Spoken Chinese only on Chinesepod?

I have no idea what the party line is, but I agree with your point Henning about Advanced, and Media which we just started using on my Practice Plan. I realize I was probably too quick in arguing that CPod focus was spoken Chinese in my earlier response to Business Chinese. I almost treat it as a one stop shop, though I do get my daily dose of CSLPod as Chinese only; not to mention my own sources of online news. I don't need any formal source of grammar or writing, I'm happy with inductive learning, but I can see that others feel differently, and that's something CPod may have to cover at some stage.

Calkins: I'm not tying to take digs at anyone or belittle anyone. Please don't misunderstand. I think you took what I said about Clay the wrong way, I was saying that maybe at first reading and writing were easier than speaking but most likely after he had more opportunities to use his spoken Chinese, that the spoken Chinese then surpassed his written Chinese. The bottom line is that everyone learns how to speak at least one language but there are people out there who are fluent their native language but also illiterate in it. Literacy can be such a tremendous help to perfecting your spoken language. When I first joined this site, I had very high hopes of using the message boards as a learning tool. The Cpod community is fille with really wonderful people like Azerdocmom, Auntie68, Taipan, Henning, Goulniky, Greg Mcgrath, Auntiesue, Changye, Johnb, Bazza, (Lantian...although it's been a long time since we've heard from him) among many, many others who keep this community vibrant and I really wanted to post as much in Hanzi as possible to learn from the community of others as passionate about this language as I am. What I found out after joining, is that posting in Hanzi is not only not poromoted by the Chinesepod staff...but actually discouraged. The reason I say this is because when I first joined I posted a lot on the upper intermediate and advanced forums in Chinese..I'd post MANY, MANY questions about the lessons and never receive an answer from the staff...I thought, "Okay...my messages keep getting lost in the shuffle". Later on I started asking Jenny questions directly by posting this way; "Jennyzhu": Then the body of my question... But never received answers back, yet she would post answers on the same board back to many other users...as long as they posted in ENGLISH! After some time went by I thought it was just that she was busy and didn't have time to post responses to everyone so I started asking questions of Connie...who also never responded. Every now and again they would post responses back to other users who asked questions in Chinese...but only if they were very short (and as you have seen my messages are never short...). Gradually I came to realize the staff here just doesn't want the boards littered with too many post in Chinese, I suppose to make them as readable as possible to the masses. It's perfectly okay if Chinesepod doesn't want to focus on reading and writing but why in the world discourage it? The reason I'm a bit up in arms here is that when I or others post suggesting more resources to help us in reading and writing there seems to be a great resistance to it, I get posts back essentially saying "We don't need that here"...which is quite baffling to me Now I'm going to go on record again by saying that I love Chinesepod. I very much support this site. The main reasons I joined in the firstplace was A- To get transcripts (which I could have gotten by purchasing the cheaper program than the one I purchased) B- (Most impotantly) To support what they do here! There are other Chinesepod clone sites out there I could join, but none that are as well done as this one! This site has the best content, the best talent and the best model of them all...so the things I'm suggesting are things I hope my favorite website will include to make the learning process more complete. PS Clayroup: I'm honestly not tying to take digs at you. :)

(And "argue" may be the wrong word there. Let's call it a "counterpoint.")

'contend'?

This is my non-professional opinion (I don't work on the academic team or make these sorts of decisions, so I'm just speaking as a fellow Chinese learner here): learning to read and write is much easier to do on your own than learning to speak and listen. Chinese is a pretty straightforward language to read, once you get over the characters. No verb conjugations to decipher and no cases to mess you up. For the most part (though there are some tricky structures), if you know the words then you'll understand the sentence. I would tend to argue that if you can't read something you either don't have a sufficient vocabulary or a sufficient grasp on the grammar structures being used, both of which can be rectified through *more reading*! :) Listening, and by extension speaking, is a different can of worms, and lends itself to being taught via podcast. I'd like to see more material on CPod to support reading, but if I had to pick one (given the wealth of reading material on the web, and the relative dearth of listening material), I'd want the listening.

Johnb is right. Its the listening that is the toughest to come by, and therefore to learn. I studied one full year at Hawaii when I arrived in china for the first time. I couldn't understand a thing. Like, literally not one sentence. And likewise, they couldn't understand me. But I could write! If i wanted to go to the shopping center, I would have write it down in chinese characters. My vocabulary was virtually useless, as it only existed in written form. ChinesePod recognized this problem with traditional students, and therefore provides the means necessary to COMMUNICATE. That is not to say they preach the student to not write, but again like JohnB says, thats easy to do on your own. Listening and speaking are not.

clayroup: However the support here for reading and writing is a bit lacking. In response to one of my earlier posts a member of the Chinesepod staff posted that Chinesepod makes no pretenses at being a place to learn reading and writing, just that it has transcripts available of all the Podcasts and that's the extent of it. As I've pontificated many times before, reading and writing are essential to learning to speak. Learning each aspect of a language goes hand in hand with the others to create our full, human system of communication. In the end each helps the other and makes it stronger. Besides, why would anyone want to voluntarilly be il...um...readingly challenged?

I think JohnB and Clay make good points. Xiaohu, I'm sorry, but your claim that "reading and writing are essential to learning to speak" is absolutely 100% wrong. You know how long the human race existed, talking happily, without writing, right? Writing is a technology. YES, an educated speaker must read widely, but we're focusing on the listening and speaking that comes long before that.

Okay, but the fact that there are more Newbie lessons that anything else shows me that you're aware that a healthy part of your audience has little to no prior experience in the language. For a lot of us, myself included, this IS our Chinese education. We're missing a whole facet of that learning.

John: Perhaps I should have said it a different way...learning to read is an integral part of the overall learning process and reading is essential to higher learning. However, I don't see how my point any more or less reasonable than Clay or JohnB? JohnB says: "Chinese is a pretty straightforward language to read, once you get over the characters. No verb conjugations to decipher and no cases to mess you up." So to learn how to read 3,500 or more characters is easier than to learn to change verb form? Go, going, gone, will go, have been is easier than 去，去了， 会去，去过？ By the way it takes most people years and years to get over the Characters, while it takes most people only a few days to pick up 26 letters. Most languages have the benefit of phoenetics which Chinese doesn't have and Chinese has been rated as the hardest language in the world to learn to read and write and yet has been rated as fairly easy to learn to speak...because it has no conjugations or cases to mess you up. Clay says: "I couldn't understand a thing. Like, literally not one sentence. And likewise, they couldn't understand me. But I could write! If i wanted to go to the shopping center, I would have write it down in chinese characters." I'd be curious to see the extent of Clay's writing abilities...as he hasn't shown them to us yet in the message boards. I would be willing to wager a large lump of cash that after coming to China Clay most likely found speaking to be the easier to master. Besides, in any language not just Chinese, reading and writing are considered to be the more difficult aspects of language. I guess Clay was an exception. My hope is that more Poddies will wish to explore the Chinese Characters and that we have a lot more blogging going on around here in Hanzi.

Actually, gentlemen, I'd argue that by the time you reach the Advanced and Media lessons, you no longer *need* any real "teaching" on the characters. It's down at the Newbie through Intermediate stages where that support is lacking and that's where it's really most useful.

I love ChinesePod and we all think it's an invaluable tool for learning the language. However, I don't think anyone should expect to become proficient (spoken or written) and fluent from CPod alone. There are so many other tools out there, most of them accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. That's one of the great things about CPod...we all share those tools with each other. CPod can't be everything to everyone. If there's something you want to learn that isn't provided here, look elsewhere. There are a million ways to learn reading and writing characters, many of them free. I'm not saying not to voice your opinion about improvements you'd like to see - definitely voice them, but get what you want elsewhere until that improvement comes to CPod (if it does). xiaohu, I'm not Clay but even I take offense to your presumption about him. Why even say something like that? I also take personal offense to what you said in this thread, "...there are very few Chinesepod users are fluent in or even interested in reading (I think the extent of those people have already posted responses to you on this thread)." Again, presumptuous. I'm pretty sure there are more than 5 users interested in reading and writing Chinese. I know I am...and I'm getting that education through other means. Just because someone doesn't respond to you in hanzi (or at all), doesn't mean that they have no desire learning to write. Not everyone is at your "level"...so please try not to belittle (purposely or not) those who are at a lower level than you.

First of all, no argument that writing helps. However, there are plenty of illiterate people who speak their native language and others as well. My Dad speaks fluent Tagalog to this day from his WWII service: no lessons, no writing, hasn't returned since. I don't believe that's uncommon. Second, given the rather significant difference between spoken and written Chinese (something I didn't see mentioned above), a dialogue-based approach to writing instruction past the Newbie/Elementary level seems problematic. IMO, Cpod's strength is teaching dialogue, and that's what it should stick with.

Xiaohu, Lets get to where we are taking digs at each other now. Ha, I wish my spoken ability existed when I came to China. I have no motive to mislead anyone, so what I said you can assure to be true. Feel free to email Prof Ted Yao at UHawaii. He would laugh at that presumption. (in fact, im going to send him a link to this to see what he has to say on this subject. He is author of the Integrated Chinese textbooks btw) And I also think you mistaken when you say, "....in any language not just Chinese, reading and writing are considered to be the more difficult aspects of language." I'm not saying I speak the gospel, but in China at least, you are more likely to encounter someone with written/reading abilities that far exceed their spoken abilities. (everyone one of our Chinese employees would this fit this profile in regards to their English ability, including Jenny Zhu) This is one pitfall with the traditional school method of learning a language. Its easy to gravitate towards reading and writing. You can go at your own pace.

Clearly, it's all preference for where you're at in your studies and your life. I personally love the language but have no interest in learning the characters. I don't bother trying to decipher posts that have hanzi, I don't want to type Hanzi, I don't want to text Hanzi... I listen to the lessons on the ipod, and even if the characters were popping up on screen, I wouldn't read them while driving or walking the dog. I absolutely agree with goulniky and xiaohu that i would benefit in my speaking and higher learning if i spent the time to learn the characters, but I would benefit on my speaking just as much or more if I spent that same time working on speaking. It would be cool to see writing resources here, but that would take the cost of a whole other team building materials for those who want to learn to write and read beyond the flashcards and transcripts. As an audio/web interactive learning and listening site, that time and money is probably best spent on more audio/web resources. Ulitimately, it is inevitable that it will all converge, but as first movers in a growing market, we have to settle for the production timeline that's acheivable.

I agree with all of the following: Spoken comes first and is often neglected, CPods strength is spoken language, podcasting suits spoken communication best, traditional teaching often misses the point, you can learn Hanzi by yourself with books or third party websites. However, there is the catch: John and Clay, you both already got a full backpack of "traditional" knowledge when you realized the need to focus more on spoken communication. And most of the more Advanced learners brought along Hanzi, too. However, many pure CPod learners do not share that background. They start from absolutely zero. And quite a few have become convinced here that Hanzi are a troublesome "nice-to-have" that might be "maybe tackled somewhere later in the future". Cf. Taipans post above. This is the point when we throw out the child with the bathwater. A fallacy that even got its own name: "Elementry-Intermediate gap". Written language is an integral part of any language, and in my opinion it is absolutely crucial for acquiring Chinese as an adult - it is the very core ingredient for picking up, remembering, and distinguishing larger vocab amounts. It starts at the Elementry level when the dialogue between Ken and Jenny follows this pattern: "Those too sound absolutely the same" "They do. But the characters are different" "You absolutely have to see it written down" Besides: Why would CPod want to send its students elsewhere along the way? "Go acquire written language for yourself. Buy books. Take classes. And maybe come back later for our more advanced level." (?) My point is not that CPod should abondon its path. But that it might be advisable to *support* it with additional, more written content on all levels. Even if it got that light "traditional" smell.

Xiaohu, what's with this obsession with goading other people into writing Chinese? If people want to write in Chinese with you they will, and if they don't they won't. Big deal. 你写啥我都能看懂，但是我对跟你练习中文写作可没趣咯，况且你又侮辱了他人，怎么还想大家会踊跃地来跟你交流？呸。。。

All that said, I'm a fan of reading and writing. I love reading. But our resources are limited (stupid immutable laws of economics!) and thus what we can do is limited. I hope that we do have more material to learn reading and writing in the future. But I think it will probably be "in the future." :)

You guys advocating writing - do you have a vision of how it would actually work to learn Chinese writing via distance learning? I am trying to figure out how that could be done effectively. Wouldn't you need need someone to look at how you make your practice characters, including stroke order and shape? I can type and text Chinese when needed, but writing characters with a pen is mostly beyond me, besides my name - can't even write one to ten. If it became important for me to learn this I would learn from a real live person.

Actually, xiaohu, I find that I tend to gloss over posts by fellow users who write in Hanzi. My skills are so weak in this regard that my choices come down to spending inordinate amounts of time going back and forth between browser tabs to translate it, or ignore it altogether. So far the latter wins. What I would love to see, however, is the same great ChinesePod method applied to this area of the Chinese language. That's just one user's opinion, of course. Your mileage may vary.