What did’nt work was a new lesson every day. Just too much at INT level. Also 10 mins is too short. 1/2 hr seems optimum, 3 lessons per week. I’ve been with CPOD from the start and I’ve seen a real output leap with this methodology.

The advantage of having a new lesson a day is saturation. Not going in depth but exposed to so much new language. There are words coming up from lessons in my first couple of weeks that I don’t remember the tone or the exact meaning but I KNOW I’ve heard it. I’m one step closer to remembering.

I would also like to know about recording the lessons. I haven’t asked about this. If we have the ability to record them for ourselves to go back and listen to. Is that OK?

Interesting to read that 2 or 3 days a week for a longer period of time could be an option - I think that would attract a lot of people. Learning a lesson each day is a real push and I’m not confident that I’m retaining much. But having a fixed time each day to speak some Mandarin is excellent (and we’ve actually changed my lesson plan so we do 4 new lessons and on the 5th day review). I also feel that if I kept this up, somewhere down the road would be noticable improvements - just hard to see day to day!

I also agree that a 3 month option would be good - the 6 mo and 1yr option are a big commitment (time and $$). The cost also comes close to getting me a private tutor a couple times a week (I’m in an urban area with pretty good access to Chinese tutors, but still like the convenience of Chinesepod which I do at night in my PJs!).

Finally (this is my first post so I guess I had a lot to say!) it would be neat if you could provide recordings to Practice plan users so we can hear how we sound (and hopefully hear improvements over time).

Thanks for everything - I tell everyone about Cpod.

Ken, I might take you up on the custom time frame. Frankly I can’t afford a years worth of practice plan (not your problem though!). I will probably do 1 month on and 1 month off. Too good of a resource not to take advantage of it.

The Skype connection sounds great though being half duplex makes it difficult when both people are talking.

Michael, to address one of your concerns, the ‘format’ is flexible. If you are fluent enough to converse with your teacher in Chinese they will speak to you in Chinese. The more Chinese I use with Vera the more she uses with me, and not just in the lessons.

Kudos to CPod for setting up the practice plan and to Vera for being an incredible tutor\teacher.

You definitely have to give the learner some choice in the matter. If someone thinks that pronunciation is terribly important, then it is terribly important. However, a class that focused mainly on pronunciation isn’t something that would help most of our learners. They want to start communicating and I encourage that. There’s always a need to balance.

My gut feeling is that like you said, too much emphasis on pronunciation tends to kill interest. On the other hand some learners (in the case of English) specifically ask for more practice with pronunciation and, in that event, a forewarning that it is hard work seems to work well.

I’m wondering if, in an attempt to personalize things, you could ask students what their goals are in terms of pronunciation practice before you start. This allows you to get an initial “bead” on things and you can always get additional readings as the class moves forward.

I look forward to hearing more!

Good observations. The medium is the message, so a 10 min class has limitations on what it can achieve.

Aggie uses a number of techniques, and translation is one of them. This segment is heavy on the translation because she’s trying to get the learner to produce language in the most efficient way possible. In other instances she may ask the questions in Chinese, so as to emphasize the comprehension.

In the same way she is free to tackle pronunciation and tone errors as she sees fit. This will vary from learner to learner. My view is that over-emphasis on tones and pronunciation at this point would kill learner motivation. Learners have to feel they are communicating in Chinese - they are communicating in Chinese!

I’m not sure how long she has been working with this particular learner, so I’m not sure if the learner is familiar with the classroom language, but I agree that she could use more of it.

I’ll post more recordings soon.

I really enjoyed listening to this. I’m sure Aggie is well liked by her students. She struck me as the kind of teacher I missed when I first studied Chinese.

In the segment I listened to I was struck by four things which I thought I would pass on at the risk of boring you and with a thought to stimulating more discussion on these topics. Here are my observations.

1. During this short segment the only task the student was given was one of translation from English to Chinese (both closed and open ended sentences). I counted about 11 instances of translation. I thought this was a good example of the Grammar Translation method- very pattern dependent.

2. There were relatively few instances of classroom language being used in this lesson especially given the students advanced ability to translate English into Chinese. Here are some words that Aggie used in English that she could have said in Chinese:
1. Can you think of…
2. How about..
3. Any other things…
4. let’s try some sentences..
5. Very good
6. (it) means
7. So how would you say…
8. So (in a logical sense)

3. I only identified one pronunciation correction and no tonal corrections. Do you spend time working specifically on pronunciation and tones in other parts of the lesson?

4. Thanks for letting us hear this. I never realized that pattern practice was such a big part of your oral lessons.