Suggestions and improvements for Chinesepod in 2015

It's a big ask, but it would be great to have each lesson on memrise.com

I'm a bit late to the party, but here are my suggestions if they are still being accepted:

For how I use ChinesePod, there are 4 types of lesson I would like to keep track of:

1. Lessons I don't plan on studying any time soon.
2. Lessons I would like to study in the near future.
3. Lessons I am in the process of studying (usually takes a good 2-4 days for me and I often have a few going in parallel)
4. Lessons I have finished studying.

Type 1 is easy - unbookmarked, unstudied

For type 2, I've been using the bookmark feature

For type 4, I've been used the mark studied feature.

I'm not aware of a feature that would allow me to mark type 3 lessons. If there is, I'd like to know. If there isn't, maybe that could be added?

I also echo previous commenters suggestion about having some male native speakers... I'm male myself and I would like to understand more how tones sound from a lower-pitch voice. Obviously not something that can be changed overnight, but maybe something to keep in mind.

Finally, I worked my way through the pinyin series (it has been a great help to me pronunciation!!), but the Pinyin chart itself that was mentioned in every lesson was no where to be found. It is kind of there in the various lessons, but I think it would be great to follow along with them all in one place.

Perhaps a little late to the discussion, but I recently re-joined, and I have two comments on the current CPod:

1. Not enough material for advanced students; and

2. Can we please get Detective Li back? I really loved the Chinese murder mystery hear plays!

Other than that congratulations on joining Fiona - I really enjoy your Qing Wen videos, even as an advanced student these are sometimes useful!

I would like to see media lessons again that are based on current events. All the cultural topics are ok, but they are not useful enough to spend more than five minutes on. I find them to be made up of a bunch of specialised vocab mixed in with elementary-intermediate sentences. I take little to nothing away from them. Also, lessons based on conversational dialogue, like the advanced lessons, are just too easy. They won't prepare students for what advanced Chinese is in the classroom and on standardised tests  -- that is, long articles and complex sentences. Conversational Chinese ends at the intermediate level...

If CPod doesn't intend to serve advanced students like it once did with media lessons, it should be made clear. My current subscription was based on the assumption of having new media lessons, but after I subbed, I realised there weren't any. I tried to get my money back but I couldn't even after three emails explaining my situation. That was unfortunate. I wish I knew before hand that there weren't any more article-based lesson. I'm making the best of my sub, but it really hasn't given me anything that I don't already own through past subscriptions. Even the discussion forums are practically dead...

One thing that I would find very useful would be to make the different "sides" of the flashcards more versatile. For example I would like to have My Language on one side and Pinyin + Audio on the other side or even Pinyin + Audio + Hanzi on the other side. This is currently not possible.

I hope I'm not doubling up on a suggestion, but on a quick scroll through I can't see this mentioned. I'd like a feature restored that has been lost. Previously when playing a line in the dialogue tab you could click on the play button again and it would go back to the start of the sentence. This is useful for long sentences if you miss a bit and want to go back to the start without having to wait for the rest of the dialogue to play out. I realise there is a workaround now...that you can download each line of the dialogue and then you could control that in your playback. But this would be less efficient for me. I only occasionally want to start the line over again. Any chance of bringing it back? Was there a reason this feature was removed in the first place. It's great when we have new helpful features but not so great when old useful features are removed.

Just came on here to say - so far so good by my standards.

Also, having a balance of male and female native speakers would be a major plus. I remember, as a beginner, I would be caught saying things in a very effeminate way, and I blush a bit when I think back at it. :) 真讨厌啊！

Dear Chinese Pod and users, 

I have some concerns with chinese pod's diversity.  It seems since Jenny and David have left you cant hear any fresh mainland mothertongue putonghua. I like fiona, her english and chinese are both amazing. This might be the problem. From my selfish point of view Chinese pod is for listening practice. Therefore having something explained to me in chinese is higher value than a crisp english explanation. (This still applies to low level courses.) if i still misunderstand I can look to textbooks/google etc, but in honestly the chinese explanation is more effective in terms of starting to use the lanaguage straight away.

As a customer I obviously want the standard quality chinese, or at least a wide variety.  I love Taiwan and all its charm, but It is not known for its quality, standard putonghua.  To that end, Cpod needs to think about getting some charismatic mainland speakers (to which there are many!) By all means keep Fiona. An improvement in diversity is key. Many of us will likely head to Beijing / Shanghai before Taipei. Chinese pod will lose customers if it becomes taiwanese pod. Maybe I am in the minority and I guess some users cannot differentiate between the Taiwanese accent and a mainland one. 

Would love to hear if anymore has similar worries etc. By all means fire me down if you think im wrong. 

Best wishes 

James 

Hi guys, concerning the discussions, I would suggest to put the most recent threats to the top. This way one could avoid scrolling down the whole way and would quickly be able to assess the latest inputs. Best, Kerstin

I have 2 additional thoughts regarding this question:

1) The courses are showing their age. It would be nice to get some of the more recent shows and hosts into them.

2) It seems like you guys are sitting on a mountain of underutilized data. You've already linked each show to a list of associated vocabulary and subject tags. And you know which shows we've studied (based on the "mark studied" button). By extension, you have a rough idea of which vocabulary and subjects we're familiar with. Why not spit that information back at us? It would be nice to know where our strengths and weaknesses lie, how much new vocabulary any given show might present to us, and when's a good time to advance to the next level (based on vocab rather than on # of shows).

I had the same thoughts as I start to transition to Intermediate. I do listen to Newbie lessons once and awhile and the newer ones seem extremely not newbie. Also the newer Elementary lessons are much more advanced than they should be. However with that said it must be hard to come up with new ideas for entry level lesson. John Pasden, a 100% true educator was involved for so many years and made so much good content. That is a hard act to follow and even harder to improve upon. Although I think the new host are hip and cool they may not be at the same level of education understanding as past hosts like John, especially for newer learners. But with al of this said there is still a ton of great content on the site at the newbie and elementary level. Focus on this... as you improve and move towards more advanced levels then try newer lessons. Also let give the new team sometime to react to all our comments. I'm sure there is some settling in that still needs to happen.

I only just started learning chinese, so I still usw newbie lessons. They have in my opinion gone way down in quality compared to earlier. All the last lessons are oddly specific, topicwise. The expansion sentences are completely overblown, both gramatically and vocabularywise, for a newbie lesson. In the latest "sleep in" about half the words are introduced with their pinyin and ztheir tones, the other half is not. It seems lackluster to ask "what does wo3 mean" and not do the same for yao4. Plus none of them get repeated anymore. Listen to the John pasden newbie lessons for reference, they are just great.

Also it seems like there isn't a teaching goal. In the end, after the lesson is wrapped up, Greg asks "so what's the word for alarm". This is the kind of unstructured "one word here, one word there" learning that I didn't encounter in CP previously. 

An actual newbie, someone who uses this as their first podcast, will walk away from this with almost nothing at all. Probabaly not even wo3. 

I suggest having the lesson title as well as the number on all contact points e.g. on the downloaded files and on the library information about each lesson.

I find that I download the mp3 files and then don't know the title of the lesson that I have downloaded. I them check in the library and have to actually open up the lesson to find the title. I have now taken to changing the title when I download mp3 files and PDFs, but it would be more convenient not to have to do so.

you could try http://www.slow-chinese.com/

http://china.org.cn/learning_chinese/index.htm 

http://readchinese.nflc.org

http://justlearnchinese.com/mini-novels/

Hi everyone,

Im fairly new to Chinese Pod and currently studying the intermediate level.  My listening and speaking are more advanced than my reading and it is reading I would like more help with as I think the podcasts are great for listening practice. 

What I would like would be more reading practice, such as small paragraphs of text to review/challenge.  For example using the vocabulary from the elementary lessons to create stories or texts so I can continue to review/practice the characters.  Otherwise I just review the lessons I already studied so I am not sure if I actually would recognise the character if it wasn't for the fact I have learnt the sentence and know it is coming! 

I mainly use text books and pleco for reading practice, anyone have any useful methods/websites/books etc?

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this site and starting to get the lay of the land. In a recent vid, Fiona and Gwilym recommended learning measure words at the same time one learns the corresponding noun. It would be nice to have that option built into the vocabularly manager.

Also, does anyone know if it's possible to import vocabularly into Memrise? I looked, and that doesn't seem to be the case. This might push me into the direction of Anki.

It would be nice to get some periodic pointers to what is happening in Chinese music.  I like listening to Chinese songs but in recent years they've gotten a bit harder to search out.   The local bookstore that used to sell CDs closed, Chinese web sites have put restrictions on downloads to US based IPs.  Youtube gives kind of a skewed view and is easiest to search, if you already know who to search for.

Agree

Size of the jump is substantial.

Other Comment

The Hanz Font in a Dictionary is to small.

When teaching you can not give same "real Estate" to Chinese Characters and Latin Letters.

This is a common mistake accross the board of Chinese Instructions.

Why?

The Teachers know the characters and have conceptual problem being i "student's shoes.

:))

Zic

I'm also stuck somewhere between elementary and intermediate so agree with previous comments about the size of the jump. Also it would be useful for me to have separate feeds for each level rather than the current mixture.

Not sure why but I keep finding the lesson reviews in my RSS feed appearing before the relevant lessons. That makes it really hard to work with when driving long distances and just wanting to listen to a bunch of shows. 

I would really like to use the vocabulary flash cards more often but I find there are several crucial things missing:

1) Generally, it is difficult and clunky to work with large decks and add new words to them.  There are many reasons for this and if someone at ChinesePod is going to tackle this I would be happy to go into it in detail. Or you could just search for my previous comments and see what I've suggested before.

2) I often want to review vocabularly while walking/washing dishes/driving etc.  All of these need handsfree operation.  I would like to put it in auto review but the one mode you can't select for that is to automatically say either the chinese word or english translation.  It would be great if you could work through a deck and have it give either one first, pause for x seconds and then give the other.

3) It would be great if there were a pre generated deck for every lessons.  Not just the vocabularly words, but every word that shows up when you click "Break Down" for all the individual phrases

How to submit the placement test

Hello everybody, I am relatively new to ChinesePod and wanted to take the placement test to start with. Unfortunately, I could not find any button to submit my results from part 1/3 or even continue the test. I might have missed it but in my search for a quick answer I could not find any kind of frequently asked questions page either. This might be worth an update but for the moment I would be grateful if someone could help me figuring this the test? Thanks a lot in advance, Kerstin

I have another suggestion. In the lesson dialogue would it be possible to add the pinyin below the characters? It is like this in the lesson PDF and I find it very useful as I add the pinyin to my flashcards along with the characters. 

Currently it only shows the chinese characters and then the link to click the dropdown fo rthe english translation.

can we get a lesson on food, like actual cooking for the advanced users? I'm finding it so strange that I can talk about investing, stocks, economic downturn and marketing, but I cant say "boil" "sautee" "deep fry" "pan" "steam" "spatula" or any actually useful words for the process of cooking. 

If you could fill this vocabulary gap it would be great.

As for the accent of mandaring changin to taiwanese, I hardly noticed any difference when i was there so not worried at all. 

Make some competition within the community. Fiona has already done this with her tonge twister competition and I think it was a great idea (I was a little late in seeing it to participate) more of these types of things would really help to build discussion in the community.

My ideas for competitons:

a. More tonge twisters obviously.

b. KTV recording competition (I'm already cringing but this would be fun and funny)

c. Create a short story and record it.

d. Do a chain story within one post on the lesson page, everyone would reply to that post with a recording, they would be required to use the vocabulary used in that lesson and eventually expand upon it.

Exmaple

Write “If we have free time, we’ll go to the party” and explain that the students are going to make a story one by one using this pattern. The catch is that every student needs to use the second part of the phrase said by a previous student as the first part of his/hers.

Student 1 If we have free time, we’ll go to the party.Student 2 If we go to the party, we’ll have fun.Student 3 If we have fun, we’ll come home late.Student 4 If we come home late, we’ll miss our test tomorrow. etc.

Gwilym, I believe you did promise another user that you would ask the tech team about restoring the feature where the page automatically scrolls to the point in a discussion thread which is indicated by the link when a user clicks on the comment header.  Any update on that?  

Also there seems to be a loss in the functionality for searching for lessons, as alluded to by others.  I think this is a technical problem, but also there seem to be some omissions in lesson tags / related lessons curation.  Maybe the library was never properly catalogued or indexed to begin with, and its gotten quite large, so I can understand if it is hard to comb through everything after the fact.

Is there a simple list somewhere of all the lessons, by title and lesson number?  

Thanks

So far I have two suggestions:

1) Make it easier to find some of the available content as it's not listed under the "Library" section and I only stumbled across it but managing my library feed settings from the main page.

http://chinesepod.com/dashboard/feedsettings 

Some shows such as the video series, What's the Story, The Menu Stealer and Shanghainese is not listed under lessons or culture shows section of the library.

2) I have already made this suggestion in a previous post but want to add it here as well. With the new video content being created it would be nice to have a video link directly on the lesson page. Currently Gwilym is great and posting a URL that we can copy and paste in another tab but having an intergrated viewer or embedded video would be nice. This already exists for some of the old CPod videos. Ex: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/where-do-you-work

Another thougt.  It would be really cool if you could save an entire sentence to a deck. So rather than just vocaulary items being stored, being able to save useful sentences, or "staring" them and being able to look them up somewhere on the site.  

Hi guys. What's the new green icon next to the play button on the dialogue section for? I noticed it sometime yesterday?

Nice idea, but I wouldn't be expecting the current regime to pay this anything more than lip service.