Newbies, how are you studying now?
jennyzhu
November 24, 2009, 08:21 AM posted in General DiscussionDear newbies,
ChinesePod has not been publishing new newbie lessons for 2 weeks now. I am wondering how is your study going. Do you go back to the archive and study old newbie lessons? How do you decide what lessons to study? Most of all, how can we help?
Please let us know!
Jenny
daniel70
November 27, 2009, 05:18 AMI listen to elementary lessons, but study the newbie lessons, playing and repeating the dialog and expansion sentences. I'm working through the back catalog, which is large, so there is lots of content. I will say though, that I enjoy Ken, Jenny, and John as hosts, and hope that Ken will continue host 1 to 2 shows a week.
Purrfecdizzo
November 27, 2009, 05:31 PMHello Jenny, I have been studying for a little over a year, and I am somewhere around newbie/elementary level. As others have pointed out, there are many newbie lessons, so I have not encountered a shortage of lessons to work with. Fewer lessons per month have not really been a problem for me.
dunderklumpen
November 27, 2009, 06:12 PMHi Jenny,
I have stuedied abuot a year and a half and mostly listen to newbie and elementary lessons and qing wen.
The newbie and elementary archive is very large so I guess it will take forever before I have listened to all dialogues... And when forever has passed I will study them one more time and learn the characters...
Guess I'm saying that it's not a big problem that newbie lessons are not published very frequently now.
We newbies and ellies can still listen to old lessons, and as long as a team member answers to questions in the discussion board (which I think works pertty well) newbies and ellies can still feel welcome.
Purrfecdizzo
November 27, 2009, 06:15 PMYes, I agree with the last poster. I suppose that the only thing I might add to what has already been said is this; Do new newbie lessons on topics that people are interested in, and that no lessons currently exist.
Thanks,
George
dunderklumpen
November 27, 2009, 09:24 PMI agree with George; a few new lessons would be nice, but I don't think you need to publish just for the sake of publishing. A few good ones would do well.
I still enjoy Ken and Jenny's lessons very much so I'd be sad to see Ken disappear from future lessons.
pretzellogic
November 28, 2009, 02:59 AMJenny, I wonder if you are making a distinction between
1)people who just in the past couple of days/weeks subscribed to cpod
2) people that are at the newbie level, regardless of how long they subscribed
3) people that are new subscribers, but come to cpod as an intermediate learner.
It might help clarify for those that make suggestions about which group of newbies you're interested in helping and hearing from be more clear about their needs.
dswalker
December 17, 2009, 05:21 AMI am in the above post's group (2).
I agree that the existing newbie lessons should be sufficient for a student to transition himself to the next level. I'll let you know when I get there. For the business and to keep things fresh, perhaps redoing some of the older newbie lessons may be a good idea. The Cpod subscriber base is probably mostly newbs-> intermediate. Would like to see the historgram of your subscribers. Very interesting.
Thanks for all the help, I'm a happy subscriber.
-Dave
jennyzhu
December 18, 2009, 01:51 AMGuys,
Thank you for your feedback. We decided to stop publishing new newbie lessons largely based on user feedback. Your comments really do reaffrim that. Pretzellogic, you brought up a very important question: the impact on new newbie learners on the site. I don't know if we are providing enough help and engagement for them.
Any new newbie users to the site? How can we help you?
johanchristersson
November 26, 2009, 10:21 PMI can only speak as a recent newbie and my opinion is that the back-catalogue of lessons is more than enough to be confident and get on to the next level. The variety is there (I certainly haven't heard them all) and I can understand that because the lessons always cointain a new word or a new phrase it is difficult to know whether you are ready to try something harder. I got that feeling that there was always something new to learn and that I hadn't really mastered the newbie level. In retrospect, sort of an on-going process of going nowhere that held me back.
/Johan