User Comments - xiao_liang

Posted on: How Did You Learn Chinese?

I followed the suggestion for loading hundreds of dialogues into a playlist and listening to them. Not in the ridiculous hours-of-effort manner you suggest, but in a sensible I'm-a-normal-human-being way while I drive to work or whatever. It's massively helped both my motivation, and also my listening, but only when it's backed up by listening to the full lessons. There's no way I would work out the vocab any other way.

That's genuinely a good suggestion though. Your cynicism as to the chinesepod method isn't reflected by me, personally speaking from experience as a person with a job, family, and not much time in my life, trying to learn Chinese around the hundred other things I have to do every day.

Posted on: How Did You Learn Chinese?

For a minute, I thought you'd been trying to learn Chinese for 10 months, but because you were learning without characters, you'd inadvertently learned French, which would be kind of awesome.

Posted on: How Did You Learn Chinese?

W0w, another great tip to check out. Thanks Jaron!

It was covered in another thread recently, but I'm finding huge huge benefits from just block-listening to Chinesepod dialogues. I downloaded 100 or so elementary dialogues (from my "active" list), and when I've listened to a lesson or two on the way home, I just set the dialogues to play on random. I was cynical at first, but the amount that it's improved my pickup of vocab and (most importantly) my willingness to study is really striking. I'm going to add in all the intermediates I've got to study as well, see how I get on.

Posted on: Asking the Time

Hi iqbar

I agree it's a bit labyrinthine. First off, make sure you're not subscribed to groups that are inappropriate for you - stick with general discussion and the newbie group maybe? When I was starting learning on chinesepod, what I tried to do was every time I studied a lesson, I posted a comment with a question about that lesson. No matter how simple the question, anything that I'd wondered - perhaps from the expansion sentences etc. You'll always get an answer from a teacher, and usually some interested users pitch in.

The problem with being a newbie is that a lot of newbies are quite shy to perk up and have a conversation, especially involving chinese, since our ability isn't up to much. I'm trying to study intermediate lessons, but I still blanch when faced with a wall of chinese text, and usually skip on, if I'm honest. There was a "senior newbies" group that had a few users posting recently though.

Good luck!

Posted on: Which Hilton?

They've just expanded their voice talent to include the awesome Dilu! Jenny still does some, but was off on maternity leave recently. She did an Intermediate this week!

Which reminds me to say how much I'm enjoying Dilu's input. She's such a great addition to the team, I really enjoy her practical approach and sense of humour. Keep up the good work!

Posted on: Welcome to ChinesePod

Never too old to travel :)

Posted on: Delegating Tasks

Thanks folks! Actually I'm finding the explanatory dialogue easier and easier to understand, as I listen to more intermediate lesson. When I said "study", I meant the expansion etc :) Because 材料，打印，通知，取消 and 安排 are all new to me, it's going to take me a while to memorise them. But I'll get there! Possibly :-p

Posted on: Delegating Tasks

You know what, scrap that easy nonsense. I just tried studying it. There's so much vocab that's unfamiliar to me, it's actually really hard!

Posted on: Delegating Tasks

You know, I'm just working my way through older lessons to get them off my list, and in my opinion, this is one of the best structured intermediate lessons I've listened to. It's clearly explained, with a good mixture of chinese and english. Maybe a little on the easy side compared to some others, but it's so great otherwise. Introduces some really useful work-related vocab. Thumbs up thumbs up!

Posted on: Help with the Baby

I think it is a big cultural difference. I'm certainly no expert, but often I imagine it is due to necessity rather than preference - to provide a home for that baby, both parents have to work insane hours, so they'd rather have the child looked after with a consistent quality of care, doubly so if they often have to work away from home. Also, there's the argument that growing up in this way makes the child more self-reliant, and better able to cope with the world.

Not saying I agree with it, and (of course), I'm purely speculating, but those could be reasons.