#chinesepod

Here is a cool new lesson released on ChinesePod today that I wanted to share right away.  I will be spending my lunch reviewing this!!!!

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/switching-language-input-methods

This gives me a good opportunity to discuss my thoughts and experience with ChinesePod.

So I have fallen in love with ChinesePod ... quick bite sized lessons that teach daily life conversations.  Their premium account comes at a premium for sure... $29.99 a month.  Once you consider that the lessons go far beyond just a podcast to include exercises, homework and a message board one may start to justify the price tag.  Your first month is only $0.99, so I say try it out and see if it helps you in your studies.  Being a lover of Chinese food I find their Hungry Traveler course series very useful and interesting.  

Each course includes the audio podcast with a native speaker and an English host.  The conversations are preformed by voice actors, which sometimes can see a tad over preformed.  One of my friend's in Shanghai stated that it sounds so dramatic.  I find it amusing and at times helpful with understanding the emotions being performed by the vocal actors. Once you finish the podcast, usually no more than 20 mins, there are many options for continued study.  Additional audio options include the stand-alone acted dialog without any host commentary and a separate vocabulary review.  All audio files can be downloaded for you to keep.  

Beyond audio files the ChinesePod  site and phone apps include a discussion area, written dialog, vocabulary list, expansion practice and scored exercises.  You have the option to do all exercises in Simplified, Traditional or Pinyin Chinese.  Each lesson is again available for download as a pdf file for you to keep.

My top reason for my new found love of ChinesePod is because John Pasden is part of their team and one of the hosts for Elementary and Intermediate lessons.  If you are not aware of John's work you must stop what you are doing and visit his sinosplice blog right away.  I have mentioned AllSet Learning, another project of John's in a prior post.  This man I must say is a Genius (in my beginner's opinion) when it comes to teaching both Mandarin and Shanghainese to the western tongue.

I've been learning Chinese for about six months now. So far my method has been quite scattershot - I've used Skritter, Chinese Pod, The Michel Thomas Method, Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi book, Livemocha, Memrise, Lang8, and just this week I started formal lessons at the University of Southampton. I'm now going to add "Blogging about the process" to my collection of learning methods.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to blog about my experiences with each one of them until I'm caught up, and then I'm going to try to continue blogging about my experiences learning Chinese.

As my Chinese improves I hope to write more of the blog in Chinese (with English translations) but for now I will have to make do with just translating the title as my vocabulary is too small.

I have three months until my first visit to China and I hope to be able to get by with some basic conversation by that time.

Dear Chinesepod,

    You were absolutely right in your lesson about tones: I wanted to go to Shanxi (山西) road, and the driver took me to Shaanxi (陕西) road. He was even more embarrassed when I told him that there was a lesson on this very mistake. I told him not to be sad.

Thank you!