The last time I mentioned Popup Chinese on this site my comment got deleted by CPod's customer relations person, but since said person is now gone, here goes: Yes, Popup Chinese will give you Beijing (Northern China) accented Mandarin, and at full conversational speed. Yes, the similarities between Popup and CPod are not coincidental; the founder of Popup Chinese was the programmer for CPod's web site in the early days. Popup Chinese would maintain that they were radically different from CPod, but I struggled to see the difference initially. I can now say that CPod focuses on practical, situational dialogs first, whereas making them memorable is a secondary emphasis. Popup Chinese dialogs, by contrast, focus on being memorable (some might say bizarre) without the focus on task-specific learning. There are very large differences in price, and in the size of the archives between the two services, but I think either could be good value depending on how wisely and well the subscriber used them. Popup still maintains a few positives that CPod had in its early days, such as unlimited free access to the podcasts and no automatic recurring billing on subscribers' credit cards. I agree with you that it's a loss that CPod no longer has anyone based in the mainland that can comment about life or language usage there, but thus far I have been reasonably impressed with how Gwilym and Fiona have managed the handover under the circumstances.

cool, thanks Podster!

I found their website which you can stream the podcasts from.

http://www.techinshanghai.com/

Matt, I found it in the iTunes store. The Podcast is called "Tech in Shanghai" (Unrelated to ChinesePod podcasts). They have a one hour podcast released on November 9 with the host and Jenny Zhu.

Podster, do you have a link to this interview you are speaking of? I would love to listen to it :)

Jenny, I'm halfway through listening to your interview from last month on the Shanghai tech podcast. Nice to hear stories about the early days. All the best!

@Baba,

Thank you for transcribing David's and my swan song. I hope the farewell video will be up soon on the ChinesePod youtube channel.

I think this raises a further point that there are differences. There is quite a bit of variability in the mandarin spoken different regions in China. Learning from "Native Speakers" from other Mandirin speaking places might confuse things even more if your primary focus is business or travel in mainland China.

To your comment on Spanish -- if you were planning to going to Latin America or Central America -- spanish as learned in Spain would work. You would still have to deal with ~dialects and differences in idioms that are present in different locations. For example in Puerto Rico the slang varies from one part of the island to another--and it's a small island.

I guess we will have to see what these changes really mean when they play out. My subscription will be ending mid-2015. I'm still undecided on what to do. Finding a teacher in California is not so hard. The hard part is that someone that is not in country might not be in tune on trends in usage. Well we all have to face these pitfall when learning a language. There is the written and historic use (standard) and how it's used on the street.

I looked at ChineseClass101 in the past and found it wasn't really that interesting or appealing vs ChinesePod. Now that you list out their lesson schedule for 2015 it makes it even less appealing.

ChineseClass101 is absolutely no competition for ChinesePod. They no longer have the resources to produce the ChinesePod-like podcasts (which I use to find quite informative). Their lesson schedule for the first 6 months of 2015 is:

Monday: Top 25 questions you need to know for Absolute Beginners (in other words, one question per week)

Tuesday: Listening Comprehension video

Thursday: Throwback Thursday - they regurgitate one of their old lessons - as though people can't just find them in the library themselves

Friday: Video Vocabulary

Sunday: News

And they dare to ask for $180 per year for this utter crap.

I certainly hope when ChinesePod moves to video, they won't be wasting one or more of their weekly lessons on boring and useless vocabulary videos. If they do, it will be a sure sign they have gone into cost-cutting mode and are headed the way of CC101.

Its all the same bloke. Bit like bitching Chinese complaining cause they're to thick and can't understand what an Indian says when speaking English, which is of course an Indian 國語

I'm not sure the location of a company has as much importance to language learning as you might think. Take Bussu.com, their offices are based in London yet teach multiple languages. ChineseClass101 (perhaps ChinesePod's main competitor) is based out of Japan owned by Innovative language, Yoyo Chinese is on the west coast, USA, etc etc.

A quick look at the contact us page shows that Cpod is a Hong Kong/New York owned company, and has been for many years.

I agree with you on everything there except the bit about Spanish. The vast majority of Spanish speakers live outside Spain - Spain itself only accounts for about 10% of the world's Spanish speakers. So I would want to learn the Spanish that is spoken by the most people - and frankly from a more interesting part of the world.

And that is the same reason why I want to learn mainland Mandarin rather than Taiwanese Mandarin. Less that 2% of Mandarin speakers speak Taiwanese Mandarin.

Why would I say there would be more credibility for CPod based in Mainland than in Taiwan? Maybe wrongly, but

a. I would presume the numerical majority of people learning Mandarin are doing so because of a connection with Mainland China rather than other Mandarin speaking countries

b. I think if I was to learn French online I would look for a site based in France, not in say French speaking Africa, or if I were learning Spanish I would look for a site in Spain rather than say Mexico. I would assume, maybe wrongly, one would get a version of the language more rooted in the country of origin that way although of course there are still massive regional variations

c. I am also more interested in what is going on in the Mainland society and the associated cultural nuances and ways of life than what is going on in Taiwan and I am not sure a site operating outside of the Mainland will pick up on this. Taiwan is a very different society.

Anyway, that's just my view, which may be naive.

I don't agree with everything you write, but it's always entertaining.

Regarding censorship, do you really think the move to Taiwan will mean they won't censor the sort of comment you made on the other thread? Do you really think vile and derogatory sexual comments should be permitted? Thankfully they have deleted those today.

Never heard of them before my dear newton, but perhaps they may have been casualties of what Podster describes as Cpod's self censorship. Understandable for sure, given Cpod being based in Shanghai and their need to remain accessible: Cpod have been shut down by the authorities before.

Podster, not that Cpod hasn't tackled prickly topics, they have. However, such topics have not been discussed frankly during the lesson or on discussion threads for obvious reasons, mainly commercial.

I was wrong to suggest Cpod be lumped in with Confucius Institutes. Although Cpod has had to self-censor, their only motive is to present lesson content and features that aid subscribers in their pursuit of attaining Mandarin language proficiency while making a profit: unlike the latter which is concerned more with presenting a bottle of the foulest baijiu as the purest of spring waters.

I suspect you are more familiar with the location of the door than most, oh angry one. I believe you have been shown the door on more than one occasion.

So (following on from the other thread) are you MIANTIAO, or AUNTIE68, or DAVE?

I agree with the substance of what you say. No need to be snarky though. CPod was self censored all of these years, as are the Confucius Institutes that you cite. Does this diminish their legitimacy or value as language learning resources for the vast majority of learners? My answer is an emphatic "no!" If that were a deal breaker for you you wouldn't be here either. And I don't think a CPod based in Taiwan that might, in theory, tackle heretofore off-limits topics is going to make them the least bit more commercially viable. If you disagree, I will respect your opinion. I assume we are all here to improve our Mandarin.

Mark, re: "The Mandarin spoken in Taiwan is further from standard than that spoken in Shanghai." --- you are probably right, but I'm not even sure what that means. Mandarin is not the "native" language or "mother tongue" to the majority of people in Shanghai or Taiwan. But a lot of people in Taipei would have roots in the mainland, so it would hardly be exotic either. I'm aware that word usage and tones on some words differ between Taiwan and the mainland, and I suppose that people in Shanghai who learned Mandarin as their second language would have learned the PRC standard as opposed to a (perhaps) different variant on Taiwan. I guess the operative questions for us are: Will the language models that CPod uses from Taiwan be harder for us to understand? And, will we be harder to understand if we learn from them and then try to speak to someone from the mainland? Given that hundreds of thousands of people from Taiwan now live in and do business in the mainland, I think the barrier cannot be that significant. On a separate note, I'm surprised that CPod was never ever able to recruit a wide variety of speakers from different parts of China, given the diversity of Shanghai.

I understand the desire to learn "correct" or standard Mandarin, elusive though that beast may be. Maybe somebody will create a competitor to CPod: "live from our studios in Harbin, China" to cater to the uber-purists.

You make me laugh. The people conducting podcasts are but a selected few with easy to listen to Mandarin pronunciation. They speak very clearly, and much slower than the average person on any street anywhere in China.

As for muckraking, you sound like some of the talking heads trotted out each day in Beijing to meet the press.

All I can say is if you don't like it you know where the door is.

"Why would you say there would be more credibility if Cpod was based in China?" The Mandarin spoken in Taiwan is further from standard than that spoken in Shanghai. Given the my interest is language learning rather than muckraking, I think the answer should be obvious.

Why would you say there would be more credibility if Cpod was based in China?

I'm thinking that Cpod the way it has been for years is more like a Confucius Institute: happy to make money facilitating language learning and propagating a sanitised picture of China, while avoiding odious fact and castrating open discussion.

So looking forward to new management in Taiwan.

This does seem a shame, particularly if it means a change of tutors for the personal tuition. And surely there is more credibility being based in Mainland China rather than Taiwan.

It seems particularly poor customer relations for CP to not make any announcement upfront and tell all the subscribers what is going on instead just leaving us in the dark. Come on CP let us know your plans or do you not know yourselves what you are up to?

omg, I just checked out sexy mandarin, this has to be the most ridiculous, male-oriented language learning website I've ever seen. absurd.

@Bodawei the only hints I've been able to find on what is in store for new Chinesepod content has been by following links on Community->Team. Fiona links to a youtube channel and a site called MandarinMadeEZ. The videos I've sampled seem to be of good production quality, mostly in English, and point out some Mandarin vocabulary relevant to whatever the video is about, somewhat like the Qing Wen format.

Kaoru Gleissner seems to be associated with a site called sexymandarin, and a few other things, including BigFoot Entertainment. From what I could tell, sexymandarin is kind of similar to the MandarinMadeEZ videos, but with less clothing.

Bigfoot Entertainment lead me to "New Concept Mandarin" which I think might be the outfit that is taking over the individual instruction for Chinesepod.

My guess is that the Chinesepod library has enough lessons in it for most students to find new content for as long as they continue their subscriptions, and it doesn't cost much to just keep the Web site running. So, maybe the video content will be the draw for new students, and the Chinesepod library will be a source of study material for those of the new students that get serious about studying Chinese. Since nothing official has been said, I'm just filling the speculative vacuum.

Well I just bought an annual subscription .. I don't see much likelihood of them closing the shop in 2015. Whoever takes over the reins no doubt has plans for meeting a no doubt steadily increasing demand for Chinese learning materials.

Really gutted to hear about this mate. After over 8 years of subscribing, I let my last subscription expire back in October because I've been just too busy to regularly use the site. But I just popped back on today as my new year resolution was to get back into my Chinese study. And I find these threads about Jenny and David now also having left. Might hold fire on resubscribing (and getting back into the Transcripts with Tal group!!) until I've sussed out if CPod is continuing!

Thanks for posting this.