User Comments - mike3838

Posted on: It's Time You Got a Smartphone

Thanks for your suggestions everyone.

I'll check out those links, and plug away with some extra time on the dialogue and exercies online.

Posted on: It's Time You Got a Smartphone

Hi Chinesepod,

I'm pretty sure that this must have been raised before, but I'm struggling with the gulf between the Elementary and Intermediate programmes. I'm at the stage where most Elementary lessons don't have that much more to teach me (except for maybe one or two vocab words), but where Intermediate is a massive step in difficulty.

I'm talking about the jump to:

1) Dialogues 4-5 times longer than Elementary

2) Only one read through of the dialogue instead of three.

3) No dialogue translation in the audio.

4) Number of new words in each dialogue up from 1-2 in Elementary to 10-15 in Intermediate.

5) Conversations in the dialogues conducted at full speed rather than slowed down.

6) Much less English in the commentaries, with no time for the listener to digest the Chinese one sentence at a time.

The end result is that I find both the Elementary and Intermediate lessons impossible to learn from.

I appreciate that there will be some easier Intermediates and some more challenging Elementaries, but some way to identify them would be great, and allow learners to ease themselves through the transition. Is there any advice on the site anywhere as to which lessons might be best for this?

Thanks!

Mike