Progress with CPod?

I started as a complete newbie in October 2005 and I still only class myself as Elementary, but I think I'm almost Intermediate.

I just got a call via skype. The guy wants (or if he gives up wanted) to teach me 中文. But my chinese isn´t that good that we could have talked in chinese and he ( 白俊 ) wanted, to try to speak english to me. So I used english, but most of the time he didn´t understand what I was talking, so we used skypemessages to get by and that helped a bit. I understood that he wanted to e-mail me something (I had given him my email-adress) so I checked for emails , what caused the skypecall to end, my internetconnection was getting low, but for a short time I still reached him per skypemessage, then he went offline. I hope he calls again tomorrow or so, but it realy showed me teaching isn´t easy and I have to approve my chinese skills, cause with his english skills (sorry but they realy aren´t great) and my actual putonghua level it´s the hardest communication ever. (I guess he used a translating software for understanding what I wrote...) That far from my expirience. I don´t know how long it takes to make some progress but at least I know if I say 好or 我不懂 or 我会说一点一点一点 it´s understood ;-)

Bazza, you are under estimating yourself again. Of course there are difference in levels based on if you're in China or not. So Bazza, when you going to come LIVE in China?

Yeah, seriously, Bazza, why aren't you in China? What's keeping you away?

Lack of courage. hehe

Work maybe ... but it's just a supposition.

Started from absolute scratch (though on a very solid Japanese basis) around summer '06 and worked my way up to Upper Intermediate with using almost exclusively CPod - dialogues only, as I never touched any premium stuff. I do own a grammar book but it proved to be rather useless, unfortunately. I have no time to keep up with CPod on a daily basis so I have to work in blocks of very concentrated effort: listening to all Newbie and Elementary dialogues in a couple of months and absorbing everything that was possible to absorb from those... then moving on to Intermediate dialogues - starting off with one per day, then increasing the pace. I stopped listening to the English-language banter a long time ago, although it is immensely entertaining and I regret missing all the good info contained in it. However, I still listen to all new lower-level dialogues as I regularly find good vocabulary items in them. I keep up with Intermediate dialogues, too, listening to podcasts in whole once as I do find the banter very helpful (and entertaining). For reasons outlined below, I am not listening to anything beyond Intermediary at the moment. Now, I've been said to have courage in life-endangering quantities and CPod also got me hooked on China: I first went there in Nov '06, just to have a look around and test my Chinese and I've found time to come back to Shanghai and other places ever since every 3 months or so. Travels to China corrected my initial scepticism on the usefulness of some of the CPod vocabulary vocabulary items: I realised how great it was to know words like 'lajitong' and 'weishengzhi' and am now squeezing each CPod lesson for details like that. Nothing compares to an amazed face of a native speaker when they hear something very colloquial or a very specific term for a particular object out of a gaijin mouth. Following Henning's scheme, I would describe my current capabilities as follows. - Listening comprehension: Upper Intermediate in CPod terms. Can watch simple movies but still overwhelmed by the news on TV, serious talk shows, etc. Incidentally, picked up enough Zanheihua on my travels to be able to identify it confidently and understand some basic formulas and constructions. - Vocab / speaking: enough to get through most situations and social small talk. But then again - I thought I had enough a year ago... I'm very creative with my vocab no matter how little I know, so it's difficult to assess. - Reading: can read (= enjoy) a simple novel, without heavy use of the dictionary. Reading and passive recognition of words and phrases has to be my strongest skill. Forcing myself to read (= decipher) 3 news items every day. - Pronunciation: I have made myself some intolerant friends, so my accent's become very decent (paying a lot of attention to tones), unless I'm tired or emotional... - Grammar: frequently messing up the word order in prepositional constructions - have to do a concentrated study on this at some point, I guess... And there must be plenty mistakes of all kinds which I am not aware of. - Writing: forming sentences is consistent with my speaking and grammar skills (basically, I can't say anything that I don't know how to write); hand-writing and brush-writing the characters is very strong. At present, I have (sadly) moved away from CPod and only occasionally listen to new podcasts (Newbie through to Intermediate) and occasionally review the old ones. I feel that I have achieved some functional fluency adequate in most uncomplicated situations and have shifted my study time towards more structural vocabulary and character study. My real interest also lies in Wenyanwen more than in the spoken modern language. So with that in mind, as I have written elsewhere, I am concentrating on my character studies, with a goal in mind of mastering around 6,000 characters by year-end. I'm also trying to pick up vocabulary that comes with these characters, looking up examples of the real-life usage, etc. Paying a lot of attention to tones, too. It feels like I'm doing hair-splitting work on miniscule building blocks but I find it is providing me a very solid foundation. As a break from the above hair-splitting, I will probably go through all Upper-Intermediate lessons in a space of a couple of weeks at some point this year. Realistically, I don't think I'll find time for Advanced/Media lessons before '08. But if my current strategy pays off, I should find no difficulty dealing with those levels when I get to them. To summarise, CPod on its own has accounted for about 80% of my present speaking-listening ability. The remaining 20% has come from real-life interactions that I've actively been seeking ever since getting on the Elementary level. Most importantly, I don't think I would have ever considered learning modern-day conversational Chinese without CPod. My interest in Chinese would have most likely remained limited to its earliest forms and their influence on the Japanese language. So not a bad result overall: well done to CPod. (^-^)/

furyougaijin, So lovely to see you again! It has been a year since you dropped by in the office. Anyone who knows your amazing linguistic ability wouln't be stunned by the kind of discipline you showed in this post. Take care and do come back once in while.

hey. i live in hong kong. i take mandarin at school but I think I need to improve my pronunciation because i'm bad at that... listened to few podcasts from cPod and beginning to like it!

aeflow, great summary of options. A question for you: where do you get those 5-10 minute international news reports? Something like that, especially in a podcast form where I could click the iPod back over sentences again and again (and again and again) could be really useful for me. If it's not too much trouble, I (and others here?) would really appreciate a direct link - I've gone to Chinese-language radio/ podcast sites and, not surprisingly, everything's in Chinese, which makes it hard to find any links to radio shows of the right length. (I've found long, as in one hour, Chinese-language podcasts from the CBC and I think the BBC, but not shorter more manageable ones.)

LostInAsia, I just listen to the first ten minutes of a 60-minute broadcast. For VOA, you can go to: http://www.voanews.com/chinese/program_schedule.cfm and click on the ones that begin with 国际新闻. However, that's streaming audio only. If you want MP3s that you can download, you can go to http://www.voanews.com/english/Webcasts.cfm and then select "Mandarin" from the drop-down menu. There's also a "Program Archive" link at the bottom of the page. That still gives you a 60-minute-long MP3, but perhaps there's some audio editing software you could use to cut them down to the first 10 minutes which is the newscast, if you're short of space on your iPod. Naturally the VOA site will not be accessible from behind the Great Firewall.

What has helped me the most recently is "The Fix." While I enjoy hearing Jenny and Ken or John talk about the vocab on a run-through, the Fix really has gotten me to be more applicable with Chinese. Even though I lived in China for over 4 years, the Fix has me saying sentences I never would say just chatting with a friend. Since using that in just a short time, I have found my listening comprehension better and grammar being a lot better. As I desire to be a translator, other than John using English and Jenny Chinese, the Fix has been the most help in my growth here on CPod. -Rich

I came to China 3 years ago speaking conversationally and being able to read almost nothing. The other day I visited CSLpod.com for the first time and listened to a podcast and understood only a little. After reading it though, I understood almost everything. I couldn't friggin believe it. It was like a real Chinese article!

Zhu 小姐！ 真不敢当... :-) I'll make sure to drop by next time I'm around - which is, hopefully, very soon: it'll be lovely to see you again and it's about time my skills are put to a real test... :-)

maxiewawa, Thanks for mentioning CSLPod.com, it's quite interesting. Their material consists mostly of advanced level stuff and a handful of "intermediate" level stuff. The advanced level material consists of a short online news article read out loud, with a minimal preamble and no vocabulary or grammatical points. But I like it a lot anyway. They're based in Beijing, so their Chinese sounds pretty standard. The "intermediate" material (which is only about 10% of the total) is a bit odd. It consists of an elementary-level dialog spoken at slow speed, followed by grammatical and vocabulary explanations. But all the explanatory stuff is spoken in Chinese at intermediate level and normal speed! It's hard to tell who this is aimed at: If you can follow the explanations, the dialog itself seems too easy. So it really doesn't compete with ChinesePod at all. Some parts of their site are still "coming soon", perhaps they'll offer more in the future.

It's hard to say where progress comes from if you also use other resources (other than ChinesePod) for learning. I use ChinesePod mostly to work on listening comprehension. The banter in the lesson, the sentence-by-sentence Dialog section and the Expansion section are quite useful for that. I rely mostly on external sources for vocabulary building: short online newspaper articles (usually 5-10 paragraphs each), and also children's books to learn and review vocabulary from everyday life that rarely appears in newspaper text. Also online radio news broadcasts for 5-10 minute international news reports, for additional listening comprehension. Using external sources of text allows a greater volume of text than ChinesePod can provide, and also allows fine-tuning: if you read an article about a specific topic, you can usually find several more articles on the same topic and read them in the following days, to really reinforce specific vocabulary. I think many people can read at a higher level than they can listen (mostly because you can read more slowly than the speed of speech, and because with characters there is no homophone ambiguity).