active part with Chinese since I'll be going there in six months). But this doesn't tell us much about your method. How do you study for comprehension?

Regarding overall learning strategy, mine is probably the simplest of all: I have been content to understand Chinese without bothering about speaking it. I have no one to talk to in Chinese and I'm not sure I wish I had. I'll bother about making myself understood to Chinese people after I'm satisfied I can understand them. Active knowledge will follow from passive knowledge. I'm not too worried about the final result. The watershed will come in due time. Up to this day, I've never understood a language which I couldn't speak eventually. What worked fine in my case for a handful of foreign languages (including English) will work for Chinese.

As to the technicalities, I don't use any advanced CP functionalities like automated vocab lists, they don't work well anyway (sorry CP). Even bookmarking lessons and finding past lessons with the search engine is difficult, let alone other things. I never click the "exercices" tab. Beside listening and listening again, the only thing I do is to look up  vocab from the podcasts and practice writing down some new characters. Wall-to-wall listening. I re-listen to past lessons at more or less regular or random intervals. If I feel it's a long time since I listened again to a particular lesson, I copy it to my mp3 and keep it there for one week, then copy other lessons, some new, some old.

Why don't you just record yourself and see if it sounds right? That's something I do occasionally. An old Poddie, AuntySue, used to organise poddie Skype weekends so that poddies could speak to each other.

The "Going to China Fear" is a pretty good fear, but it's not like you can suffer "Epic Fail" - just wave your arms around and point at stuff, 就好。

FWIW, i've talked to other poddies, and found out that they didn't listen to the lessons at all, they just read the pdfs, and were learning mandarin that way. So their pronunciation is not going to be great.  They didnt' try speaking mandarin with me, so I don't really know how their pronunciation was. 

My take it that cpod earlier on didn't give a lot of guidance about how to use the lessons until relatively recently, so i'm not sure who to blame if the tools that the pdf-only poddies were given are used incorrectly without guidance.  On the other hand, there's no one here that's going to learn perfect mandarin in the abstract anyway.  

hey paul,

i don't think so mate, not unless you do some strange song and dance as you're speaking. A friend of mine used to tell me everyday to be weary of being roped into 'the performing monkey' trap. I still don't really understand what he meant by it.

Well, I'll be in China Sept next year. Hopefully no one will laugh when I speak Chinese to them 哈哈！

I was being really lazy about my learning, too, mainly just listening to the show at work and not much else. Progress was extremely slow, but I didn't mind much. Then I decided I wanted to go to China. Then I realized "Holy shit, I'm gonna be living in a place where a lot of people don't speak English." That's how I got The Fear.It's hanging over my shoulder as I write this, asking me why I'm not actually, I've gotta go. Later.

Exams? Haha... well it'll be interesting, but how many poddies will be willing to take exams. Maybe those interested could form a study group to take exams adminstered by, of course, Cpod.

The topic here is how people use Cpod's lessons to learn Chinese. Shadowing was mentioned as a method to learn spoken Chinese. How effective is Cpod's system for teaching oral Chinese? We can't know can we? Cpod doesn't have a voice recording system like Livemocha does.  Without a voice recording system, we cannot record our spoken Chinese for others to hear. I can say I'm able to learn speak Chinese by shadowing Cpod's "native natural speaking speed", but until you actually hear how I pronounce the Chinese sounds, you'll never know whether shadowing works for me. In fact, I know a person from one of the Carribean islands who has been with Cpod for a number of years, who when he speaks Chinese, I have no idea what he is saying. It could be just me who couldn't understand him since others in the group usually nod understandably.   

Didn't someone here said that the Dr. who wrote about shadowing speaks some language he was shadowing quite poorly?

It would be fair to comment that until Cpod has a recording system to allow poddies to record their spoken Chinese for others to hear, we'll never know how effective Cpod's lessons/"native speed dialogues" are in teaching people spoken Chinese.

Again, seems to me the Dialogue Tab is a perfect place for Cpod to improve its service by articulating the words, tones, and rhythm slowly at first before speaking natural speed.  What's the purpose of the Dialogue Tab if all it does is to repeat what's already spoken in the lesson dialogue itself?

嘿，是个好主意。 We could face exams here say every three months, have the results published (the Rankings page is so 过时 is it not?), and kicked out if we fail.
Seems to run counter to CPod's business interests, but maybe the incentive and competition would be refreshing enough to keep more users' interest up high. It would be different. No other language podcast teachers are so mean and tough are they?

Seriously, I wouldn't mind trying this.

Haha, yes, I was not criticising, I was just saying I wasn't convinced it would help me much, though it was quite amusing giving it a go.

I wouldn't use any of my "learning methods" if I were you, I am terribly lazy/disorganised/lacking in discipline when it comes to learning Chinese. Basically, I do an assortment of the following:

• Listen to podcasts in car/out walking.
• Write the dialogue in a book from time to time.
• Start transcribing a lesson until I get fed up halfway through.
• Recently have been watching Chinese soap operas.
• Might, with the best of intentions, try to memorise a list of related vocab, but usually do not have discipline to keep reviewing it.
• Idly flick through a grammar book/children's vocab book/text books from time to time.

As you can see, I have next to no structure! Funny thing is, I still learn stuff, and it's always really random stuff too. Remember that Delegating Tasks lesson? It had the word 材料 in it, and I remember thinking "I'll never remember that word, it's so random", and true enough I don't think I did, until it turned up on two occasions since. Now I don't think I'll forget it, which makes life easy! I wish it was like that with all words.

As a visual learner, reading dialogues and seeing things transcribed is important to me. What I need to work on is actually producing the language, not simply absorbing it.

I really admire some of the dedication that people have here, getting up at 5 am, or compiling massive dictionaries etc. If I had "The Fear", then maybe I would do more, but with no exams hanging over me, there is no fear to be had.

Well, different people have different ways of learning. This certainly won't be the right method for everyone. It works really well for me. If you don't like it and/or don't feel like it's giving you any results, you should definitely look for a method that better suits your learning style.

To clarify, this thread is about what study methods people use. I talked about my methodology above, which includes shadowing. I recieved questions about it and I've done my best to answer them. I do not know wether this method will work for anyone else.

Actually, I think more people should post about their methods in this thread. It has sort of become all about shadowing, which is a shame. sebire, why don't you share your methods? I'd love to hear about them!

I can see how it is helpful from a pronunciation point of view, and practising stringing together unfamiliar syllables, but I am slightly skeptical as to any other merits it may have. It doesn't seem much different to reading aloud.

To be honest, I don't find it very helpful, for some reason. But you might!

that half speed idea is a good one.  I have Transcribe on my computer, so I might have to give playing the lesson at a slower speed a go a few times. 

Yeah. I try to plow through a lesson a day. If I'm not getting through a particular lesson, I might decide to spend another day on it (which means I either add no new lesson the next day, or I just add an elementary lesson, since they don't take much effort to get through).

If I feel I've "sort of" got it, I usually let bygones be bygones and move on. I still have the vocab, anyway. Getting a perfect shadowing isn't strictly necessary, as long as I hit the difficult parts at least sometimes on most lessons.

For getting the quick parts right, I recommend reading the transcript and repeating them by yourself, without the audio, starting slow and working up the pace. If the entire dialogue is "the quick parts", well, maybe you should work more on the elementary level, to get used to speaking and shadowing some more.

I think I usually get through a dialogue without major problems after about 40-50 repetitions, spaced out over a day.

(Also, if you have an iPhone, there's actually a button in the podcast playing thingy that lets you play the audio at half speed, without sound distortion except making the sound a bit wobbly. I don't use it much, but it might be of some help. You can also play at double speed, if you're suicidal.)

ok, so i've been doing that for the "Family Life" lesson.  In theory, I should do this until I get it right, but in practical terms, it actually takes around 100-150 times before I can shadow an entire intermediate lesson (this with a statistically significant sample size of 3 lessons :-)). At some point, due to time limitations, do you give up and move to the next lesson?

Forcing you to listen to the dialogue a million times and speaking really fast are two of the main advantages of the method, in my opinion. When I shadow an intermediate lesson, it goes something like this:

1: I study the lesson and the vocab.

2: I try to shadow. I get the slow parts, but the quick parts just fly by. To someone listening to my shadowing, the quick parts sound something like "Wǒ jiù shì quesdndrgtDAMMIT!"

3: I study the vocab some more and read the transcript, making sure I understand every word.

4: I listen to the dialogue some more and try more shadowing. Now I get what they're saying, but I still can't hit the quick parts.

5: I learn the quick parts and repeat them out loud, first slowly and then faster and faster.

6: I try to shadow again. I start hitting some of the quick parts occasionally.

7: Finally, I get through it. I'm very happy. I do a little dance.

paulinurus, 我认为中文博客的老师说得自然的速度。

Sebre, 他们一定说得太快了，有时候我根本听不懂。

Cpod干嘛你们的老师读得这么快呢？

Omg, talk about tongue-twisters trying to shadow Intermediate! Not sure what it does except force me to listen to the dialogue a million times and speak really fast.

Oh, you were talking about the Dialogue tab. Sorry, then I have no objections. They could maybe be spoken slower. I don't really listen to that. When I can't hear what's being said in the lesson audio, I just check the transcript.

Simon: I agree that shadowing should only be done on the natural speaking pace of native chinese. However, I think the sentences in Cpod's Dialogue tab should be pronounced slowly and clearly at first so that listeners can easily catch the tones and rhythm of each sentence before repeating the sentence at natural speed. As it is right now, I don't see what good the Dialogue Tab does other than just to repeat the sentences of the main lesson, but in a different voice. Frankly I like the way one of Cpod's competitor teaches pronunciation... slowly and clearly articulating certain words and phrases in a sentence before speaking the sentence in the natural pace.   

paulinurus: Myself, I find that the natural speaking pace of the intermediate lessons are a huge advantage. When shadowing, it makes you speak as a native speaker would. When listening, it makes you comprehend at speeds you're likely to hear from native speakers.

Where can I find the "Star Wars lingo"? I want it in my Focus File!

About a month or so ago, Cpod improved its "Review" podcast to include all the words in the Vocab section and all the sentences in the Expansion tab (previously only some vocab and Expansion sentences were included in this podcast). So now first I listen to the Review podcast on way to work and back. I find it is more productive to get oriented to the new words in a lesson before listening to John and Jenny in the Intermediate podcast.

#1 Listen to Review podcast

#2 Listen to the Show podcast.

At home, I then look at the Chinese characters while again listening to the Expansion sentences. By this time, I understand the words and their usage in the main Lesson as well as in the Expansion. However, the challenge is to remember the words and their usage. I do this by "association"... remember the new words by breaking them up into components as per the explanation in the Tuttle dictionary (see here)

Then I copy specific expansion sentences and vocab into a Word file so that I can focus on just key words and their usage. I find that it is easy to get distracted by the huge amount of lessons and words found on Cpod. "A jack of all words is a master of none", so I try and focus on just learning stuff that are useful for my purpose. E.g. Dinosaur,  Frog Dissection, or Star Wars lingo are not found in my Focus File since those words and sentences are not useful for me.

#3 Study only words and sentences which are useful for me.

Finally, as I've posted before, I find that "imitation" is the best way for me to learn how to speak Chinese. It is called Shadowing here. Imitation is how kids learn to speak their mother tongue. I listen a lot and imitate a lot. Too bad at Cpod their speakers speak fast at the Newbie and Ele levels and super fast at Intermediate levels (goodness knows why). So it is a tongue-twisting challenge (especially for people living outside China) to learn proper pronunciation with the Cpod audio files. Hey, but we can't have everything perfect can we?

#4 Listen and imitate the native speakers.    

I think it would be very hard to find a study about this subject, precisely because of what you write about gifted people. You would somehow have to take that talent into account, seems impossible.

Still, input before output seems so much more logical than shadowing.

The pronounciation issue is interesting, to be sure. I actually spent lots and lots of time listening to Mandarin before I ever spoke anything because I was afraid that I'd get bad pronounciation if I spoke too soon. I do think I have a rather decent pronounciation, so maybe there's some merit to that idea.

On the other hand, I learned French in school, speaking from the getgo, and I have a decent pronounciation in that, too.

But that's all anecdotal evidence, and that's all there is, it seems. I have never seen any actual studies made that support either side of the argument. If someone knows of any, it'd be of great value.

Dr. Arguelles himself does try to analyze his own accents in one of his videos. He comes to the conclusion that his best accents are in the languages where he spent a lot of time on speaking and working on pronounciation in the beginning, while his worst accents (where he includes Dutch as a prime example) are in the languages where he didn't. Still, that's just more anecdotal evidence.

Whet we do know for sure about pronounciation is that some people will have good pronounciation and others will have bad, and different methods seems to me to have only a small effect when compared to natural talent. Maybe there are some methods out there that can give anyone great pronounciation, but there are people who are just gifted and will get good pronounciation no matter what method.

pretzellogic

Glad to hear you dont watch Dr Phil. Good choice. Let me first say this, if it works for you - do it. Everybody learns differently. I never said  Dr A's approach was without value. In fact I said I have been using a variation of it myself for some time now and would give his method of simultaneous shadowing a try. I still plan to do so. I just dont think its "rocket surgery" as my daughter says (tongue in cheek). As for my comment about magic bullets, it was a general comment, not aimed at any particular technique.

blox- that is interesting because I outlined that very concern in my earlier post. We will see.

I once heard that shadowing is actually bad for your pronounciation, because you don't spend enough time on listening before you speak. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that Dr. Arguelles Mandarin pronounciation is pretty bad, and his Dutch pronounciation is horrible. (I'm Dutch). He does study a lot of languages, so perhaps it differs per language. For me, just listening very well is far more effective than his shadowing method.

I haven't looked up Dr. Arguelles.
Today I had my first class this term. We were advised to work on our hearing comprehension and pronunciation through Shadowing. Our teacher pointed out I needed a lot of work on my tones, and said that Shadowing would help correct the tones and help me become able to speak naturally. She also said, "you can do the Shadowing and correct the mistakes you're making now, or go on speaking like that forever".

RJ,
Neither Shadowing nor Repeating are presented to us as magic bullets. If someone happens to be a learner who doesn't need them that's fine, but I would imagine many would find them to be effective training and therefore yes--it is work.

rjberki, I don't watch Dr Phil, so I can't state one way or another why being obvious is a bad thing in that context.  But since you said that everybody learns differently, i'm not sure why you can't just leave it to people that value what Dr Arguelles does to use it to learn.

I think the key is you have to change strategy every now and then to keep it from getting stale.

This Dr Arguelle is like the Dr Phil of language. He states the obvious. I long ago discovered that reciting out loud what is fed to my ears by an ipod while walking briskly helps retention. Walking with purpose helps keep you focused. What is new in his idea is to speak on top of what you hear rather than wait until a sentence is finished and then repeat. I always thought the forced recall after a short time would help retention and yet it was soon enough that you could still remember the pronounciation as heard. I will try his way and see. If nothing else it allows for uninterupted flow and memorization of the passage. I just question whether or not you can hear, adjust, and speak simultaneously. There is no magic bullet in language learning. Its hard work. Damn hard work and everybody learns differently.  

tal, no problem.  After a week of trying shadowing, it's probably best started with Newbie or elementary lessons.  The way that those lessons are structured makes it easiest to Shadow the way Dr. Arguelles intended.  I've ended up cheating a bit on Intermediate lessons, backing up after about 2 sentences so I can learn the dialogue/pronunciation.  Upper intermediate sentences are just too long themselves, at least for me.

This discussion has certainly taken an interesting turn. I think I will consider some of these ideas and methods more carefully. Thanks for that link pretzellogic. The embedded videos on the page seem to be missing however, (no doubt they are being blocked to internet users in China.) Pity.

FYI, here's the link to Dr. Arguelles' website:

http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/foreign_language_study.html

FWIW, once you can synchronize to what's being said, it makes a cool stereo effect, especially when you say the words clearly out loud, as you're supposed to.

bloody hell mate, thats way over my head. 

bloody hell mate thats way over my head

Both Shadowing and Repeating are training techniques used by professional interpreters. One of the best-selling Mandarin learning book series in Japan recently is all about using this interpreters' training. When Shadowing you should always utter (and not mutter but really vocalize); it's the point after all to actually be able to speak what you can very well hear. The difficulty one may experience at first comes with the realization that being able to hear, or thinking you're hearing, and speaking (reproducing) are 两回事.

Repeating is also very effective training. This is when you pause the audio after each sentence or whatever sized-bite is manageable for you and reproduce what you have just heard and retained. Retention requires great concentration. Tough on our brains, but just the kind of exercise they need! I ought to do these more regularly myself.

I find this notion of shadowing fascinating. I didn't know it had been put forward as a learning method per se. It is similar to simutaneaous translation ("interpretation") in international symposiums, only here it is easier because you don't switch languages. I wonder if you need actually to utter the words for effective shadowing to take place. I feel sometimes I half-unconsciously "shadow" what I hear by sort of mentally repeating, and I feel even this subdued form of shadowing does some good. Anyway shadowing will be easier to perform on the audio review sentences where there's ample time to repeat.

Otherwise I've found being able to associate a sound with its character is essential. Before I can put a character on a sound in my mind, that sound remains elusive. It's like putting a face on a noun.

not rocket science, but not intuitive either. I suspect upper intermediate is too difficult right now because there are too many unknown words, rather than the lesson being too long.  But i'll be happy to put that to the test.

Well, it's hardly rocket science. :)

I can imagine upper intermediate lessons being extremely difficult. I don't think I'll be doing that for a while, if ever. Might be that they're too long to be able to do this profitably. The sweet spot is around a minute to a minute and a half. For upper intermediate, I think I'll split them up in segments, when I get that far.

holy cow.  I tried doing this before I knew there was a method called Shadowing. You're right, it really was hard.  I gave up.  It didn't help that I was doing it with an upper intermediate lesson ("When the Taxi takes the Long Way Home"), and the actors were agitated and speaking even faster than normal speed Chinese.

Great feedback though.  Sounds like I was almost on the right path. 

1) No pausing. You speak over the audio, listening and speaking at the same time. You're trying to reduce the time between hearing the audio and speaking your echo. The ideal is speaking virtually in sync with the audio. The point of this is that you'll be getting constant, instant feedback on your pronounciation. If you're "off key", you'll hear it instantly and will be able to correct it on the next rep.

Side note: This is pretty damn hard in the beginning, and it demands a lot of concentration. This is why you do it while walking "purposefully", as if you're going somewhere, briskly, and with good posture. This helps the mind to stay focused. Also, you get excercise and oxygenate your brain. :) You can try it with Elementary dialogues first, as they're a lot easier to keep up with. But the native speakers do speak quickly, so we've got to learn, right? It also helps to read the dialogue carefully beforehand so you know what they're saying.

2) I listen to the entire dialogue through, so it's usually a bit over a minute. Then I rewind and do it again. Over and over, at least ten times. It's quite tiring, so you can't do this for half an hour straight, or your performance will likely suffer.

simonpettersson, no luck with the other link you forwarded.  But in any event, i'm interested enough to go ahead and give Shadowing a try tomorrow.  I guess some more questions are based on the following you said in an earlier post:

While walking at a brisk pace with good posture, I listen to the dialogue and I echo the speech as I hear it, trying to use the exact same tones and melody. This is difficult in the beginning, but it gets easier, and by the time I can do it effortlessly, I've memorized the entire dialogue. This is extremely effective, as I have to speak at the same pace as the native speakers on the tape

1) when you listen to a CPOD intermediate lesson, I assume you listen to the 1 minute or so dialogue.  do you stop the dialogue after each sentence to echo the speech, or do you talk over the sentence as the actors are saying it?

2) when you listen to a dialogue sentence, do you continually replay that sentence over and over until you can say all the words in that sentence well, and then move on to the next dialogue sentence?

Thanks!!!

I'm at Intermediate. I haven't been doing this method for that long, so I can't swear by the results yet, other than the fact that my thinking in Chinese has greatly improved. I've only been shadowing four lessons so far.

You can still use google, I hope? Do a google search for: "site:http://how-to-learn-any-language.com shadowing" (without the quotes). It was on that (excellent) polyglot forum that I first encountered the term. You need an account to search the forum, but you can use google, as above. If you do register for an account, you can even discuss the method with lots of excellent polyglots, amongst others professor Arguelles himself, who posts to the forums regularly (or at least did when I was last there, which was some time ago). He's certainly an authorty to be trusted, as he speaks a gazillion languages himself.

simonpettersson, actually, two more things:

1) what level are you at? I've tried going from elementary to upper intermediate, and it seems too big a jump. I've since gone from elementary to intermediate which works much better.  But i'm curious as to how far and how fast you've been able to leap using Dr. Arguelles' methods.

2)I'm here in China, and YouTube videos are unaccessable.  Any other resources you might have are appreciated.

StudyArcade has been a huge boost to me. Whether or not it's worth the price of an iPhone, well ... :)

Here's how it works: You add words to your ChinesePod vocab list. StudyArcade syncs with your account and downloads the words automatically. You then start a session and StudyArcade will start showing you flashcards. You look at them and then you judge how well you did.

SA will keep repeating the cards (interspersed with the other cards you need to repeat) until you judge it to be "Easy". The, how long it will take until it brings it up again depends on how much difficulty you had with it. So as long as you just think it's "easy", SA will take longer and longer to bring it back.

You can also set how many new words you want to get as a maximum each day. So if you add 50 new words to CPod, SA can portion them out a few each day.

There's also a "review" mode, in which SA will show you the words you haven't looked at for a long time, and a "Test Cramming" mode in which you'll get the words you're having the most difficulty with (EDIT: also a "Random" mode).

I'm starting to sound like I'm selling the program. :)

Finally, there's a "multiple choice" game that you can do, in addition to flashcards, and there are premade fact packages you can download, like HSK word lists, the most frequent characters and lists of all the radicals.

Yeah, this helps. Unfortunately, I don't have an iPhone, so using Study Arcade isn't an option right now.  The way you're making it sound, maybe I should break down and buy one. I forget if the iPod Touch or other iPods can use the iPhone apps, but I suppose I can go to the iTunes Store and find out such things. 

Thanks again.

The only review I do consciously is when I do Skritter. I pick and choose from the last five or so lessons (the words being tagged with the lesson name and all) depending on how difficult I feel they are and how much I've reviewed them already. I don't really have a method for this, and it's not strictly necessary for my methodology.

The real review is done through StudyArcade. SA tests words in both directions (Chinese to English and English to Chinese, never showing the pinyin except on the answer side). When SA gives me an English word, I sketch the character with my finger in the air. If I can't, I give myself a low score. Since SA has spaced repetition, I'll get to review it soon again. Thus, as soon as a word is added to the vocab, it's synced with SA and thus I never forget it, since SA brings it out for me when it's time to review. Skritter is just a way to do the initial brain-burning. It's an aid to the StudyArcade process, since it makes sure I know the word well when it goes into the SA system. Once it's in there, I never forget it (OK, I do, but SA reminds me).

Does that answer your question?

EDIT: Oh, and sometimes I review by simply rehearsing a lesson dialogue in my head, since the shadowing makes it memorized. I can think about the characters of the words while I do that. Of course, after a long enough time, I'll forget the dialogue. No worries.

simonpettersson, this is interesting.  When do you do your review of lessons from a couple of weeks ago? Do you do a review of the last 2-10 lessons or so? When you do the review, how much did  you retain? for the stuff you didn't retain, how much review time do you spend working on the lessons until you get accurate again? Thanks.

I recently felt dissatisfied with my stury method, so I gave it an overhaul. I'm very pleased with my new method. Here's the lowdown:

1: Listen to the lesson. I do this at work, usually, and I do it several times, since I have eight hours, anyway.

2: Add the vocab. I add all the regular vocab into the CPod vocab tool and tag it with the name of the lesson. Supplementary vocab is only added if it seems very useful and/or common.

3: Skritter time. I use the Skritter tool in CPod to burn the vocab into my brain. Skritter is, as a previous poster pointed out, extremely good at this. I do Skritter, then do something else, then do Skritter again, and vary with some older lessons, until I can get through the entire vocab list (that is, the list tagged with the lesson name) without mistakes. I also use some mnemonics to memorize the characters, going by what they look like and/or what radicals are used (and I look up new radicals when I encounter them). I have a Wacom tablet, which makes writing characters on the computer a breeze.

4: Syncronize. I use StudyArcade, a great free iPhone flashcard app that not only uses spaced repetition, but also syncs with CPod, for maximum convenience. This means I never have to worry about review, since the SRS algorithm handles that for me.

5: Shadowing. Shadowing is a method invented by professor Alexander Arguelles (search his name on YouTube and you'll find some videos on it). Basically, I walk for fifteen minutes to and from work every day. While walking at a brisk pace with good posture, I listen to the dialogue and I echo the speech as I hear it, trying to use the exact same tones and melody. This is difficult in the beginning, but it gets easier, and by the time I can do it effortlessly, I've memorized the entire dialogue. This is extremely effective, as I have to speak at the same pace as the native speakers on the tape. Very good for fluency.

6: Writing. Since I now have the entire dialogue memorized, I write it down, from memory, to make sure I can write all the characters used. I feel I need to do this as Skritter is a bit helpful when you're using it. It's more difficult to write on paper than on Skritter.

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This works really well for me. The only thing I'm missing is a lot of reading practice. I will get to that later, when I know more characters. This method is very convenient, as the vocab takes care of itself. I just add it automatically to the list, tag it and then sync with StudyArcade, which handles the review schedule for me. The only annoyance is that the iPhone won't let you play podcasts on repeat, so there's a lot of button pressing when doing the shadowing.

EDIT: Oh, and I usually do the excercises, too, though I don't feel they do much for me. Still, they're kinda fun, so why not?

dadahuhu, FWIW, my study strategy is similar to yours, but more metric driven.  I'm at the point where I create small notepads for my sentences and characters, so that I can carry them around conveniently. 

My weak point is also review.  I do review and consolidate lessons around once a week or so, but i've noticed that even in consolidation, I forget, and I'm not sure how many times to review before I go to the next lesson.  If i keep score, should i only forget 10 out of 50 words, and then move to the next lesson, or just 3 out of 50 words?  Pimsleur was great in that it implied that you should remember about 80% of the stuff you learned, then move on to the next lesson.  I think the theory is that in other lessons, you come across the same words in the same or different contexts, and that helps anchor your intuition, so you don't need to have perfect review/recall in order to move on.  That's the theory at least......

Adding my grain of salt, I think regularly going back to past lessons is a good idea even if it means doing fewer new lessons. This is because when you learn Chinese, you spend a lot of time looking up characters, in spite of electronic dictionaries etc. Therefore it pays to go over older stuff where you don't have to waste time afresh looking-up characters. Put it another way: all other things equal, re-learning 5 forgotten words is more time-efficient than learning 5 brand-new words. The latter entails new look-ups while the former doesn't, and the result is the same (= +5).

I couldn't agree more about the expansion exercises. In fact, I forgot to mention that I don't just add individual words to Anki, I also pick a few expansion sentences for each lesson and add them as well. When I'm reviewing, I read every card aloud, so having entire sentences to review is really helpful.

I usually listen to each lesson every day for about a week, and after that I don't generally go back and listen to them. I just rely on my flashcards to continually reinforce what I've learned.

One more thing: since I'm much slower in learning Hanzi than Pinyin, I have 2 separate decks for Anki: one for learning vocab (concentrating on the pinyin), and one for learning reading/writing. If you want to set up your deck similarly, you'll have to tweek the Model Properties. It's kinda confusing until you've done it once, so feel free to ask for help.

Thanks all, great advice.  I forgot to mention that I do the same work on the expansion as the dialogues.  The expansion excercises are really helpful for me.

I tried out Anki (on the shared vocab lists) and it seems like a great system once you get accustomed to it.  The iphone app at cpod is extremely convenient and hopefully it will integrate some spaced repition features in the future as well.

Do any of you listen to the whole lesson a 2nd or 3rd time in the future or just the dialogue/lesson reviews?  Perhaps as you get more advanced you only need the quick hits, but when starting out it may be helpful to listen to the whole lesson again a month later.

My study strategy depends on the lesson level, somewhat. Lately, I have been trying to understand as much as I can on the first hearing of the lesson dialog, then listen through the entire lesson.  After that I try to read the lesson transcript and understand as much as I can without pausing to look unrecognized characters up.  Then I repeat the listening excercise, and follow up by looking up all the unrecognized characters in the transcript.  It sometimes takes me a couple more readings of the transcript (dialog tab) before the new vocabulary is in my intermediate term memory.  Finally, I edit the lesson dialog to insert silences so I can play repeat-what-you-just-heard while I commute.  For intermediate lessons, I write the dialog out by hand at the end of the week.  When I feel up to frustrating myself, I do the listen and type portion of the excercises, because my tone recognition is still poor.

As for a study strategy, here's my routine:

Pick 2 elementary, 2 intermediate, and 2 qing wen lessons for the week. Listen to each lesson and it's audio review at work, once a day throughout the week. I also read the PDF for each lesson once a day. Also, every day I go over my flash cards (using Anki - an excellent flashcard program). At the end of the week, I add the new vocab from my lessons into Anki.

Also, on days where I have more free time, I like to listen to an upper intermediate lesson a couple of times- once with the PDF at hand, once without just for listening practice.

I don't use ChinesePod for learning how to read or write Chinese though. I'm using a book called "Remembering the Hanzi" which I highly recommend. It associates pnemonics with each character, so you can forego the traditional brute-force method of rote memorization.

I stopped using CPod's vocab feature a long time ago. I highly recommend you download a flashcard program. I use Anki, and it's incredibly helpful. It utilizes a spaced repetition algorithm for scheduling cards for review, and it has done far more to increase retention than anything else I've tried. If you decide to go with it and need help setting it up, feel free to send me a private message (I may forget to check this thread later on).

dadahuhu,

what I do is, I to put the Dialogues and the Audio Reviews of studied lessons on my MP3/Phone and try to mix it 50% with music so there are some "rewards" in between. I listen to that in shuffle mode as often as I can, e.g. while communiting, waiting in line somewhere, doing housework.

Recently, I have also started using Skritter more extensively. I import the relevant lesson vocab of the week and add it to the (already quite immense) Skritter batch. Not only does it teach you writing, it also burns vocab directly into the brain.

There is a downside: Yet another service one needs to pay for. Sigh.

Hi dadahuhu,

I have studied with cpod for about 8 months. In the beginning I tried to use the cpod vocabulary list, but I found that it was a bit hard to use vor reviewing and it lets you only review individual words.

I work through the lessons similar to you ( but not so thorough, I have to admit). Then I export all the vocab and all the sentences ( dialogue and expansion) to a flashcard desktop programm. This I use to revise everything. The advantage of this is there are many tools that track your progress on the studied items and organize for you how often and when to repeat which items, based on how well you know them already.