lots of lessons fast, or a few lessons in detail slow

As Newbie learner, I'd have to say that the sentence patterns presented in the expansion sections were the draw that signed me up to cPod. But the fact that they are a sort of bonus, not explained, but a nice surprise makes the site much more enjoyable for me...

BUT: As an English teacher, I've found that this is only good for lower level students who are striving for basic fluency. In the beginning, students have to speak before they know, have to imitate before they analyze, have to produce it before they break it down.

At intermediate levels, I think the more traditional structured learning with sentence patterns is fine. It gives students a backwards engineered look at what they already know, so they can see the limits and possibilities of what they've learned, and helps show them where they can build.

So for Newbies, I think cPod is really well-structured. The 'incidental' repetition seems highly controlled to me, or just intuitively good presentation of a new language.

Hi, I'm at Newbie level. I have been using CPod for about three or four months, and before that I listened to the Pimsleur course. My current strategy is, after hearing the lesson a couple of times, to listen to the Review MP3s over and over a few times and also review the Exercises on the website and the flashcards on the ChinesePod Android app.

I also try to do 30 minutes of Skritter per day. I save vocab lists which are labelled according to each ChinesePod lesson and then I import those into Skritter. Also, when I feel I have studied the lesson on CPod to a reasonable level, I mark it as studied so it goes into my archive, change the vocab set for that lesson so it says "STUD-" at the beginning, and then dig out more Newbie lessons to subscribe to (I normally have about 20 lessons on the go).

It feels a bit like I am overdoing it with the Review MP3s at times and I could get through the lessons quicker if I was less strict on reading/writing ability (I sometimes listen to the Elementary lessons and they don't seem too hard), but I am wondering if I will ever catch up in terms of writing ability if I build up a big backlog? On the plus side, remembering characters seems to be getting very slightly easier as I become more familiar with the radicals.

I'm aware it's not a good idea to be too much of a perfectionist when it comes to moving on to new lessons, so I'm also wondering how others approach this?

I'm all for more sentence patterns. I volunteer to teach English to immigrants, and I get very far with them, very fast, by using common patterns, then adding vocabulary to those patterns. Rote repetition drives it into the brain and out of the mouth.

Recently I have committed to gathering up my materials for all the CP lessons I have marked "studied" so I can easily review/retaiin the material, but somehow I am more memorizing that material and NOT seeing and utilizing patterns that might help me actually use this language. Calkins, that course you took - I envy you!

Hi !
For those of you like Calicartel (and myself) who are unfortunate enough to live outside China, have no Chinese contacts but are still interested in achieving active Mandarin knowledge (ie not only be able to read and listen but also speak), I would personally recommend Chinesehour (www.chinesehour.com) as a supplement to Chinesepod; they provide affordable one-on-one private lessons through video-conferencing with native speakers based in main-land China. (I've personally been taking 4~5 times-per-week 30mins "half-lessons"... instead of the regular 1 hour lessons because I found that the required level of concentration is quite exhausting) This may also give you a serious reality-check of what real-time spoken Chinese is like ! :-)...Yes, sorry, this is live Mandarin so there's no "playback/fast rewind" button like on your ipod/iphone or your mp3 player !...be prepared ! (^O^)

I hope that this helps some of you.

Best Regards

Karl

Yeh, in fact if I had active knowledge right now, I wouldn't know what to do with it since I'm living outside China and have no Chinese contacts. In my situation passive knowledge is gratifying enough and requires less maintenance.

I have the same experience. No knowledge -> passive knowledge -> active knowledge is a lot easier than trying to skip directly to active knowledge. But then I'm not in a situation where I need to use the stuff I learn from day one. If I were in China, as many (most?) of CPod's subscribers are, maybe rushing towards active knowledge is worthwhile.

Regarding patterns, my feeling is that the more CP try to pinpoint them, the more they lapse into unfruitful repetition, like when they teach the "什么什么 ... 的话" pattern for the hundreth time. Cross-linking to previous lessons - merely mentioning a previous occurrence in the podcast - would be useful for reinforcement, but again CP students doing lesson 60 will not all of them have done lesson 53. This is a major difference compared to traditional courses.

Some good pattern learning is implicit in the expansion sentences though. Maybe the expansion sentences could concentrate more on patterns than on vocab & expressions, ie instead of having 3 sentences illustrating a particular word, have 3 sentences hammering in the same pattern.

Here are sentence pattern drills I found very efficient (listen to the latest 5th of the clip):

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ealac/zhang/dh/dh_audio/01b.mp3

Note the immediate repeat by a second voice.

Reverting to the angst of efficiently learning patterns of grammar, one should not lose sight of the fact that one is learning a language, not a system of rules or patterns. The main thing is to get there, never mind how. I'm confident that once I can understand Chinese radio and listen to it for fun and keeping up with the headlines, patterns and new terms will sort themselves out in my mind and I'll be in business.

calkins,

One thing I think would be great as a supplement to the existing Grammar Guide would be the following:

Every lesson that has a distinct sentence pattern would have a link to a page within the Grammar Guide, where a clear explanation of the pattern (i.e. S  把  O  V) and approximately 10 example sentences for that pattern.

This seems right on to me. I am still Newbie and finding I'm having a hard time locating examples of sentence patterns that are relevant when I want to express myself. Unless I can use the words I've learned to address new contexts and situations, it's useless. Got to get away from thinking in English! Got to say it in Chinese first! CPod needs some more bridges to that. Ways of cross-connecting chunks and patterns and facilitating expressive rather than passive language. I've just joined, and I'm still too new to be able to ask for what I feel I need, so I hope to keep following these threads and that y'all will lead the way.

calkins, I totally agree with you.  Actually, I found sentence patterns to be one of the few helpful ways for me to learn grammar. Qing Wens tend to go through many of these, but yeah, cpod doesn't explicitly cover them. 

It would really be good to know that they are about 120 or so sentence patterns in Chinese. That way, cpod could know they needed about 120 separate and distinct QWs and they could go about teaching us those patterns. Personally, I thought working out the patterns in the way you did above was something I was going to have to do, so i'm happy that you started doing it.

In any event, I think you should add your grammar idea to John's thread about the list of ideas for improvements to the site.  Or maybe you've already added this to the Cpod User Voice site.

I think one thing that is just as important as learning lots of vocab. (perhaps more important) is learning sentence patterns. 

Since attending 師大 I've realized that the amount of sentence patterns in Chinese seems to be endless.  In a 10-week quarter, we cover 10 chapters...each chapter has approximately 30 - 50 new words.  Regarding sentence patterns, each chapter is different, but to give an example of a chapter where 把 bǎ was covered, there were 12 different sentence patterns for this all-important little word...here are just a few:

1. 
S  把  O  V  。
我已经把功课做完了。

2.
S  把  O  V  (一)  V。
別忘了把书看看。

3.
S  把  O  V  来/去。
我把那本书带来了。

4.
S  把  O  V-DV。
外面很冷，快把衣服穿上。

5.
S  把  O  V  Number M.W.。
我把那部电影看了三次。

I know this thread is about Cpod's lessons, not about "traditional" classroom learning, but I feel this is one very important element that is lacking (not entirely missing) from Cpod.  Most Cpod lessons teach a sentence pattern, but it is often not very clear and obvious.  Qing Wen does a great job of teaching patterns, but it just doesn't seem like enough IMO.

One thing I think would be great as a supplement to the existing Grammar Guide would be the following:

Every lesson that has a distinct sentence pattern would have a link to a page within the Grammar Guide, where a clear explanation of the pattern (i.e. S  把  O  V) and approximately 10 example sentences for that pattern.

I understand that Cpod's approach is that you will learn these patterns with time and more lesson exposure, but I think it's very important that when we see a new sentence pattern in a lesson, that we are able to also see a clear map of that pattern, including additional examples.

I also know this would be a lot of work, but it'd be a great goal to have for the far off distant future.

Thanks Mark.  I do recall you posting that you tested for the HSK, and you're definitely further than me on Mandarin studies.

I guess one thing I take from all this is that the balance between retention and speed seems to be around 30-50 new words/patterns per week. I definitely understand about the day job thing. I remember themainman posting that he blasted through about 90 lessons in a few months and felt significantly better about his Chinese.  But then he added that he was unemployed at the time. Sounds possibly also that he didn't have wife/children making demands on his time also, but that's a big assumption. Ultimately, as we all know, the more time you put in, the faster you learn. 

As to the question of fast or slow, I try to guage the amount of lessons according to how much new vocabulary they have.  I try for about 60 words a week.  My memory is less than perfect. So, the number I retain for the long term is smaller than that. If I do the excercises, try to compose some sentences with the new words etc, my retention rate is better, but this extra work reduces the amount of words/material I can cover sometimes.

I think some have achieved complete fluency in the amount of time that I have been studying Chinese.  So, I am an imperfect testimonial for my method, but I might be doing ok for someone who has never lived in China and has a day job.

For what it's worth, I've had no problems with the RSS feeds. I used to have an archived Intermediate lesson added to my feed every week. I just changed that to UI.

oh, hunchiepunker, i'm in the same boat on RSS feeds.  I still haven't got a good handle on how they work, or what benefit they provide, let alone how to change my feed.

It is interesting about using the site itself and doing the review the way you do.  I actually tend not to use the Chinese pod site itself that much. I seem to post too much, and look for the site to provide guidance, but then I really end up listening to the lessons/dialogues/fixes on the go. 

The bad news with this approach is that I only know about 140 characters.  I really like skritter, but integrating writing and learning characters has seemed to go back to the backburner. 

xiaophil, you explained better why I was thinking this "blast through lots of lessons" works better than I did.  I was thinking that going through lots of lessons would force me into the review that is necessary in order to retain new phrases/patterns/words/sentences.

I'm not sure that it works.  I agree with simonpettersson that there's a tremendous amount of review that needs to be done when you blast through lessons. 

Maybe the answer is to blast through a set of lessons, but then blast through a sample set of previously studied lessons a couple of weeks after you learn them?

When I did Pimsleur's this way, it did seem to help my retention.

Personally, I don't get into systematically studying a lesson and then moving on only when the majority of words are memorized.  This way perhaps works if you have 20 years to gain fluency (i.e. it is too slow).  I go on a blitzkrieg path and just devour as many lessons as possible, take a break and then take the mp3s and listen to them again over and over in my mp3 player while on my way to work.  During said break, I move on to other material and repeat the process.  Eventually, most of the new words, at least not the specialized ones, show up again elsewhere, and then they really sink in.  This is based on my personal '3 theory', which basically says that if I hear or see a word three times in different contexts within a relatively short period of time (short being measured in weeks and not hours or days) I will tend to remember them later.  I don't know if my ideas are bunk, but they seem to work for me.

I'm also doing the guided subscription, and finding myself settling into a kind of hybrid study/review style. It seems to work for me, so I'll share it here.

I'm able to listen to cpod while at work during some parts of the day, so that's where the bulk of my listening practice happens. That's also where I listen to the lessons assigned by Crystal. Prior to beginning my work week and the new batch of assigned lessons, I add all the vocab to the flashcards and look through them on the ipod when I have a free minute. I keep it trimmed to about a hundred words per week.

I keep reviewing these assigned lessons each day until my talk with Crystal on Thursday evenings.

As more lessons are added through my normal subscription, I just listen to them on the computer when I can dedicate about a half hour. For these, I'll always listen to the lesson while looking at the dialog and vocab pages, so as to not miss details. If needed, I'll add a few words from these to my vocabs. Otherwise, I just hope to use one or two words from each subscription-added lesson during my review with Crystal. If I can squeak one in, then it's icing on the guided cake.

Hey, one question! Does anyone still receive a package of past lessons each week? I looked at

"My Personal RSS Lesson Feed - Settings"

and find that the settings haven't changed since forever, though it's been months since I've received any past lessons...

If you don't have a good system for review, burning through lessons quickly is likely to give crap results, I think.

vallance, simonpettersson, thanks. I'm seeing that with the guided subscription, i'm in the range of working through 3 intermediate lessons a week, which could be about 30-50 words per week. But i'm starting to feel a bit more lost than I would have had I not sped up.  I'm feeling like this speed is worth seeing how it works out, at least for awhile. But there's plenty of reviewing that needs to go on for me as a result, and some of that review is not happening.

I'm doing a lesson a day, which means something like 100-150 words a week (I add all words I don't already know, not just the vocabulary ones). Retention rate is hard to answer. I'm using spaced repetition to memorize them. So long-term retention is 100%, but I of course do forget a lot of words short-term. This means a lot of time spent on review. I review maybe 200-300 words a day.

I'm currently trying to learn about 25 words per week and find I retain most of them... You raise a good point tho and I would be interested to hear some opinions as it seems like some people are able to run up the levels really quickly.

Im up to about 260 words now and still feel im well within newbie territory still.