10 days without an Advanced lesson...

bpeacock,

Thanks a lot for the support. I appreciate it. :)

John,

As the owner of a vertical market software package, I sympathize with what you're going through.  Everyone seems to know better than you do what everyone else needs.  It's tough to deliver a product that does everything for everyone.  I've only been a poddie for one month but I am enjoying it.  I do on occassion find thngs that don't work, but I know that you're getting to them.  I wish you luck in satisfying the masses and if there is a formula on how you did it can you please forward it to me.  LOL Thanks to ChinesePod.

ps. My mother just joined ItalianPod and loves it too.

Actually I'm using sets a lot to manage lessons, not just (or even at all) to plan studies - some of my sets have hundreds of lessons, so I think we have slightly different definitions of "meaningful set"!

What I'm looking for is a way to find out which Advanced lessons now have a traditional html, rather than spending quite a bit of time going to the lesson, then copying links, pasting, overwriting with "trad.html", and then finally finding out there isn't one available yet.

So I guess I mean a set of "Upgraded Advanced Lessons", for lessons that didn't use to have current features and now do. Or if that gets too unwieldy, a set of "Recently Upgraded Advanced Lessons."

(General suggestion: some kind of a "Worth Another Look" feature - older lessons that are somehow especially relevant right now. This would be in the spirit of what "Related Lessons" should but doesn't yet do - lead people back into the archive and making them study that way, rather than just waiting for the next day's lesson.)

lostinasia,

I'm not sure what you mean...

The quality upgrades I'm talking about refers to the expansion sentences (+ recordings), vocabulary (+ recordings), and Audio Review.

So we're not talking about re-recorded dialogues or full podcasts in this case, and I'm afraid there are too many of them to create a meaningful set.

For updating about upgraded lessons: wouldn't the Lesson Sets be a great way to do this?

baillies,

Agreed. We have actually just made a decision to make publication of lesson levels more even. Please see my response in this thread.

And yes, we will definitely be updating users about the upgraded lessons soon.

John

Thanks for your great information once again. I guess I would prefer a more even balance in lessons especially as there is already lots of lessons at the lower levels and I feel the best way to bridge the gaps is to have lots of quality lessons.

Is it possible to indicate when lessons have been 'fixed' so that we can revisit them if desired?

lostinasia,

We are definitely working on better support for traditional characters. Please trust me on that.

auntie68,

You're welcome.

Your lesson suggestion is noted.

Word of support to "overconfident intermediates":  Although you perhaps don't want to base your entire studies at the Advanced level, it is a great thing to push your limits.  Do this by trying to read Chinese news articles, listening to Chinese news, and listening to Advanced and Media podcasts.  How can you continue to improve if you're not pushing yourselves?

Overconfident intermediates, 加油！

Just a suggestion to other learners at the Advanced level: it is good to get information from sources other than ChinesePod.  I find that ChinesePod is great for strengthening my understanding of grammar and increasing my vocabulary, but there is only so much a service like this can do for us. 

My study method: Daily trips to the BBC Chinese web site, watching Chinese TV online, conversations with Chinese friends through Skype, and in addition supplementing my studies with ChinesePod.  Although I don't have major problems with understanding Chinese media, I find that I learn lots of information from Intermediate through Advanced level podcasts.  Intermediate podcasts are just as good for gaining vocabularly as Advanced ones.

Overall: Don't look at using outside sources as being pushed away.  Instead, look at it as moving towards a more "authentic" Chinese.

Fourthing and fifthing others--thanks John for great responses.

Addressing a few issues...

I don't exactly feel "contaminated" by simplified characters--they're just harder for me because I'm unfamiliar with them. (I live in Taiwan, so what I see every day is traditional.) At the advanced level, with traditional characters I feel "Oo, that's hard, but I think I can figure it out", whereas with simplified I just... have no idea. And I continue to believe that any Chinese-learning tool, and DEFINITELY one that's based on the internet, should have equal and easy opportunities for both traditional and simplified characters.

Although the decreased difficulty of Intermediate doesn't suit me personally, I still think it is a good change. It's a little hard for me to tell, but I believe the Elementary/ Intermediate gap is much less of an issue that it was six months ago. Good for ChinesePod for addressing this.

Re: sorting out consistency of the Advanced lessons. These are minor issues: recent lessons have Supplemental Vocabulary. Older lessons don't. Every so often I'll find that the "Vocabulary" section focuses on totally different words from the "Expansion" sentences.

I care MUCH MORE about bringing in traditional htmls for the older Advanced. I'm glad to know this is being worked on. Fixes (Lesson Reviews, or whatever they're called) are good too - better than I'd ask for, actually.

When I said the Advanced lessons weren't as interesting as the Upper Intermediate lessons, I wasn't slamming the Upper Intermediate lessons! It's just a function of language - at lower levels it becomes harder to talk about interesting topics. We've all had this in language classes - in our heads, in our native language, we've got a nuanced interesting point, but all we're able to say is something like "Me think good. No smash. Smash bad."

Lesson length: the gripe I often have is on what's covered. Basically I think "easy" vocabulary should be a lower priority than sentence patterns, usage, and more complex vocabulary. By "easy" I guess I mean words with an straightforward 1-1 equivalence in English. What annoys me is when the lesson banter just seems to follow the vocabulary list. One thing I like about the current Intermediate is that almost every sentence is covered - I think that's invaluable for those just starting to deal with more Chinese banter from Jenny.

If the slowed lesson schedule does lead to tidying up the lessons in the archive, then I guess that's a reasonable trade-off. I'd rather see tidying WITH seven lesssons per week, but I guess the resources aren't available.

yep, thanks John.

John

thanks for your Saturday response + clearing that up. You see, even your seemingly tough & hardboiled Advanced clientele needs some love once in the while.

SCNR: Based on your numbers it will take roughly 3,25 years until we see the 100th Media lesson. At the same time you reach Newbie lesson #480...

:P

John, that was a very gracious reply to me. Thank you. We do appreciate everything you guys do, I can only imagine how much you have on your plates at the moments. God knows I do enough to make it hard for you NOT to be grumpy.

Once things settle down, I hope you will consider my request for a few lessons in the form of letters; the language is so very different from spoken Chinese. Eg. letters from a loving husband to a wife, letters carrying joyful news (and also sad news), "parental guidance" letters to a child, letters full of homesickness... etc etc

And I do hope that -- one day -- there will be a workable way for CPOD to include Chinese language definitions as well in the "Advanced" pdfs. It doesn't have to be a definitive definition; but it can help ease the transition to using Chinese language-only dictionaries for your users. 

THANKS.

Henning,

We will not break the levels, and we will not intentionally drive learners away. Please don't worry about that.

The previous 7 lessons/week schedule was a multi-week cycle with a level distribution starting at 25% for Newbies, winding down to 7% for Advanced Media.  The new 5 lessons/week schedule is also a multi-week cycle, with a level distribution starting at 25% for Newbies, winding down to 5% for Advanced Media.

Sorry for not giving out all the details, but the proportions remain essentially unchanged.

auntie68,

It's really not that we're not open to suggestions. The truth is that everyone at ChinesePod is working really, really hard to make it better. I admit, at times we have our heads down in our work and don't communicate enough, and we need to work on that. Obviously, we do make some mistakes along the way as well.

But we have always listened to our users, and we will continue to do so, even when they're pointing out how we're screwing up.

John,

OK, let me rephrase   :)

1. I still need study tools.

2. I learn most from the CPod Advanced lessons and can now pretty reasonably follow them, but do not consider myself Advanced - even by CPod standards. In both my writing and my speaking there are still too many fundamental flaws [Did somebody say 了?]

3. According to CPod standards, changye is "Advanced - 10th dan". Sometimes I have daydreams of getting there. I really need CPod Advanced and Media lessons to speed up that process and cut it down from 20 years to 15 or even 10...

Conlusion: I love those Advanced lessons and, yes, I need them. On a regular basis.

rjberki,

In all fairness I think the intermediate lessons were shortened or simplified in response to the many criticisims posted regarding the disproportionately difficult leap from elementary to intermediate. They are trying to smooth this out. Real or imagined, this issue drew many complaints.

Yes, this is exactly the case. I appreciate your picking up on it.

Please note that a few shorter lessons of a certain level does not signal the "death" of the lesson level as you know it. Some lesson will be shorter than others.

henning,

The reduction of the release cycle, the shortening of the dialogues, and the decreased number of (more preparation-intensive) Advanced lessons might all be a result from this.

You're right that our tech resources are not infinite, but it's the academic team that has the burden of cleaning up old lesson content (sentences, translations, recordings).

It's very interesting to me that the shorter lessons are perceived as some kind of cutback. The shorter lenth is actually a part of the effort to increase lesson quality, and also to provide some relatively more accessible lessons within each level.

At some point, it became a sort of acceptable practice that "the higher the difficulty level, the longer the dialogue." While it's true that learners at higher levels can comfortably take in more material, it's certainly not a given that that's the way it should be done. Why can't I have a 10 minute Advanced lesson instead of a 15 minute one? The important thing is that the lesson is interesting, and that I learn useful information. That's what we're working on.

lostinasia,

To be honest, I probably shouldn't be in Advanced, but as I think we've discussed elsewhere already, they're often really interesting - moreso than most of the Upper Intermediate.

Ouch! Actually, this is one of the quality issues I mentioned above... Upper Intermediate and Advanced lessons should be just as interesting as the other levels. We're working on that, and I think some of the lessons coming out soon will demonstrate it nicely.

lostinasia,

One of the reasons the production schedule has dropped to 5 lesson podcasts per week is to devote more time to lesson quality. This includes not only future lessons, but every lesson in the archive as well.

The issues you're talking about are already being worked on. As each old lesson gets cleaned up, its Chinese expansion sentences, translations, and recordings are redone as necessary, and new PDF/HTML files (simplified and traditional) along with new Audio Review (Fix) files are uploaded as well.

So yes, we do hear your cries of anguish. We tried really hard to clean up the archive without cutting down on lesson production, but it just wasn't happening, and the team was stretched too thin. You may have noticed that Amber and Clay have commented less frequently than before. This is a major reason why.

Making the lessons more consistent - sorting out what's in vocab, what's in the expansion sentences, and what's in supplemental vocab - would also be nice.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this, but we are fixing all those sections for all the lessons in the archive.

Henning,

I don't think the "Advanced" lessons are designed for "genuine" Advanced learners (like you), but rather for overconfident Intermediates (like me) who strive to built up their vocab base in order to become "somewhat more advanced".

Well, how you use the lessons is up to you, but I assure you, the lessons are designed for advanced learners. It's our "advanced," though, not the HSK's, or some other standard's.

"Crutches"??  I thought they were study tools.... :)

Wow, lots to address here. I've just returned to China after a vacation in the States, and I'm still getting caught up on all the developments.

As ChinesePod Product Manager, Clay is in charge of the lesson schedule. There are definitely well thought-out principles behind the publication frequency, designed to meet the needs of our user base and to deliver new lessons of every level in a regular fashion.

I will talk with Clay and make sure that he explains the issue and addresses your concerns.

Don't break the balance of the levels.

I am convinced that it is of prime importance to bind learners from all levels here for reasons of exchanging experience, helping out, and showing a path up there. We need the Newbie learners just as much as we need the Advanced ones. Who, by the way, pay the same price to enjoy the services here. Why overproportionally punish them?

The logic "you have grown out of this, play elsewhere" is dangerous as you drive away more advanced learners. Besides: It is only half true because there is a huge gap between CPod Advanced and real media. With the same right you could say: "Newbies, there are so many beginner resources out there on the web waiting for you.". See the danger that lurks on that dark path?

The old scheme was perfectly fair:

• 3 x [Newbie/Elementry]
• 2 x [Intermediate/Upper Intermediate]
• 2 x [Advanced/Media], with Media coming only every second week
• 1 QW
• fun stuff (DA)

Do we switch to a scheme of the following sort now?

• 3 x [Newbie/Elementry]
• 1 x Intermediate turned Elementry
• 1 x (rest)
• 1 x QW
• 1 x fun stuff (DA)
• 1 x (non-Mandarin! extra show for a minority of the users)

BTW: I would definately appreciate a clearly laid-out, explicit publication scheme that tells me when to expect what level.

@henning: Wow, "overconfident Intermediate" describes me so perfectly, I hope it make it onto a official CPOD t-shirt!

In all fairness I think the intermediate lessons were shortened or simplified in response to the many criticisims posted regarding the disproportionately difficult leap from elementary to intermediate. They are trying to smooth this out. Real or imagined, this issue drew many complaints.

Lost in Asis@ certainly your complaints re trad support are valid but I would think simplified lessons would still hold value for you. Only about 25-30% (based on my own crude measurement) of characters have been simplified and Im guessing since you have chosen trad you are learning both. Its not like you cant touch a simplified lesson lest you be contaminated. Am I missing something?

As for advanced lessons I do find it unfortunate that they are reducing the number of lessons per week but at the advanced level you have other options such as engaging in actual conversation, reading magazines or books, writing letters, watching tv shows, or listening to radio. Lower level folks depend much more on the spoon fed lesson materials. Again I am disappointed at how cpod communicates change, and I find the total abscense of any staff involvement in the boards on the weekends to be an eerie silence, but I dont expect cpod to be a stand alone tool.

Thanks changye - you're right, and that's a good point!

I do find it endlessly ironic that I'll spend the day standing in front of a class, begging my Taiwanese students not to be shy, then as soon as I'm out walking the street and someone starts to talk to me, I'll shut down.

Hi, native-English-speaker guys,

Hehe, actually, I’m very pleased to hear that some of you are shy about posting comments in Chinese. The same could be said for us non-native English speakers who post comments in clumsy English. It took me a lot of courage to post my first comment written in English here, and much more in Chinese.

A lot of listeners don’t post a comment partly because they don’t have much confidence in their use of English. You have an advantage. At least, you don’t have to worry about your English ability. Just pick up your courage to post in Mandarin! Nobody laughs at you in here, just like you don’t laugh at our English.

One of the reasons I've started on the old advanced is that I seem to be consuming two advanced lessons a week.  I'm not sure what I'll do when I get all caught up, especially if CPOD is slowing down on new advanced content.

LostinAsia

Hmmm.  I could have written the same as you for example "I seldom comment in those lessons (Advanced) because I'm really shy about typing in Chinese! "

I get inhibited by Changye and others who throw in passages of Chinese and who (obviously?) are cruising at that level, rather than desparately trying to gain a foothold.

When I have written something in English, it seems to get ignored and smothered by reams of Chinese characters from others - or maybe it is sufficiently boring not to engender any interest.

Careful, Henning, I resemble that remark! :)

henning says
11 hours ago

changye,

I don't think the "Advanced" lessons are designed for "genuine" Advanced learners (like you), but rather for overconfident Intermediates (like me) who strive to built up their vocab base in order to become "somewhat more advanced".

I've just changed my level to "Upper-Intermediate" in my profile. I'd never dare claim I'm at that level to anyone's face, but maybe - just maybe - ChinesePod bases business decisions on how many subscribers declare themselves to be a given level. Perhaps others should do the same.

As a language teacher, I'd suggest the Advanced lessons actually aren't as preparation-intensive as other material. When I'm preparing material for my classes, Advanced is relatively easy, because I just say or write what I'd normally say or write, but a little slower. Lower levels takes much more time to prepare because you have to trim and trim and trim. The language needs to be much more controlled and carefully thought-out.

(Re: participation in Advanced... I seldom comment in those lessons because I'm really shy about typing in Chinese! Same bloody problem that keeps my spoken Chinese from improving, actually. Sometimes I fear that ChinesePod has given me a wonderful chance to work on my passive Chinese skills, and so persuade myself that I'm improving, without making me work on the active skills that I also need.)

I wonder how many people work on advanced levels.  Some of us (myself included) are  trying to get up to that level but not really there (Henning you must be there!), but indeed find the subjects more fun than Upper Intermediate in general.  Maybe it is only a handfull ....  Chinesepod will know!

I too wonder whether the other xxpods will be as successful as this one.  The number of commenters on Frenchpod seems small.  I am waiting for an Advanced Frenchpod lesson to see whether it helps me but so far no sign of it.

The previous Spanishpod didnt work out.  I haven't checked up on the current one as my interest in Spanish is minimal at the moment.

Hm,
my suspicion is that the problem lies exactly here: Praxis doesn't have a developer day left for this type of task.

Thinned out, due to

a) the aftermath of the new release (bug fixing) and

b) (more worrisome!) the introduction of all those xPods.

The xPods drag from the shared resource pool but it can't be expected that they already (if ever) bring in enough extra cash to compensate.

The reduction of the release cycle, the shortening of the dialogues, and the decreased number of (more preparation-intensive) Advanced lessons might all be a result from this.

But this is of course speculative. I would really love to read some official statements from CPod regarding the higher levels.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've used traditional converters in the past but found they missed a lot... then again, maybe they've improved in the past year or two. It's the kind of thing the internets get better at fast.

It's actually better for me to copy and paste from the simplified html; I'm lazy enough that I want me my pinyin!

To be honest, I probably shouldn't be in Advanced, but as I think we've discussed elsewhere already, they're often really interesting - moreso than most of the Upper Intermediate. My speaking is certainly nowhere near Advanced, although my [traditional character] reading is OK for it. I didn't so much graduate from Intermediate as ChinesePod lowered the bar, so up I moved.

The whole tradtional html issue just seems like the kind of "follow through and get the quality right" thing that ChinesePod often... doesn't do. Would it really take more than a day's work for someone in the ChinesePod factory to sort out the traditional htmls?

LostinAsia

Can't you copy and paste the text from the dialogue tab into word and then use a converter to convert the characters from simplified to traditional?

Long winded maybe but then you could use the older lessons.

I'd love to look at more of the older advanced lessons, but unfortunately a lot of them don't have a traditional html file available.

ChinesePod, if you are going to lessen the amount of new content, at least please make the OLD content properly available! It shouldn't take that long for someone to go through the older lessons and set up a traditional html file.

As far as I can figure out, lessons up to and including 话中带刺 (April 23, 2007; E0495) don't have a traditional html. That means more than half (71 out of 133?) of the advanced podcasts are very difficult to use for those that don't like (er, despise/ find utterly useless/ wonder why they even exist) the non-cut and pastable PDFs.

Making the lessons more consistent - sorting out what's in vocab, what's in the expansion sentences, and what's in supplemental vocab - would also be nice.

(Less of an issue but still annoying, on traditional PDFs I downloaded way back, the links to the htmls don't work for anything before 城市的乞丐, #712, from November 26, 2007. I guess they got broken in one of the changeovers.)

I've started studying the older advanced lessons recently.   They seem harder and more jam-packed with tasty vocab and indecipherable patterns than the more recent ones.  I like challenging puzzles, but they were too challenging for me when they first came out.

The production quality of  the new ones is also better.  Cpod is deffinitely improving over time, but the old lessons still charm me.

next advanced lesson...(July 20, 2008)

changye,

I don't think the "Advanced" lessons are designed for "genuine" Advanced learners (like you), but rather for overconfident Intermediates (like me) who strive to built up their vocab base in order to become "somewhat more advanced".

Although I am now indeed trying to integrate other sources into my learning slot, I still learn most from the Advanced CPod lessons. The stuff out there in the wild does not have the structure, repetition, and add-on-material ("Expansion", "Exercises" and "Audio Review"). Yes, I still need those crutches.

Hi henning,

That might be better from a marketing point of view. The last Media lesson was uploaded on June 29, about 20 days ago, but I don't think there are many listeners who complain about this. Pradoxically speaking, I guess that the more you advanced, the less you listen to advanced and Media lessons. And more importantly, genuine advanced learners usually don't come to language learning podcasts. They learn languages on their terms.