Bananas and gong fu

This is relatively amusing, if you don’t mind listening to lao wai speaking shaky Chinese. My view is that this is actually a good way to learn. It’s comprehensible and it draws your attention to their mistakes. What do you think?
It’s generally easier for learners to understand other lao wai speaking Chinese. I’d be interested [...]

Practice

By now, regular readers of the ChinesePod blog will have realised that V3 has left no stone unturned. The 8 Week Program is no exception.
For the uninitiated, the 8 Week Program provides a personal study plan designed by one of our counsellors, followed by a daily 10 minute practice session scheduled at whatever time you [...]

Emergent strategies, emergent learning

Jay Cross sees the need for a fluid, dynamic approach to corporate training. The present day knowledge worker is having to learn more, and learn faster than ever before – a situation that will intensify over time. According to Cross, the old, static, one-size-fits-all, training programs are proving hoplessly inadequate in the face of [...]

Pinyin Guide and Listening Test Makeovers

Long-time ChinesePod users are familiar with the Listening Test we developed a while back, as well as our pinyin chart, which provided all the syllables of Mandarin Chinese in all the tones in an easily clickable format. V3 is taking these two resources to the next step.
The most obvious change with the Listening Test and [...]

The All-New Grammar Guide

Yes, ChinesePod has been promising a grammar guide for a while now. There’s a good reason that it has not yet appeared. Basically, an entire language’s grammar is a lot of information, and we want to organize it well. With the help of the Academic Team, I’ve been working on the Grammar Guide since the [...]

Interview with John Ralston Saul

This week we had the privilege of a visit from John Ralston Saul. Saul is one of Canada’s leading intellectuals. He’s written on an impressive range of topics, from history and economics, to philosophy and social theory. He also writes novels, thoguh I have no idea where the finds the time.
Saul is a contrarian, but [...]

ChinesePod is a community of practice

Our recent posts have talked about ChinesePod as a tool. Today I want to emphasize the people (learners, experts, and practitioners). We’re all here to share knowledge, work towards common goals, and learn Mandarin collaboratively. We are, in that sense, a Community of Practice.
The concept of CoP was originally framed (20 years [...]

The Connect Section

Brand new to this version of the site we are introducing basic social networking features. In this section, we hope to facilitate two functions: (1) finding other users and (2) tracking conversations.

Finding Other Users
All registered users (Free Account, Basic, Premium) will automatically start a profile. First, we recognize all users will not be interested in [...]

Vocabulary Study Tools

The vocabulary study section has much of the current functionality with a few enhancements.
Vocabulary Lists
First of all, vocabulary words can be added from the lesson review similar to as they can now. Once words have been saved, users can add tags to categorize them as they see fit. Instead of using ‘folders’ as we do [...]

Better pop ups, more learning

In the past week or so Hank, John and Ken have let slip some of the improvements we’re planning for V3. In this milestone blog post (ok, I’m overstating things, but it *is* my first) I want to talk about some of the backend changes we’re instituting in the run-up to V3, and start a [...]