But writing and haven the results corrected is a powerful learning approach, although it sure binds manpower (womanpower? Aggiepower? whatever is most suitable & PC here). As a midterm solution I could imagine a reactivation of your teachers’ network in combination with a centralized payment-model (as Lantian suggested someplace else) + defined service chunks. E.g. correcting a piece of written homework with a defined max-length. The homework assignements would come from CPod like the lesson plans, the rest would be outsourced to the “Joint Venture CPod teachers”.

The writing blog is a good idea. For now, however, I don’t have anyone to oversee it.

I could accept a simple blog post each day and leaving people to their own devices to comment on it and practice writing. I’m sure, however, that many users would want systematic corrections. I don’t have a staff member to do that right now, but I guess we could invite a guest to do it if they were willing to do so.

Ken Carroll

Somewhere where everyone could feel more comfortable writing in/commenting. We need more places to write hanzi, but maybe the previous zh.blog was too segmented, advanced and etc. I know there’s a place in the Forum to write, but I just don’t regularly enough get myself clicking over to that area and we do need a moderator/main writer of some sort to spark our ideas and discussion.

How about a Chinese cblog where instead of the main writer ‘writing’ big posts, they could just post one-or-two liners tangentially related to the daily podcasts and their JOB is actually to ‘correct’ our comments. This way any BigBrain could write a comment in Chinese and get some corrections. This way we could all see and learn together!

好不好！

Bring on the dancing girls!

We also have blogs written in Japanese, Korean and German! You can find their links on the blog homepage (on the bottom right hand side).:D Frank’s the first Cpodder to be part of the ChinesePod blog but he is definitely not the last! ;D

-Eileen

By the way, once at his blog, the links to the comments don’t work because they’re still pointing to frank instead of newbie. If your web browser hasn’t been dumbed down, then once you get the 404 not found message, simply change “frank” to “newbie” in the URL and all will be revealed.

Frank is an entertaining writer, and has never been afraid to expose himself when it makes for a good story. This blog might become my first stop on the site, and it’s already the only page that has two bookmarks.

I think what they meant wasnt that gender isnt appropriate in titles as that is the incorrect way of addressing a woman. If a lady was about to be hit by a bus you wouldnt yell “女人!小心!” you would yell “小姐! 小心!”. It is more appropraite to use 小姐 instead of 女人 when addressing someone. With men you would use 先生 instead of 男人. People wont be offended if you use 男人 or 女人 when addressing them, probably just laugh at you.

Another thing you do in both Chinese and Korean culture, you address people by what relation they would be in your family. Like calling an old man “Grandpa” is normal in China and Korea and a woman your mom’s age “auntie” even if you have never seen them before is not unheard of. In fact, 小姐 is literally “sister”.