The old Elementary to Intermediate Issue

I live in the SF Bay Area and the Intermediate lessons are pretty easy for me now. I usually can follow them completely on the first hearing. My advice, is keep trying to "punch above your weight". Also, try to read the dialog while listening and follow along that way. Even memorizing the dialog fromt the transcript may help.

Next week I will be putting it to the test. I will be traveling to Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Suzhou with some Chinese friends who agreed to an "immersion" for me. We'll see how I do in the "real world". I've been in the "real world" before and I found it pretty intimidating. I'm usually good for the first sentence, then the reply comes back at warp speed, and my confidence it shot. But I'm back for another round. I'll be visiting the new Cpod factory as well. If I don't understand Jenny's and Vera's perfect, instructional, sympathetic Chinese, I know I am a hopeless case.

scottyb, I find Henning's backward approach very helpful too. A main reason is that intermediate lessons are quite vocab intense. In newbie and ele, we firmly limit the density of the language in terms of vocab and sentence structure. But intermediate is when we push the boundary to introduce native speech as spoken by natives if you will. Therefore, you hear the speech at natural speed, vocab and sentence constructions (and topics) that a native speaker uses to communicate. This can seem daunting and uncomfortable at the beginning, but don't get frustrated or overwhelmed. It's completely natural that you won't get the bulk of the language after the first listening. But hopefully John's and my analysis will help you. And the exercises will further drum it in. Give yourself time and try a new approach, e.g. Henning's backward approach. You'll definitely make the leap.

If the elementary lessons are easy, then you are definitely ready to move on to intermediate. I have been studying intermediate lessons for over a year now. I think you must change your expectations somewhat. I do practice plan 5 days a week and it usually takes me about a week per intermediate lesson. Learning the vocabulary and sentence structures takes time, at least to soak into my dull brain. And guess what, I still have to review and review. These structures keep popping up again and again so you keep getting to revisit them. I always keep an additional list of vocabulary words that I may not recognize from the dialog and the expansion sentences, which I find extremely challenging in most cases. When I started studying intermediate lessons I could easily have 75-100 words per lesson. I felt overwhelmed. Now I maybe have 25. You know why? I'm actually recognizing more vocabulary. I consider that progress. And the frustration that you feel not understanding the dialog... guess what? That's the same feeling you will have at first listening to real Chinese conversation. Don't go for 100% comprehension. Listen for the vocabulary words, see if you can pick those out. Then listen for the constructions that John and Jenny highlight. Keep doing it and be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to not understand everything, but listen for clues to the meaning. Soon you will be getting the gist of the conversation, you may not understand the details. That's OK. It will get better, but it takes time. Think how long it takes a baby to speak, how many times they must hear a word used again and again in different contexts. Chinesepod will revisit this vocabulary again and again in different contexts. And you can always revisit elementary and even Newbie lessons, because they too have great vocabulary. And when your vocabulary recognition gets to a critical mass, the intermediate lessons will be so much more fun for you. I promise. Just don't give up, forge ahead. So many of us have felt your pain. It is not you, it is not the lesson, it is just the process of learning Chinese. Relax, enjoy, and good luck!

你们太好了！ Thanks for the advice and, possibly more importantly, the encouragement. 我会坚持。

And I thought I was brilliant for coming up with "Henning's" method all on my own, apparently not! :) Another crushing blow to my ego! Actually, scottyb, I wouldn't have survived any of my live classes without following the "backwards" approach. For me it's the logical "forwards" approach. I'm also repetition-heavy. I'll go back & forth between listening to a dialog while reading along, and then just listening (no reading). Each time I listen without reading, I might notice a few more words that I can't immediately process, so back I go to read the text. And so on...

Maybe you should try the approach henning suggested somewhere else for those of us who are trying to move from upper intermediate to advanced: Do the lessons backwards. First go to the vocabulary section, then the dialogue, and only after you have worked through it, listen to the podcast the first time. I have started doing it and am slowly back to the old routine of first listening - which, I think, shows progress. 加油!

I'm working on the same problem, only going from Upper Intermediate to Advanced. Assuming you have a premium subscription, my variation of Henning's backwards approach is: 1) Listen to the Podcast first to see if, in fact, it is difficult. (Depends upon the topic.) 2) Drill the vocab using Flash cards 3) Copy the PDF using traditional characters (I'm more comfortable with them) 4) Flash cards then dialogue only (i.e. not full Podcast) 5) Line-by-line dialogue while reading the PDF 6) Flash cards and dialogue only 7) Copy the PDF in simplified characters 8) Flash cards 9) Listen to the Podcast 10) Either understand it or move on If I go through all the steps above, I've never failed to understand a lesson. (I don't obsess about the banter.) However, it may not be appropriate if you're not interested in writing.

Actually step 10 also includes doing the exercises and the test. As an aside, when doing the exercises, one of the Cpod's tools that I find really useful is double-clicking on an unfamiliar term; that term is added to your vocab/flash-card list.

Actually, from all I have seen here so far, the key to getting ahead does not at all lie in a specific method of approaching the lessons. That is also highly dependend on personality. Some love flashcards, others read more in dictionaries, the next group transcribes dialogues or even the banter. For me a rudimentry backwards approach worked quite OK. The good news is: By now quite a few Poddies crossed level borders, either from Elementry to Intermediate or from Intermediate to Advanced. Some sooner, some later. From all I observed there are two commonalities among all of them: 1. They all tackled characters (reading, not necessarily writing by hand) at one point or another. 2. They continued to study with steady effort. My old mantra: It is all simply a matter of not giving up. From what I saw so far (case evidence only), 2 years is the time you need from zero to Intermediate with reasonable daily CPod input (60 to 120 minutes). Add another 1-2 years to get to Advanced and you have a reasonable perspective. Some are of course more diligent and gifted (Bazza, goulnik), so they advance faster. But what really matters in the end is continuity. No wonder that we did not have pure-blood-CPod-based level crossers a year ago. Right now there is one particular gap that I am really worried about right now: the gap between Advanced and real life. That one seems to be the widest, deepest, and scariest.

Just to add encouragement (and I don't I need that soimetimes!), a year or two ago I was going through the (early) intermediate lessons trying to move up from elementary - I would use a mixture of techniques as discussed above, but I would also try to understand the discussion in chinese. To do this I would play the lesson again and again until I could distinguish the pinyin and then look up the words (I used to upload the vocab on to the comments as well for others). Now the intermediate lessons are pretty easy for me and I can usually get 90% at first hearing. The upper intermediate require a fair amount of work but I am starting to tackle the advanced ones in the same way as I used to do the intermediate. I like the advanced ones as the topics are more interesting than the upper intermediate (and I wish that there was NO English in the upper intermedate). Incidentally I live in a very non-Chinese environment in England.

Elementary should really be called Upper-Beginner because it is simply more difficult Beginner stuff. The format is identical to Beginner and as Miss Jenny has said it is purposefully limited to what it attempts to put across to the learner. The step up to Intermediate should be no different to your first weeks of learning at the Beginner level. You don't understand much and there's a lot to take in, and get used to. I am at the Upper-Beginner level at the moment and it is a bit of a plateau as I am now able to pick up on what is being taught a lot quicker and things are clicking together a lot easier. It's a little like school.. when you start school you are in Primary/Elementary. You learn all the basics and foundation for things to come. Then you hit High school and those basic topics are built upon but new things that you've never even seen become the new things for the foundation.. then you get to College/University and again you have to start from the basic level but in things that a Primary school person would have no hope in fully comprehending.