Top 12 Best Practices for learning with Cpod

On the tone thing; In practice, I agree with you 100%. I've been told by Chinese teachers that "they know what I mean" when I casually throw tones around. But my reply to them has been, "you get in the taxi cab with some dude who just wants to know where to drive you, and then you forget what to say, and you will know tones go right out the window"

Maybe add a sentence along the lines of "10 words per day, to 25-50 words per week"? In practice, very few people are able to maintain 70 words/week for more than a couple of weeks. Or at least no one on this site reported that many, although a couple of people were on track to do so. Plus, I suspect learning Chinese is your full time job at that rate.

I don't agree. Tones are the reason people don't understand you and that you don't understand them.

replacement for No. 10. Learn reading characters early. They are the key to understanding this language and of utmost importance when it comes to deal with the abundance of homonyms.

No. 13. Be aware that it does takes years if not decades - especially if you are a part time learner outside of China.

I wrote: "Don't WORRY about the tones", that does not imply that you don't pay attention to them! I also wrote: "try to imitate"!

Here I am, three years into my decades : )

I think one of the more interesting aspects of the cpod 5-year anniversary celebration is the opportunity to hear cpod students use their developing Chinese. We can hear everybody's Chinese for better or worse, and see how these tones are coming along!

Do you include yourself in this "everybody", pretzellogic? I hope we'll get to hear your Chinese, too!

I plan to, as soon as I can get my computer to record!

Number 4: simon, not sure why you'd want to wait even one day to start attempting speaking based on what you've heard. But I suppose I don't have data either way that supports speaking based on listening right off the bat. I certainly didn't say start speaking Chinese right as soon as you've downloaded the first cpod lesson. It would be an interesting experiment to see if accurate language acquisition is verifiably acquired faster than delaying speaking.

Well, here's the theory behind it: The brain controls the speech organs based on the sound they are to produce, not based on which muscles are used. That means that the brain must first form an accurate image of what a sound is supposed to sound like before it can decide on how to use the speech organs to form that sound. This requires a lot of listening. Think of how much listening a child does before starting to speak.

Early speaking will, because of this, be inaccurate. Your own speaking quickly becomes habit, though, and the brain will tell the speech organs to make those inaccurate sounds it's gotten used to using. This is why you get immigrants who've been living in a country for 20 years and have a great command of it, but terrible pronunciation.

This theory is far from uncontroversial and might well be wrong. As far as I know, there are no comprehensive studies made in this area. If someone can point me to one, I might well change my mind.

Here's a quote from renowned linguist Stephen Krashen:

"The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." Stephen Krashen

For those present in the very early days of CPod, you might recognize the "comprehensible input" mantra used by Ken in every other podcast. I suspect Ken was heavily influenced by Krashen when he created ChinesePod.

I had a professor once who said stuff like, "Economists has Physics envy. In Physics, 3 laws describe 99% of what you see. In economics, 99 laws describe 3% of what you see". It was probably because his undergrad major was Physics, then he became an economist. I'm starting to think linguists belong in the economist category.

I remember Ken talking more about "lexical density" than anything else, but it was your reference to the portion around the cpod site that led me to Stephen Krashen. I casually looked at Stephen Krashen's research, and I guess I have more unanswered questions around language acquisition in general. But I understand linguists have plenty of unanswered questions and hypotheses as well.

Honestly, when looking for practical advice on second language acquisition, linguists aren't really the people to ask. The correct thing to do is to go to Polyglot Forums and check out what people there are saying. There are a plethora of methods there. You'll find both delay-speaking methods and early-output methods and both sides have their adherents. Accomplished polyglot Moses McCormick (not sure of the spelling on his last name) uses a method with very early output.

Thanks for the link. I do recall your original shadowing post of some months ago, and think I saw this polyglot forum around that time.

What I guess at this point I was hoping for was more peer-reviewed research around methods that are verified to be more effective than other methods. So far as I can tell, you're right, linguists don't seem to be interested in the effectiveness search. There doesn't seem to be much research around effectiveness, or i'm using the wrong search terms to find that. Even though I posted this "Best Practices" thread, I would love to see some evidence verified. Certainly, polyglot experiences should, and do count for plenty, but I am also thinking that there's a lot of chaff in this wheat somewhere.

对了，SRS is also key... I'd suggest Anki to anyone who seriously wants to study Chinese characters.... best program I've found after using multiple programs.

6) get a Chinese girlfriend: I've casually heard that the teacher/student relationship heads south as your Chinese girlfriend moves up the ladder to become your Chinese spouse. :) But of course, everyone is different, your mileage may vary.

Boy, I can't disagree more on the "learning pinyin" before anything else, but it would really be interesting to hear from people who learned pinyin first along with their Chinese pronunciation, then had to correct significant errors once they landed in China.

I'd like to recommend people to take a look at Mental Case, too. I paid a huge sum for Anki for iPhone only to find it didn't support creating new cards. That has been fixed now, but I still prefer Mental Case. Largely because it looks stunning, whereas Anki looks like someone threw up in my iPhone. And you still can't create new decks in Anki for iPhone.