Chinese language meetups - tell us your thoughts!

My casual take is that meet-ups have a cocktail party look and feel, so in addition to materials, you'd also need a critical mass of participants interested in attending the meet-up. Somebody had also better be engaging and entertaining so that there's a "life of the party".

I could have sworn that out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Cpod was trying to arrange a language exchange through skype. I thought that there was a signup board somewhere where if someone was interested, they could sign up to participate. If that effort is still ongoing, it should probably be given wider dissemmination so that you have more attendees. I guess i'm thinking that's a meetup without the formal name?

Thanks for the feedback, content for meetup groups, interesting. I'm sure the need for English has been debated many times here, but for what it is worth, in 2007 I did absolute beginners French, no background required, and all lessons were delivered in French from beginning to end of term, not a word of English. The text book was also written in French. It is now 'the way' it is done. Relevant to learning Chinese, I don't know. Able to mix beginners and advanced speakers .. well actually I think that this is feasible in a meetup situation. Consistent with learning by immersion. As long as everyone gets something out of it.

Hey,

I'm reading everything in the thread, though I'm not responding to everything. In any case..

Have you heard of English Corner? Basically, it's a meetup of a bunch of people learning English at universities in China, and I believe they don't allow any Chinese speaking in their meetups. I don't really think it's that bad of an idea for foreigners to meet up together if they want to learn Chinese. It's good to have other people that are also learning the language to study along with you. I can definitely see where you're coming from, though, and of course, there should be fluent speakers among the meetup group.

Sarah told me that perhaps CPod could provide content for meetup groups, or maybe start meetup groups. I'm not TOO clear on what exactly our plans are (I'm just the marketing intern, after all), so don't jump to too many conclusions.

I agree with what Frank said--meetups need to have a topic, or several topics per meet up.

The one thing about not having any English in meetups is that beginning learners would be clueless. I think it'd be pretty hard to have a meetup that is didactic for both beginning and advanced speakers.

100% with you.

Imagine you were a english pupil, when you speak with a professor(for some profound topic) you would not understand the meaning and learning anything.

如果你是english native小学生，当你和教授谈论深奥的话题时， 你同样不可能学到，理解任何东西的.

I would agree with that too. In a meetup, the possible cure for the deficiencies of the language exchange are with teachers or native Chinese speakers patient enough to let you struggle with your bad mandarin, and then patiently, calmly correct you, but continue speaking Chinese.

Were the Shanghai Cpod meetups Chinese only?

I agree with you. My students often complain that English corners are just a bunch of Chinese people speaking poor English. I say yes, but it is important for language learners to sometimes have that chance to practice speaking in a situation where they feel safe and free to make mistakes. It's the same thing for everyone I gander.

多谢你的客气话而你的链接；我很期待读你的博客

Running around? In this rain?

。。那，你没看过那部电影叫做“唱歌着在下雨”？

。。加油朋友！

I am, Baba (you are, by the way, a man of many disguises - I like the latest) over on my personal website willbuckingham.com/blog - and occasional philosophical stuff from the trip on thinkbuddha.org - although this will be less frequent.

Running around? In this rain?

Hey, great to hear you've made it to Beijing thinkbuddha...very exciting. Can't wait to hear of some of your experiences. Are you keeping a blog by any chance? [not that I would...I'd be too busy running around trying to see as much as I could]. Anyhow, hope you have a ball. Cheers :)

798 Art Zone!

Thanks, folks. It's been a good one (tho' I'm not sure why I decided to go by bus to the Beijing museum of printing history as a welcome to China, but there you go...)

That first day in China you will remember for ever. I remember grabbing a beer in a plastic cup and spilling it because the plastic is paper thin. My first 包子 on Chinese soil tasted amazing (I ate wheat in those days.) First meal in a crowded restaurant where people spat the bones on the table.

Welcome to China!

Congrats on finally making it thinkbuddha!

granted tomorrow will be your first full day, but is Beijing what you'd thought it would be?

Comprehensible input http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensible_input 你们英文好，看这个应该很好理解

Second language acquisition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_language_acquisition

英文好不代表 你理解这些道理

==》it is important to have a common topic 这句话对了.

（如果是学汉语，英语的话..）不光是一个话题...可以是4个5个大家熟悉话题，或者更多，比如世界杯，环法，欧洲火山爆发. 可能需要一个，两个主持人。避免大家跑题.

It is important to have one or more than one topics everybody knows.For instance, worldcup,cycling around France.etc. it needs a host or two to avoid offtracking

==》topic everybody knows matters. 这句话我要表达的意思是: it is very important that the everyone is familiar with the topic.

topic everybody knows matters.是不是太formal了？因为我从地方学到it matters 代表的意思是“很重要”

==》关于你说的..Western party 和chinese party差别说的很准确..我这里表达，

就学语言来说， 我觉得可以把meetupsz做成一个meeting,这样效率更高

It is more effective to have the meetups as a little formal meeting

haha. yes, I think phil said he was a teacher. Language teachers sometimes can figure things out with just a little bit of info. Sounds right to me. Maybe wait for Frank to clarify.

Aha, I think you might be right! Bravo :) Chinglish skills +1 :)

I think he means that it is important to have a common topic in situations such as this. Extrapolating further, I bet he means there should be an activity or proper planning to provide a way for people to feel integrated. He probably looks at this event as a party, and from my experience, a Chinese party and a Western party are two different things. Typical Western party = room with appetizers, possibly a deejay, people slowly conversing as more alcohol is consumed. Typical Chinese party = held in banquet hall or restaurant, several activities and games arranged according to a set schedule, host, as in a guy or gal with a mic TV show style included. I know that is a big extrapolation, but I give a 70% chance I am totally right, 85% I am at least half right. Let's see what Frank says.

Frank, this doesn't really make sense. What are you trying to say?

bodawei,

I think it's only natural that folks view of the country they live in is going to be to a large extent influenced by the specific region they come from and their experiences there. None of it's wrong,but it's just not necessarily going to be the full picture. In my opinion most people can't see the forest for the trees. Who amongst us really sees the big picture? This is why it is so good to have the CPod community to discuss these issues and get the viewpoints from Poddies living all over the country to round out the picture. So please do keep your valuable insights coming. Yeah, great discussion bodawei and xiaophil. Thankyou. :)

Hi xiao_phil

That is all true what you say about text books and learning materials. Even my rubbishy story books I have posted about elsewhere were published by one of the universities in Beijing. So you could fairly argue that foreign learners already have a Beijing focus in their learning. In general I think that this is a good thing, because it represents a kind of Standard form that everyone can understand, although knowledge about regional differences could be valuable. For me, I don't want to be distracted by regional dialects too much, except in the 'wow - how about that?'/instantly forgotten way. I make no real effort to learn kunminghua, and it has never proved a drawback living there. Everyone at least understands putonghua.

My 'complaint' was a reference to the cultural references rather than the language itself (as I say, no gripe with the dialect series, as long as they do not chew up too many ChinesePod resources - I see them in the same light as one of our frequent beside-the-main-point-but-interesting threads we see here.

Eg. there are frequent references in dialogues and lesson material to things that do not apply in the rest of China. Many examples - I used to post about them but I have kind of got over it. Just the occasional swipe now. :) For people that don't know China reasonably well, the lesson material gives a skewed understanding of what China is like. One recent example: the lesson about bottled water. Not only was this biased by Shanghai experience, it was so 'middle class'. I guess it doesn't matter to most people. I am probably atypical - I really am attracted to the lessons that are most authentic, at least as far as I understand authenticity from my limited experience of China.

Thanks for your comments - I always appreciate them.

bodawei

I thought a bit about your complaint that CPod is too Shanghai-centric. Chinese people sometimes ask me if I like Shanghai. I always tell the truth, yes, but I would like to live in a city that has a more historical tradition someday. So I guess I'm saying, I feel no love for Shanghai, but I do feel "like" for Shanghai. That said, when I took Mandarin lessons in Shanghai, all the textbooks were published in Beijing, and it seems that they make little attempt to teach Mandarin that is not included in their Beijing sphere. Countless times I asked teachers about words presented in the text, and they would say that it is something particular to Beijing or the North. To give an analogy, it would be like ESL students in London learning from textbooks published in Texas that constantly say "howdy" and "y'all" (not that that would ever, ever happen). When I went to the bookstores, the situation was the same--all the books were published in Beijing. Now I don't have anything against the Beijing style of Mandarin, but since I am in Shanghai, I had hoped to learn more in the way that people speak here. That's why I am very grateful that CPod does lean towards Shanghai. But I must say, unlike the books from Beijing, CPod does try to attempt to introduce elements of spoken Mandarin from different regions. I also might add (from my anecdotal evidence) that the Mandarin generally spoken in Shanghai is more applicable to all areas of China than the variety spoken by the 老百姓 in Beijing as the mass influx of out of towners in Shanghai from all over tends to keep Mandarin neutral.

Anyway, none of this neutralizes your point. If I was more interested in Beijing, I would certainly wish CPod would head more in that direction. I just thought I would throw in another perspective.

Thanks for that danchao - actually the dialect lessons were not my agenda (it may have looked that way.) I think the shanghaihua series was a good effort - but it is so far from putonghua that it is no practical use for me (except on my next trip there.) I think that the dialect series (when there are several in place) will be a good fun resource for learners. But we are mainly here to learn Chinese.

BTW - thanks for clarifying your intentions above. They were certainly not clear from the introduction. It definitely looked like a discussion about Shanghai meet-ups.

And to be fair, there was an awful lot of very positive Shanghainese feedback. I'm fairly certain that it wasn't all from Chinesepod staff making up new usernames :-p

Hey bodawei, I can't comment on ChinesePod being too Shanghai-centric, but I'd like to mention that you should expect to see a series on Cantonese to be up soon, and I've heard Beijinghua being mentioned around the office. Hopefully that quells some of your too-much-Shanghai sentiment.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback. Appreciate it.

Do you think an invitation will be extended to me?

Haha, as far as complaining goes, I highly recommend calling a truce at these events, but of course its anybody's choice.

there was also something else I forgot to add that was critical for language exchange to actually work: you both already have to be somewhat fluent in the language you're trying to learn, otherwise, the person who's not at least able to hold up the other language always loses. For example, the language exchange guy had pretty decent english, and my chinese probably consisted of 100 words at the time. So we kept speaking english all the time, and then I was like, "why am I doing this? I thought we were going to speak Chinese at some point".

Or maybe could say, you and your language exchange partner need to be at approximately the same level to make this work, and you also have to be at like the Chinesepod Intermediate level or higher to pull this off so that it's not a painful exercise for both you and your language exchange partner.

Interesting you say that, baba. I am starting to realize that Jen-not-jenny was right about you in her example about maturity. I'm looking to your example to start thinking more about "not letting my ego show".

Is it open membership on the boring father club? :)

"seeing as how I live the boring life of a father, i'll have some orange juice. "

hehe. I love your style pretzell. From another boring father, ganbei !

Dan,

"the effectiveness of using CPod content at meetups"

...I tell you what mate, I'd love it if I ever had the chance to come to such a meetup to act out one of the characters in the dialogues with other Poddies playing the other parts,particularly shenjiawei and his line from love tangle 9 "ni zhe ge edu de nvren"...to try and emulate David's awesome delivery would be so much fun,and personally I can't imagine ever delivering such a line in real life so that would add to the fun and the experience. So yeah,personally I could imagine the content being very useful. :)

Ok, sounds good. I might have a Heineken on you, but seeing as how I live the boring life of a father, i'll have some orange juice.

You, on the other hand, should have something that you can only get at a bar in Shanghai.

Now if you can shed any further light on how decisions about specific lesson suggestions get approved or vetoed (say for example a lesson suggestion on cheese and dairy products like cream, half-n-half made some months ago in China), if you send me a PM, I will send an email to your boss telling him/her how great you are at customer service.

Alright, so basically, the productions team picks out lessons according to level--lower levels get lessons about situations you'd encounter most frequently, and the higher you go, the more technical the lessons get. Every time people make suggestions for lessons, I copy and paste a summary of them plus a link in an email that I send around to people every morning. The production crew pick lessons based off how well lessons it fits their need for dialogue, whether it's different from past lessons, whether they could get good vocabulary out of it, whether it'll fit a certain language level really well, etc... I've never picked a lesson before, so I don't know EXACTLY how it works, but that's the general picture.

You owe me a drink, so therefore, we're even. I say, let's buy ourselves a drink in honor of this exchange.

Ok, Dan, i'll buy you a drink if you tell me what really happens when we give Cpod these lesson suggestions. Like for example, how does Cpod decide which suggestions are made into lessons? I won't tell anybody.

Hey, that's some great feedback. I'm not sure if Cpod would buy everyone drinks, but I'd buy you a drink if you wanted, just for this post.

Anyway, I'd like to clarify that I'm not talking about a gathering of the CPod community. Just asking for insight on people's experiences and opinions on Chinese learning groups. For example, the effectiveness of using CPod content at meetups.

Unfortunately, the logistics of having a meetup of CPod's online community might come at a magnitude larger than we what can consider. Kinda hard to organize a meeting for people all over the world.