User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

baba, your comment;

"1stly possibly a very long lesson [?potentially boring], and 2ndly the problem of regional variation."

to me suggests that the organization of the lesson should have been clearly made around these basic rules, then regional variations.

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

baba, it might be my lack of knowledge around mahjong. But the point for me is that creative use of video can turn a dull, dry, long, tedious explanation of mahjong rules into something that could be described as "tedious but short?" "dull and short?" "interesting?" Maybe at the end of a 30 second visual about the basic mahjong rules, someone might say, "ok, I got the basics, now what?"

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

Interesting. Maybe it's just me then. But it would have been nice if the lesson intro had said, "this lesson is for someone who has a basic grasp of mahjong". I barely know what mahjong is. And i'm not really interested in learning to play the game. I naively thought this lesson was going to actually teach someone who didn't know anything about mahjong something.

Funny, that's the difference between me and everyone else here? Everyone commenting actually likes the game, and the people not commenting couldn't care less about mahjong? Maybe. I seem to be commenting about the lesson itself. Sometimes you're the oddball for interesting reasons. Or maybe not.

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

along the lines of "what is being taught?", if "key grammar rules applicable to Mahjong" are being taught, then it might have been helpful to have an explanation of key grammar rules applicable to mahjong this way:

- a visual with simplified characters, pinyin and english in a basic sentence or sentence pattern applicable to mahjong

- highlighting in a different color, or italics, or bold, the key portions of basic sentence pattern

- - John Jenny provide voice over highlighting the section in bold/italics

- - John providing voice over for stuff he's great at, like "don't fall into this trap, .....".

All of this is done in Chinese for upper intermediate, or John speaking English and Jenny speaking Chinese for intermediate.

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

hehe, it should be perfectly clear from my comments that I don't know the first thing about playing mahjong ;-)

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

along the lines of "what is being taught?", if the game rules are being taught, then it might have been helpful to have an explanation of mahjong basic rules this way:

- have a visual where 2 or more people are handed out all the tiles. the people are represented by stick figures, not actual individuals

 - - have Jenny or John do a voice over explaning this tile handout. 

- have the visual start with a couple of rounds of game playing.  This is where the visual is a green screen, where the game board, tiles and players can be manipulated in space quickly, taking advantage of things only video offers: fast picture drawing ("a picture is worth 1000 words")

  - - John or Jenny again do a voice over while the visual goes through a few game scenarios. 

All of this is done in Chinese for upper intermediate, or John speaking english and Jenny speaking Chinese for intermediate. 

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

Another thing behind this lesson that I mentioned earlier, and goes to the heart of the value of video. Maybe the first question to ask is, "What is being taught?"

In this lesson, lots of things were taught, but I don't pull out of them a cohesive whole that serves one clear teaching purpose. Game vocabulary? Grammar? One grammar point, or many? Grammar game vocabulary? Critical game grammar vocabulary? Are the pieces that Jenny explained in the video the most important pieces in the game, or merely the pieces that came up in this game scenario? The cultural importance of mahjong in southern China?

Is there something tricky about Mahjong game grammar that we need to know that isn't really obvious?

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

It's easy to see who's the contrarian on this thread....

One thing I took from the video and the lesson overall, is that I didn't really learn how to play Mahjong.   It seems the video tried to do a bit of both teaching the game, and teaching some language.  But maybe games of cultural importance really need one thing to be taught.  This lesson itself doesn't teach someone to play Mahjong, but it could  have if the following had been addressed:

- how many tiles in a Mahjong game anyway? 50? 75?  Do all the tiles get handed out to all players? If not, how many tiles are left over? Is anything done with leftover tiles?

- What's the object of the game? getting rid of all the tiles? How is that done?

No doubt my weak Chinese might be the reason I might have missed Jenny/John's clear explanations behind these two sets of questions. 

I saw that key tiles got some explanation during the lesson, but that explanation seemed more to come from this particular game situation, not because the tiles are critically important in all game situations.  Or is that the case? If we're going to have a game lesson, then merely explaining the rules in Chinese should give us plenty of grammar and Chinese to go through.  In other words, there is no need for a scenario where actors pretend to play a portion of the game. 

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

I agree with you about the quality of Frenchpod and Italianpod. I liked Spanishpod, so I was sad to see it stop producing lessons also. And yet Frenchpod and Italianpod didn't seem to enjoy the level of subscriber success that Cpod did. The question remains why. I wonder if video can revive spanishpod as well. But that's why I think Cpod is now producing video. Implicit in some of Jenny's comments around this new deal through Bigfoot Ventures is that Cpod can now create and produce video under the existing pricing structure. Sounds like this was something not possible previously. But now the real hard question is: "SHOULD Cpod produce video lessons?"

This isn't a "teaching tool" question, it's a business value question. It goes to whether or not video expands Cpod's customer base large enough to cover the cost of creating quality video. It is possible that video will allow cpod, italianpod, spanishpod to reach new customers. Or maybe not.

Posted on: Playing Mahjong

Interesting your point about Marco and Italian Pod. The real reason to create video is that it will give Cpod a competitive advantage. It would have been an interesting question to ask:

- Why did Italianpod and Frenchpod fail?

- Will video allow Italianpod and Frenchpod reach customers that these pods didn't reach before?

- Can Cpod/Praxis now cost-effectively create enough video to create competitive advantage?

- how many videos does a pod need to have before it has an "effective" tool in video?