Lesson suggestion

themainman

June 26, 2010, 10:53 AM posted in General Discussion

Hi all, I have been a long time CPOD user and it has helped my studies massively. I like all the explanations and other tidbits I learn in the lesson podcasts. I like them so much that I often take notes in the middle of podcasts and don't like to listen to podcasts when I am not near a computer because I won't be able to put my notes into Anki. A solution would be to include in the dialogue PDF a quick breakdown of the main points that John and Jenny discuss in the podcasts. Sometimes if a lesson seems a bit easy for me, I don't want to skip it, but I don't want to spend 15-20 min listening to the lesson. I would love to be able to read through the pdf, sort of like a textbook, and put anything I like into ANKI. This way reviewing lesson explanations would be very fast without having to listen to the whole podcast again. Apologies if this point has been discussed in the past. I have taken a 6 month break from studying Chinese and am just getting back into it hardcore. I find Cpod to be extremely useful (by far the most useful resource I have encountered) and this is the only suggestion I have as to how my learning/using experience could be improved. Actually this would be a massive help for me. Cheers TheMainMan

pretzellogic

June 26, 2010, 11:15 AM

Interesting idea. I'm never quite sure when I listen to a podcast with the complete lesson in it, what are the 2-4 main points. It seems that in all these lessons, there's an explanation of vocabulary that might have been covered before. Usually it ends up being about 5-10 words/phrases.

Maybe if you gave an example of what you're thinking should be a helpful synopsis of the lesson, other than the existing description, maybe that would clear things up for the cpod staff.

themainman

dude what I wrote is already pretty clear. basically they could take what they talk about in the lesson and type it out and include it in the lesson dialogue pdf's, that way we wouldn't have to listen to podcasts to review the main explanations of each lesson.

go_manly

Have you joined the "Transcripts with Tal" group? A number of users in that group have transcribed a number of Intermediate & Upper Intermediate lessons. You could copy elements of these transcripts for your own use.

chris

June 26, 2010, 02:00 PM

Themainman, I do a similar thing to you, albeit a little more old-fashioned with my A4 pad and pen! Basically, I start by writing out the whole lesson dialogue before I listen to the podcast. Then listen to the podcast and annotate my written dialogue with any interesting points the hosts make during the podcast. Finally, I work through the vocab and supplementary vocab, ensuring I write each character a few times to get a feel for them and also do a quick bit of background reading on the mdbg dictionary website.

I've often thought the same thing as you, in that it would be good to have a summary of the key 'takeaways' at the bottom of the lesson pdf. But then I realised that unless I write them out myself, then they probably wouldn't sink in. Chris