Using podcast sites like chinesepod effectively?

[feng]

This is just a post to see if anyone has any insights which might help me on this. I have tried over and over to use these sites and I never seem to be able to get into using them regularly.

It feels like this is my problem, but i may be wrong:

• Lower level podcasts are so slow that I am too impatient to listen for 5 minutes just to get to the point where they are explaining the one word that I don't know.
  
• In the more advanced podcasts they dont explain some words that I don't know. Which means lots of time replaying and looking up words.
  

Any feedback, suggestions, would be much appreciated. I suspect I probably just need to force myself to listen through 100 or so but its just so boring. Especially how they rattle on talking about so many things unrelated to that one piece of knowledge I need to get out of that one lesson!

[querido]

I have always snipped out just what I want with an audio editor like audacity. So, I don't actually use podcasts as intended.

I like CSLPod because there is no chatting and it's all-Chinese, but there's intro/exit I prefer to snip off; I keep just the dialogues.

I never go to a podcast looking for "one piece of knowledge"; I would google around for that.

Instead, I go to the podcast to absorb *whatever* they think I need to know.

So, I need to agree with the provider's approach, and I wanted something a little more solid or mature than some of them.

I then flashcard everything.

The podcasts are just a source of transcripts and audio snippets.

Maybe you should try to find one you like better.

[querido]

The lesson's level is too low in your first bullet point.

In your second bullet point, you describe what seems to be the actual reality: a podcast series seems to offer a way to learn just by listening and reading the transcripts. But the reality is that one must sit down with the material and study it with the usual tools, just as though it were a book with audio, so you might prefer a good textbook series instead.

[trevelyan]

I help run Popup Chinese and since we get a lot of ChinesePod listeners drifting over I'd be curious if you've tried us and what your experience has been. If you have any questions about why we approach things the way we do I'd be happy to answer them, but all of our audio is free so consider this a recommendation rather than a sales pitch:

http://popupchinese.com

We have transcripts that explain dialogues on a word-by-word basis, so people don't run into the frustration you mentioned above. That said -- I wonder if this frustration is more a reflection of poor pedagogical design than anything else. Chinese teachers are fond of things like "vocab stuffing" when creating lessons. This is an approach to teaching in which lessons are created on thematic topics that let them stuff theme-related words into otherwise generic conversation. This feels like learning to the teachers since they are certain you don't know the material and thus have something to teach. But the senseless addition of low-frequency material to otherwise generic conversation is in fact counterproductive -- memorizing uncommon words is the very opposite of what most people need. So... some podcasts are definitely better than others and I would rank ours at the top. Most shows have no explicit pedagogical theory, but there are still differences in practice so you should listen around and see which one best suits your learning style.

Also -- just generally -- I'd recommend not worrying about looking up isolated words you don't understand, and instead spend that time listening to more audio. Minor efficiency improvements in your current method of study will be dwarfed by even a modest increase in second language input. Once you can parse sentences containing unknown words and have a better grasp on what is high-frequency in conversational mandarin, you'll know whether something is worth looking up or whether your contextual approximation from an understanding of the surrounding text is good enough.

[imron]

But the senseless addition of low-frequency material to otherwise generic conversation is in fact counterproductive -- memorizing uncommon words is the very opposite of what most people need. So... some podcasts are definitely better than others and I would rank ours at the top. Most shows have no explicit pedagogical theory

I look forward to hearing the pedagogical theory behind Gay Vampires and Pirate Zombies

[Guest realmayo]

the senseless addition of low-frequency material to otherwise generic conversation

Yes, I remember finding the Chinesepod advanced podcasts more suitable for a lower level, when you want to hear lots of Chinese spoken clearly and chattily and not too fast, and I found the upper-intermediate ones suitable for a more advanced level when you want to build up some vocab on a topic by mining the pdf and then listening to the dialogue.

[trevelyan]

I look forward to hearing the pedagogical theory behind Gay Vampires and Pirate Zombies

Just trying to raise awareness about social issues.

[jkhsu]

Any feedback, suggestions, would be much appreciated.

Do you actually study off of the PDF transcripts? I found just listening to the podcasts alone pretty useless. If you study off of the transcripts similar to how you would study from a textbook, the podcasts start making a lot more sense. What I do is preview the lesson by listening to the podcast during my drive to work. Then, I'll take 30 min during lunch to go over the transcript. On my way back, I'll listen to the podcast again to review. For harder lessons, I'll repeat the same lesson (and the steps I mentioned) for a couple of days. For easier lessons, I'm done in a single day. I always review lessons (PDF transcrips only) that I've done to make sure I remember the vocab.

[jbradfor]

I've become rather discouraged by podcasts as well. Maybe to improve listening comprehension requires a huge number of repetitions over a short period of time, and I've just never spent that much time on them, but I never felt like I learned much. Compared to say, reading comprehension, where I feel I progress much faster.

The one exception for me right now is SlowChinese. But, as others have said, after listening to them a couple of times I reach a comprehension wall. I then need to sit down with the transcript to make any progress.

[Silent]

We have transcripts that explain dialogues on a word-by-word basis, so people don't run into the frustration you mentioned above. That said -- I wonder if this frustration is more a reflection of poor pedagogical design than anything else.

Imho most podcasts explain the dialogs fairly detailed. Not that different from the way you do it. The pedagogical design is definitely an issue however I fail to see how your podcast is different. At your site I'm presented with a list of podcasts without any clear order in which to listen/study them. Consequently it's not that different from the general conversation with some more specific vocabulary related to the subject of the podcast you claim others use.

The right approach is imho to build a vocabulary. Re-use what is learned and add a few words every lesson to grow the vocabulary. This requieres a fixed order to study the lessons. Still, re-using vocabulary can be hard as every podcast will need a subject (with somewhat 'specialised' words) to keep it interesting and all round usefull. The only podcast I know that does so is: http://www.chineselearnonline.com but that one has it's faults too.

As already stated by others podcasts need study to use them effectively. So you need to sit down, study the grammar points, learn the vocabulary etc. As such podcasts have no added value, are essentially identical, to a coursebook with audio. The main difference being the marketing and the suggestion that one can learn the language in the car.

Of course this is not entirely fair as I think it's very good to diversify. Not just stick to one method, but use a method and supplement it with additional reading, listening etc. This of course means that you run into the issue's OP mentioned. It's hard to find the right level as vocabulary, grammar etc will never perfectly match up. It's always too easy, too hard, or it requires work.

[Silent]

I've become rather discouraged by podcasts as well. Maybe to improve listening comprehension requires a huge number of repetitions over a short period of time, and I've just never spent that much time on them, but I never felt like I learned much. Compared to say, reading comprehension, where I feel I progress much faster.

I can relate to this, I always experienced the same. That's the reason learning characters and from that reading was motivating to me and listening wasn't. So my reading is way more advanced then listening (nearly non existing). Imho one important factor for this is that reading you can do at your own pace and listening has to be done at the pace of the speaker. However with my big headstart in vocabulary learning I start to feel that podcasts or any simple audio has real added value. When listening I relate the words back to pinyin/characters and get an anchor for the pronunciation. What seems to work quite well is to open the file in audicity. Listen and when I've trouble understanding a sentence to loop it a few times. Then compare it with the text/transcript and listen again. Most of the time that's enough to understand it (for that moment). Then I move on. For me at the absolute beginners level in listening this works great.

[trevelyan]

Hi Silent,

Thanks for the comment. Just on the pedagogical front - yes - we explicitly reject the idea that there is a single roadmap to fluency. Explicit structure works at the absolute beginner level when you can be sure what the student knows. But it is harder at higher levels and there are better ways to get reinforcement and repetition than listening to an entire podcast again.

A more meaningful disagreement is that we don't see vocab memorization as the central problem in language acqusition so much as helping people learn to parse natural speech, something which means in turn that we don't believe the central purpose of the podcast is to showcase and review words in sequence (there are other tools on the site for that). This may seem like an academic distinction since everyone obviously needs to know a certain number of words before a few unknown ones won't throw their comprehension, but it matters because it suggests a lot about what makes for good learning audio, and suggests useful guidelines like the notion that explicitly teaching low-frequency vocabulary before people can follow a conversation is counter-productive.

I'd wholeheartedly agree that any good study program needs to incorporate review and people need to be proactive and engaged for stuff to stick. The reason I posted was because I'm convinced the general recommendation above is what feng and most people in his situation really need: to multiply the amount of Chinese language input, not worry too much about isolated unknown words, and look for more interesting content. Popup Chinese can help him on all counts and has the added merit of being free. And I think it's great for people to share what else works for them -- we can learn from it too.

[Guest realmayo]

Have to say that for picking up gold nuggets of grammar and vocab I really liked Popup Chinese: although I didn't listen to many and haven't listened to any podcasts at all for the last year or two. I still remember learning 爱谁谁 from a Popup Chinese podcast ages ago, and I'm sure there were other examples -- things that made a big difference in understanding normal Chinese and felt more useful than the vocab-heavy Chinesepod ones. Turn off the podcast thinking 'I learned something new' rather than 'now I've got a lot of vocab to learn'.

Not to knock Chinesepod though: next time I want to push through some new vocab I'll grab a few of their dialogues and listen to them again and again for a while, which I found more helpful than just staring at a list of new words on a page. And for listening practice I liked listening to them chatting away on their advanced podcasts -- nice quality audio, cheery people and at a useful level for me.

So, in answer to the OP, those would be my three different ways of using podcasts: nuggets, vocab, and listening practice!

[Silent]

we don't believe the central purpose of the podcast is to showcase and review words in sequence

Then what is according to you the central purpose of a podcast?

suggests useful guidelines like the notion that explicitly teaching low-frequency vocabulary before people can follow a conversation is counter-productive.

Please define low frequency words and how you don't use them. Vocabulary is subject and situation dependent. So if you make a podcast, on basicly any subject, you need a mix of basic words and some relatively low frequent subject related words. A word that's low frequency for some may be high frequency for others. I see no way to avoid it unless you stick with 'meaningless' general chitchat

[drungood]

I think every Chinese podcast could improve by offering an abundance of uncontrived spoken sentences at native speed and accent with each lesson. ChinesePod has an abundance of sentences but they all sound completely unnatural. Same with CSLPod. I've never understood why language learning materials use a model for speaking that no one uses in real life. I like Popup Chinese because the dialogue is spoken naturally, but they need more example sentences with each lesson. I think paying for the top tier would be worth it if each lesson had 15-20 example sentences with audio that could be easily exported to an SRS.

[simplet]

OP I think your problem is that, like a lot of people have more or less said in this thread, there is nothing you can do to really improve your listening comprehension that doesn't involve multiple repetitions of each segment you don't perfectly understands the first time and extensive vocabulary research. There is no magical podcast that caters exactly to your needs at every point in time and knows perfectly what kind of vocabulary you already know and what needs to be explained to you.

Myself I honestly believe the only way to improve your chinese fast is to drill it into your head through brute force, that is hours upon hours of listening practice and repetitions. That's pretty much why I (used to) prefer chinese pod to pop-up chinese. There is simply a lot more of it. I once went through all the pop-up chinese advanced podcasts that I could somewhat understand in one afternoon, after that it was a bit hard for me to pay for a subscription (I'm also not sure about the huge payment upfront method. I understand why they prefer it that way, like a gym where everyone pays yearly but half of them give up after 3 weeks, but it dissuaded me instantly.) It also seems to me that the intermediate pop-up chinese level is kind of an elementary level, whereas the advanced level is actually advanced for the most part, so there's a really big gap there. But I haven't been in a while.

[feng]

Thanks guys, all very useful points. It is helping encourage me to take more time to use podcasts to supplement what I do now.

[roddy]

Couple of months later - how's the podcast-use going?

[feng]

Doing a few new (chinesepod) per day + review a few old per day. I am finding it exceedingly boring. Hard to measure but maybe its helping a little.

[feng]

Despite having paid for chinesepod, I find I am no longer using it at all. It is partially due to the problem where I cant download podcasts directly to my iPhone (have to download the feed into iTunes, then sync — something I find annoying and always forget to do).

I will post about this properly later, but I have been finding it much easier to find children comics and read them. At the moment I am working through doraemon. I know its not improving my listening skills, but at least its interesting enough to keep me motivated.