lower intermediate level

*** Digression again***

Xiahu,

A good example of what I'm asking here is on SpanishPod today.

Del Taco al Tango about Salsa Cubana is a spanish culture class:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/spanishpod/extra/TT0013/mp3/spanishpod_TT0013pb.mp3

bbjt：

I do agree that a section on the site dedicated to learning more about the Chinese customs and culture would be of great interest.

With the traditional textbooks I used to learn from, every lesson is married with language learning and cultural learning.

There is some of that on Chinesepod built in to the lessons, but it's not got the focus that I maybe should have, as the way it is now, you kind of have to skip around through lessons and editions of Dear Amber to find those little nuggets of cultural info.

You're right, it would be nice to have it all consolodated into one index.

*** sorry for the digression ***

Xiaohu,

I don't really want to learn japanese even if I listen to some lessons from the japanesepod101 website. Maybe one day ...

But there's a good marketing lesson for Cpod here.

What attracted me first to Jpod101 was the Culture Class :

http://www.japanesepod101.com/category/japanese-culture-classes/

This sort of culture podcasts are really clever because they touch a really large public in which some could convert as student.

The Amber show only cover part of this purpose.

My advice for a casual chinese culture class here :

- 15 minutes on one specific cultural topic

- introduction of 2 or 3 chinese words

- 1 very warm voice (Ken, Dave or JohnP)

- 1 soft voice (Jenny, Amber or Connie)

No need for promotion. This podcast will be known very quickly and more poddies will appear.

bbjt：

I absolutely agree that japanesepod101.com is way more advanced in terms of multimedia. They even produced their own episodic series about a girl who posts a personal ad looking for a boyfriend but the guy who helps her produce it is in love with her and blocking all the responses so the guys she responds to never get her videos back. (Scandalous!)

I was all into it until the one of the last episodes has an American guy waiting and waiting for her response back and then can't wait any longer so he summons one of his "connections" to give him the girl‘s personal cell phone number so he can call her! I mean...whazzup wit dat? Those must be some pretty high-level connections, like the Yakuza or Japanese government or something to know some guy who can magically come up with some random girls personal cell phone number.

But I digress.

Actually I really wish Chinesepod would finish off their Japanese site because relying on cheesy Peter Galante for our Japanese lessons is getting depressing.

The talent here on Chinesepod is really excellent, all the hosts are bright and funny. Jenny has a great sense of humor and as we've seen from some Movie Madness episodes really knows how to moderate and keep control of the podcasts when the guys get too silly, but still doing it in a sweet and gentle way. She also knows how to keep the podcasts moving and not feel bogged down the like the Japanesepod101 podcasts.

The cast here on Chinesepod are all very good voice actors, and what they may have lacked previously isn't even an issue anymore. Connie especially has turned into quite a great little actress. I used to think she sounded too robotic, but as of late she's really blossomed! Very natural and capable of being real, while at the same time maintaining vocal clarity for the purposes of the Podcast.

I'm sure that when and if the Japanese Pod site is finished that Ken will only employ talent as cool as who we have here on Chinesepod. When that happens, I'm positive I'll be going back to brush up on my Japanese...in the meantime though， we have to suffer with cheesy japanesepod101.com. 哎呀，我的天啊! 真糟糕！

There is a bit of a jump between Elementary and Intermediate, but there are higher level elementary lessons and lower level intermediate - I found the DVD ploy lesson really good in the sense that I could understand about half of the dialogue, and the gaps were filled. I have had to listen to a couple of intermediates to understand exactly how the lesson is structured (Jenny reading it line by line... that's was one of those "how could you be so stupid not to realise that" moments), and I think that I've actually managed to learn some stuff via osmosis.

I think a traffic light guide for individual lesson difficulty would be handy, but then maybe a lesson that is easier for me maybe harder for someone else.

An elementary's guide to intermediate lesson may be in order though, and it is definitely disillusioning to pick up a random intermediate lesson and not understand a word. If anyone can think of any intermediate lessons they found particularly easy, let us know!

I think from a business point of view, it makes sense for Chinesepod to address this jump, but on the other hand, I've dealt with jumps before in my education, and though dismaying at first, it's something you get used to. Furthermore, it always invariably turns out to be very good for you.

marchey -- You bring up an interesting point with customer retention. I work in marketing for a $6 billion regional bank and we look at these numbers all the time. The analogy here is like trying to fill a bucket that has a hole in the bottom. It takes less money and energy to plug the hole than it does to add more water.

Finding new customers is an important part of any business, but for ChinesePod, I'll bet they'd be better served by retaining the customers they have and turning the casual (free) users into Premium subscribers.

Furyougaijin: This is not about complaining, whining, whinging or whatever. The GAP is there and it DOES NOT make ANY sense BUSINESS or OTHERWISE to leave it there. Contrary to you I don't think that CP is doing a great job not addressing this problem. And I bet you that a lot of their new customers will leave because of the gap. CP should start thinking about retention rates. As it is now, I find myself using a lot of alternative methods to supplement the CP lessons. I use a competing website, CLO and some textbooks. Also, I have spent 4 weeks in China last year, 1 week of which was with a woman who only spoke Chinese. I also use Skype for about 4 hours every week, half of which is to practice Chinese pronounciation. I have been studying Chinese for 3,5 years total and I can handle most of the intermediate lessons, and even HI and Adv. if I put more work into it, but that doesn't change my opinion : the gap is there. If I see it as a problem, I am sure a lot of other people, perhaps less outspoken than I, have the same perception.

Suggesting that people should step out of their comfort zone seems 'not done' on this forum. Understandably so, as it makes good business sense to promote the idea that one should stick to the pace of learning one is most comfortable with.

Yet I am not known for giving uncontroversial advice or being politically correct and I actually DO think CPod is doing a great job with the levels AS THEY ARE TODAY.

That's why I wish people would stop whinging about the perceived Elementary - Intermediate gap. It's plain impossible to spoon-feed everyone all the way up to Fluency. Anyone wants an easy ride?! Just stick to Newbie and Elementary - there are enough new words coming up in those levels every day, surely in 5-7 years there will be a critical mass for a painless transition to Intermediate (which by that time will have accumulated enough vocab for a painless transition to Advanced, etc.). Sounds like the way to go if one cares about the Process more than about the Goal.

If the Goal happens to be important, why not just plunge into a challenging level?! Yes, the first 20 lessons will take 5-6 hours to get through but this is 5-6 hours of CONCENTRATED new material rather than twelve 30-min sessions in which you learn a grand total of 20 new words. And then the following 20 lessons will take 3-4 hours. And the following 20 will only take one or two hours. And that's when you know it's time to move on to an even more challenging level.

Once again, fluency is not achieved by being spoon-fed but by hard work and stepping out of one's comfort zone.

bbjt,

Thank you for introducing my youtube video here.

I always wonder why CP don't have subtitle or text for explanation of lessons.

so I edited it and uploaded to youtube.

I expect it help CP listners studying Chinese.

(and for my study)

And I think CP need video or text like this for othere level.

marcey,

very interesting. I am looking forward to your statistics.

But they are tricky, because difficulty is indeed relative as tvan pointed out above. What words are introduced? Only the ones discussed in the banter? The ones in the Vocab tab? Often the new words for me are not listed in the vocab tab.

With a base of nearly 800 lessons you might capture the relativity to some degree, however, by weighting words by their relative frequency in the CPod text corpus (it would also be interesting to contrast that with Google hits...).

Another obstacle on the way lies in the distinction of words or even grammar structures. No blanks in Chinese. You would need to analyze the JavaScript in the Dialogues to get an indicator for vocab. Then you also had characters/word...

Sentence length would work though.

But what about my other idea to provide some form of grading for all of the lessons. I suspect this is already being done internally, even if it is only informally by using the terms 'easy', 'normal' aand 'difficult' or 'challenging'. So maybe we could get a system were the current levels are maintained but an additional level of difficulty within the level is added.

As for me, I am scientifically orientated. I am currently working on a program that will help me 'conquer' new texts. It will have a stats part to. I am thinking of ways to make some sort of objective grading system based in vocab and grammar constructs used, length of sentences, number of new words introduced, etc.

Here is a useful video made with one of the Cpod advanced lessons. If Cpod could make one video (mp4) like that with a low intermediate lesson I'm sure that will fill the gap between the elementary and the intermediate level. It's possible to add more that the subtitles on the screen : - word in english - picture - cartoon But in multimedia, Japanesepod101 is more advanced that Cpod.

It is always interesting for me to hear how others approach their learning. The intermediate lessons are quite challenging for me. I can spend days on one and still not master it. But lordstanley is right, the vocabulary

keeps reappearing and I say to myself, "I should know this word by now". One day I will master it, but for me, it won't be mine until I actually use it in speech many times.

But I have noticed Chinesepod's changes in their approach to the intermediate lessons over the years. In the early days they were only in Mandarin. Then John stepped in and provided the English to Jenny's Mandarin, which really helped. I've noticed in the more recent lessons, the dialog section seems to have slowed down a bit, while you can still hear the natural speed of speech in the podcast. This is a huge help. Also, the newer lessons seem a little more trimmed down and manageable to me. So my recommendation for bridging the intermediate gap is to select the newer intermediate podcasts and work your way back in time, because some are too good to miss. I do wish there was a way to take Henning's hard work and make it easier to find the desired intermediate dialog or grammar point. I like to buzz through that and double check to see what I may have overlooked. Sometimes it takes a while to look up. You did a great service for all of us. I lot of time was spent on putting that together. Thanks, Henning.

lordstanley> That sounds like a very reasonable method of using the lessons. In addition to your various ways, there is another thing you can do with them, which I find helpful : Try to read the entire lessons (or at løast a chunk of several sentences from it) out loud, while only looking at the character text. No pinyin allowed. With my very lousy pronounciation this feels awkward, but I find that after doing it, you get much more out of the audio. You understand the audio better, and by comparing, it also helps you to correct the mistakes you make.

Franks' point of "not the contant loom of a pop quiz" is key to why I like the Intermediate lessons exactly as they are right now. Yes, they're much longer and many more new words are introduced than at the Elementary level. But not only do we have transcripts and audio that we can re-read and re-listen to as many times as we wish, but also we don't need to be "completists" about each lesson.

I used to not want to walk away from an Intermediate lesson unless I knew the character and definition of every single word in the dialogue and expansions down pat. But now, I give myself 2 hours per lesson and try to learn as much as I can. I listen to the full Jenny-John lesson once, identify 15 or so words to focus on, listen to the dialogue-only MP3 about 10-15 times at various times in various ways (listening, listening with Chinese characters only, listening with pinyin only, listening with English only, listening only, repeat), spend time on the Dialogue and Vocabulary pages, add another 3-5 new words that pop out at me in the Expansions. To save time, I often skip the fill-in-the-blank and multiple choice parts of the exercises and get my grammar training elsewhere, but do the character-definition matching exercise. Then boom, on to the next lesson. Even if there's 5 words or so that I leave on the floor and that I won't add into my Vocabulary Manger because I don't consider them fully mastered yet.

The beauty of ChinesePod is that the Expansion sentences are very well-done, in my view, and I'll end up encountering those "un-mastered" words down the road in Expansion sentences to other lessons or in other sources of Mandarin studies that I utilize, and eventually the words finally click in.

Having said all that, my Mandarin is still lousy, lol, so the idea of me giving "advice" on how to study is laughable. But thought I'd at least share my own experience of how I approach Intermediate lessons.

A grammar show would be a nice addition. Rather than create an entire new level or levels for it you could have different grammar shows within each level. For example--each monthly cycle you could include a grammar episode or two instead of the dialogue lessons.

xiaohu -- I think you've got an excellent point here! I don't, however, think that ChinesePod is trying to be all things to all people. Obviously, I don't work in their offices, but I very clearly see this as just *one* way to learn. (Not that you were suggesting otherwise, by the way.)

I took a night class last year in an adult ed format that was just a waste of my time. The biggest problem for me with traditional teacher-led instruction is that you can only go as fast as the slowest student. It's a bit frustrating when you're already "get it" and want to move on. In this case, ChinesePod works very well for me as I can linger or skim as I please.

Of course, I don't assign myself much homework and there's not the constant loom of a pop quiz, either. :-)

sushan:

Having a "head knowledge" of something but an inability to practically apply thay knowledge has been an educational misnomer throughout time. There have been many methods created to make the learning process more organic and recreate the way we learn our mother tongue, but in some ways I really believe in some of these old fashioned teaching methods like learning through recitation and repetition.

I think too often when a new method is created there is always this attitude of completely doing away with the old and embracing the new. In many ways I believe this to be a falacy because everything builds on everything else, to throw off the old is to voluntarily start from scratch again.

I believe the beter way is to constantly refine, find what worked about the old method, keep that and blend it with the new and continue to refine.

In many ways I like Chinesepod's non-linear approach, but I feel that in some ways blending it with the traditional building blocks method of learning would be a good thing.

I like the ChinesePod approach to grammar - hearing patterns with the occasional explanation. Like many English teachers in China I always see students who have spent years learning rules of grammar and whose spoken grammar is terrible - they have head knowledge of something but no practical skill in using it.

As for the original post, I also think there is not that much gap between Elementary and Intermediate, but I am not using ChinesePod to learn reading and writing. I am sure if you used the site as a one stop shop for learning Chinese and were trying to learn writing as well then Intermediate would be much more of a jump.

I've seen a real effort on the part of CPod to bring those Intermediate lessons a bit closer to the Elementary level. I do agree that the Elemetary levels seems far too easy now. But one could hope that's because MY level has advanced past it, and not through any fault of the lesson itself.

My problem at this point is one of time. I study every day, but I don't have the time to devote the two or three (or more) hours to really get through an Intermediate level lesson. On Newbies, I barely listen anymore. I just check the dialogue tab for new vocab. Elementary lessons seem too easy, but again, I don't have the time to really dig in my heels on anything harder. I'm at an impasse.

In my classes people with poor reading skills seem to also do worse speaking. Whether that represents a lack of effort in general or a causal link, I can't say. The differentiation between people who can only read (and use a computer to write) versus those who read and write by hand seems to be less strong.

I don't know if I agree with having levels within levels. Cpod's strength and weakness is that its learning is non-linear, versus a textbook approach in which lessons build upon each other. Thus, the difficulty of a lesson often becomes topical: if you're familiar with the topic, it's a breeze; if not, you struggle. The strength of the Cpod approach is that it doesn't give you the false sense of competence you get when reading carefully parsed text, but it can be frustrating. I'm not sure that subdividing Intermediate into 2, 5, or 10 sub-levels will solve that.

I agree again. There is a certain shyness about grammar and writing here. I have the feeling that both are somehow being associated with "the old fashioned way" of learning Chinese, as opposed to how it is taught on CPod. I love the emphasis on the spoken everyday language, but I think that at some point, systematic grammar and hanzi can really help you.

John does some excellent grammar teaching, but it is spread out over many lessons. Henning's grammar index could in principle help here, but if you are interested in understanding a certain construction, it is not so convenient to first find it in the grammar index, find the relevant podcast, and finally figure out exactly where in the podcast it is discussed. For quick reference, nothing can beat a written source. Except maybe an searchable grammar file, but we don't have that yet.

The relation between the written and spoken language is extremely complex in Chinese, but I think that a "sound is everything" attitude makes learning harder, not easier. When you study the spoken language, it really helps to understand the meaning of the parts of a word.

Henning:

I couldn't agree more! While it's true that Grammar is something we pick up in our native language naturally, and Chinesepod doesn't focus on Grammar because they want you to pick it up through the natural ebb and flow of their conversation...I think this is in some ways a very wrong approach.

Call me too traditional, but I think a more thorough introduction to grammar and word order, and constant review throughout the lessons would be very welcome.

And WRITING? I'm sure you know from one of my previous posts (which I'm sure will live on in INFAMY in the minds of many Poddies) that I think reading and writing are absolutely essential to properly learning this language. If you can read Hanzi and not constantly being babied by Pinyin, you will be so much more well equipped to study on your own, since when you reach a certain level, the magazine, newspaper, or novel will become your teacher.

Also this works in well to another one of your (absolutely correct) points, that if you aren't properly taught the basic mechanics of a language, then learning all the vocabulary you want is useless because you can't put that vocabulary to good use. You will constantly be stuck in a rut of only being able to form simple sentences, or incorrectly structured, foreign sounding, and quite often, unintelligible sentences!

I know everyone behind the scenes here at Chinesepod are working very hard to make improvements, but I wish some of these things would be addressed.

I see three missing links between those two levels:

1) A compact series with an introduction to the Intermediate banter

With the relevant function words, grammar terms and connectors.

2) An introduction to the basic features of Chinese grammar in lesson form.

Some of the recent Elementry's have started introducing some grammar points and the QWs are right in the center in that "grammar gap". However, in my eyes that is not enough yet.

What we need is a series of lessons on the basic mechanics of Chinese sentences - fundamental stuff like where we to put the verb, how to handle basic prepositions or where to include information on time and location. This might be complemented by the Grammar guide one day, but the Grammar guide would not replace those lessons.

I have the hope though, that the QWs might grow into that role one day. As long as there are not too many astray QWs e.g. on dialects...

3) An intoduction to writing

In my eyes this is a core prerequesite for intermediate learning. Hanzi content has yet to be taken elsewhere. I would love to see some dedicated (premium?) content on that - from a basic introduction to the structure of strokes, radicals and characters up to a discussion of rarer characters and their ethymology for more advanced students (revive the dead CharacterInsanity-group and take it to the heart of the service!).

You don't get as much hand-holding from John as you do from Ken and Jenny gets to let loose a bit but the two levels are not miles apart.

I don't think intermediate dialogues are that much more difficult than elementary but the lessons themselves are quite a lot harder. I have to learn the dialogue first before you can follow the lesson really.

Yep, I totally agree. There's a big gap between elementary and intermediate. There are also gaps between the other levels, but they feel much smaller. I doubt that anyone can reach intermediate only by listening to CPod.

I assume that most of the people here are learning from several sources. CPod is fantastic, but it is not (yet) a complete road to the Chinese language.

A lower intermediate level would get the site a little closer to being one.

Marchey,

I absolutely agree with you!

I think there should be a low, medium and advanced level of all levels to provide a transition from one level to another. (Low Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper- Intermediate then Low Advanced, Medium - Advanced and Advanced).

I respect Ken and Jenny's concept of free-exploration, and I do often visit the lower levels to brush up on things and get back to basics which is often helpful, but after a little while I'm ready to get back to more advanced lessons.

When you break it down, the most current Elementary Lesson introduces only one semi-challenging word 清洁工 qīngjiégōng, while all other words are just plain Newbie; IE: 好吃, 真, etc.

Then the transition into the must current Intermediate Lesson, Evading Nosy Questions...哎呀, 我的天啊! The jump from Elementary to Intermediate level is absolutely STAGGERING!

Anyone who's been all through the Elementary Level and listened to every podcast and diligently done their homework STILL simply isn't equipped to handle this level. Any and every student who's just studied their Mandarin on Chinesepod just doesn't have the necessary FIREPOWER (so to speak) to handle what comes at you on this level.

So you're absolutely right without the proper transition easing a student between the levels, it becomes frustrating and demotivating.