Does anyone use Yabla?

[scoopneals]

Hello,

I've just recently started reading content on chinese-forums.com; I must say, I've found quite a bit of useful information from a wide range of people! I am just starting to learn Chinese, as I am going to China in about 2 months to teach English. I can't wait to get started.

Now to the point of my post- I found a website called Yabla.com. I did some searching around on these forums, but was unable to find any information on it. Seems like it might be pretty new. Has anyone used Yabla before? It seems like it would be worth the time to check out.

http://chinese.yabla.com/

[imron]

Don't normally let through first time posts with links to a website no-one has heard of that the poster "found" on the Internet, however it does seem like a site that others here might find interesting. From what I can tell, it's basically video dialogues with Chinese, pinyin and English subtitles, plus a bunch of features for looping parts of the video, dictionary lookup and so on.

[scoopneals]

Haha I'm sorry! Glad it got through. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I was just curious if anyone had tried to learn through this method... or something like it. it seems really legit!

[Zio-Σ]

I don't know this website but I suggest to you to buy a Chinese grammar and a common course book and follow each lesson. Usually course books have dialogue CD so you can improve your listening skills (the most difficult skill to master in Chinese, maybe in every language).

However no matter how much you listen at home or how much exercises you do, when you'll move to China for the first time you'll barely understand simple sentences too.

If you have a Smartphone be sure to have a Chinese dictionary (Pleco is the best, it is available for both iOS, Android and Windows Phone and it is for free). It will boast your language skills a lot.

I also suggest to you to improve more your reading skill that is the base of further and more advanced Chinese studies. Try to translate everything you see written in Chinese because for 100 words searched you'll memorize 30% of them.

The last tip: see, translate, write, write, write. Many Chinese learning students don't know how to write or read. This is useful at first time (you can concentrate yourself only in speaking and listening) but when you try to have a deeper knowledge of the language it is not enough.

[carlo]

I've downloaded and watched all the free German videos. There's also an Iphone version. I like the format, it's a natural way to learn new vocabulary and improve your feel for the language. I haven't subscribed yet though.