Speech improver podcast

[chinopinyin]

Language learning podcasts are generally focussed on Listening Comprehension, rather than in forcing people to speak and become fluent.

My idea is to complement listening comprehension [LC] podcasts with additional speaking production [sP] podcasts to help people become fluent in Chinese. To the best of my knowledge, no such a product is yet available.

What I have in mind is a podcast that takes advantage of the strenghts of

1. Audio reviews [AR] used, for instance in Popup Chinese and Chinesepod in which you are prompted to translate a sentence and, after a brief pause, listening to the correct translation by a native speaker.

and

2. Pimsleur/Foreign Service Institute/Michel Thomas[PFM] type courses

I feel that PFM type courses are substantially less fun to listen than Chinesepod or Popup chinese podcasts (and vocabulary used is also much lower frequency) and this clearly hinders successful language acquisition. On the other hand,AR are very useful to review, but refer to isolated word/sentences and, on their own, do not pass a fun test.

I think that it would not take a huge amount of effort to create this type of speaking production podcasts, in which you would end up producing sentences you have never heard before.

What do you think of this? I am sure you will find lots of ways of refining this rough idea

I have just suggested this idea to Qooco,Pop up Chinese and Chinesepod. You can vote for this idea in http://chinesepod.uservoice.com/pages/9762-general/suggestions/433848-speaking-podcast

[abcdefg]

The main problem I would foresee is that there may be half a dozen correct ways to say "I want to go to the store tomorrow with my friends." A live teacher can validate any or all of them, but a pre-recorded answer might just correlate with one of the possible appropriate phrasings.

[kdavid]

There's also no guarantee that you're pronouncing things correctly.

It sounds a bit like you might be interested in software akin to what the Rosetta Stone uses. You speak into a microphone and it records what you say, then matches it with a native-speaker recording.

I used RS for a very short time, and didn't find it helpful, but it seems that a mix between Pimsleur/RS may be useful for some people. Or, perhaps, just find a language exchange website and network with people here in China. You teach English, they "teach" Chinese.

[Meng Lelan]

It sounds a bit like you might be interested in software akin to what the Rosetta Stone uses. You speak into a microphone and it records what you say, then matches it with a native-speaker recording.

How does it do that? Show a graph comparing your speaking with native speaking? I'd like to see a podcast that does that.