We are happy to announce the arrival of our first Lesson Plan (well actually the second but who is counting). Starting with today’s lesson “Do you have vegetables?” our daily Lesson Pods will include a lesson plan.
The purpose of the lesson plan is to provide you and your teacher/study partner with some examples of how to use our lessons and conduct rewarding language exchanges. Finding a suitable study partner is hard. Finding a study partner who is also a great teacher is even harder. Our lesson plans remove some of the risk and let you focus on learning Mandarin. You can study according to the lesson plan or pick and choose the ideas that work best for you. The choice is yours.
Today’s lesson plan is broken into 2 sections - 1. Before the Lesson, and 2. During the Lesson. The first section provides some guidance on how to study the daily lesson pod - podcast audio lesson, transcript, expansion and exercises. The idea is to study the lesson before you meet with your teacher/language partner. The second section will help you conduct a productive language exchange with your teacher/language partner. Ideally, you have both reviewed the lesson before you meet.
Lesson Plans are a Premium feature that requires a paid subscription to ChinesePod.com to access. Our lesson plans are saved in PDF format to allow for easy printing. Download today;s lesson plan and give it a try next time you meet with your teacher/language partner. And as always please send us your feedback.
Kind Regards,
Matt Park 段伟
Great news - the Lesson Plan looks really clear and is a great help to independent learners. Speaking as a languages teacher I find it well written too! I’ve got a fair bit of catching up to do, but look forward to using the Lesson plans in the future. Is there any intention to provide Lesson Plans retrospectively for older episodes?
Excellent idea if you happen to have any friends. hehe
The Lesson Plans are great. Thank you to the Academic Team or whomever puts them togther. They are very useful.
I have a request that maybe there is an easy way to handle. I find I do follow Ken’s directions to listen to the dialogue first or even twice without seeing the printed dialogue. Ok so far so good. However either the next time or when I practice alone using the lesson plan I would like to be able see the hanzi but not the pinyin.
As an old fashion gu,y I can put a piece over the pinyin but can you do it electronically? I know if the format is correct on some movie forums you can click to see the spoiler. So maybe the pinyin is a spoiler. Or worse case can you figure out a way I can turn the pinyin text red. Then I can do like I used to observe Japanese school kids with a piece of red acetate make the text invisible.
Mike in Jubei
OK - I’m diving in. I downloaded the lesson plan for “Street Food” and prepared it exactly as prescribed. Tomorrow I’m meeting my laoshi armed with the plan, and I’ll insist that no English is spoken for an hour. My fear is that we’ll glare at each other for 60 minutes while I tie my tongue up in knots. But I’m going for it. This post is nailing my colors to the mast; I’ll let you know what happens!
Good luck Conrad! I started useing the lesson plans a few weeks ago and find them very helpful. They provide that structure to that I like, even though the lessons aren’t really “structured” in the traditional text book sense.
It worked really well, Rian. The “props” (I printed the dialog and lesson plan) gave us the structure we needed. And there was enough material to keep us talking Mandarin for well over an hour. We’re going to do it again next week!
Now, one request: the Intermediate lessons are the right level for me. But Jenny and Aggie speak fairly quickly. Since the dialog is always repeated in the podcast, could they do it once at normal speed and once just a little bit slower? Those who don’t need the slow version can ignore it. Others like me could practice on the slow version first, then proceed to the normal speed dialog. Not sure how this fits with your pedagogical approach, but it would help me master the vocabulary faster. Thanks for thinking about it. Cheers, Conrad