Access to Yoyo Chinese's videos for Chinese Forum members

[parmarossa]

Here is an updated message from Yangyang herself [september 2014]

 

Hey everyone,

I'm Yangyang, the founder of Yoyo Chinese. First, I'd like to thank reviewers for taking the time to write out their reviews. They’re all very encouraging for my team and I to read!

I just want to give everyone a little update here on what’s been going on with Yoyo Chinese. Since this offer was made, we've published an Intermediate Course, which contains 50 lessons designed to bring advance beginners to the intermediate level.

I think intermediate students will enjoy the following courses on our site:

Intermediate Conversational Chinese Course

This course is a combination of authentic, interview-style dialogue shot right from the streets of China followed by my detailed breakdown of important language concepts covered in the interview.

This course covers some of the more advanced cultural topics, for example:

• What Chinese people consider to be the most and least desirable qualities of the opposite sex

• Chinese medicine vs. Western medicine, and how to debate the pros and cons of both

• What Chinese people think America is like

• Articulating why you should or shouldn’t split the bill

• Politely rejecting someone in Chinese

• Expressing your opinion towards living with in-laws

• How to answer “what would you do with a million dollars?” in Chinese

• What to say when you show up late

You can watch a sample lesson here to get a feel of what our Intermediate lessons are like.

Grammar Course

Our grammar course is a video version of a clearly explained Chinese grammar book. It also contains some intermediate to advance level content such as the “ba (把)" structure, compliment of direction / result / potentiality / degree.

Chinese on the Street

Our Chinese on the Street series is a supplementary listening material for our beginner students, but lots of our intermediate students find it helpful as well. Here’s why:

For many Chinese learners, their listening comprehension usually lags behind their spoken skill. When Chinese is spoken at a faster, “normal” speed with different accents or different word choice, even simple sentences can completely throw off intermediate-level students.

The Chinese on the Street videos are designed to train students to understand different speech patterns, accents, and word choice to improve listening comprehension at both the beginner and intermediate level.

Here’s a sample video of our Chinese on the Street series. If you can understand all the dialogue in it, great! If not, now you know what you can do to improve your listening comprehension

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We highly recommend both beginner and intermediate students to check out our courses.

You can either go to our website at yoyochinese.com or our Youtube channel to sample a few of our lessons. If you have any questions about our courses, feel free to email us at info@yoyochinese.com.

Once again, thanks for the reviews.

Yangyang

 

 

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ORIGINAL MESSAGE BELOW

 

 

Hi, My name is Ross Cranwell, and I work with Yoyo Chinese, which teaches Chinese through short and fun video lessons. As we have been building out the videos on the site, and we just recently launched our intermediate course, I would love to get the feedback of the Chinese Forums community.

 

We would like to give five 30-day Premium accounts to any Chinese Forum user who would like to try out our library of 400+ Videos, and supporting learning tools such as PDF lecture notes and audio review mp3s. Each 30-day account has a value of 25USD, but we would like to offer it for free to you.

 

Our content is mainly Beginner level, so these accounts be more suited to Newbies and Beginner learners. We have just started to publish Intermediate lessons.

 

What we would love is an honest review here on Chinese Forums about the service after you have tried our content out. We are a small team working hard, so be nice...

 

To be in with a chance to receive 1 month of free access to YoyoChinese, simply post a comment below with your current Chinese level below and why you would be interested in trying our site out.

 

Thanks a million!!

 

 

Ross

 

[eion_padraig]

I would be interested in trying out your material. I'm at an advanced elementary to lower intermediate level.

 

I'm always looking for more online resources to study Chinese myself. I often share my knowledge of good Chinese study resources with other people I meet who are studying Chinese.

 

Eion

[alanmd]

I'm studying for my HSK3, so I would say I'm an upper level beginner, with a few hundred words vocabulary. I have used some of Yoyo Chinese's videos in the past and even bought the pinyin introduction DVD! I wouldnt have time to use my subscription until January, but I could post a review on my site at http://hskhsk.com

[grawrt]

I'd love to try out your material. I haven't heard of yoyo chinese before but I'm always eager to try out different chinese resources in order to improve my listening and speaking comprehension. I would consider myself an upper level beginner.

[Ania]

I would love a chance to try Yoyo Chinese! To be honest, I haven't come across your website before, but it looks like it would be very useful! I love the fact that the course is structured, so I would imagine that there would be some revision material, which is very important for me. It's just usually not enough for me to watch/listen to something once and remember everything, so any course that is well thought out and structured works for me. 

 

I would probably consider myself an upper beginner/elementary student (depending on how you label things), so your course is definitely right up my alley in terms of the level. I would love a chance to find out if it's something that would work for me in the long-run.

[parmarossa]

Thanks a lot for the responses so far. It's brilliant.

 

From Monday the 16th of December, we will start reaching out to those who have posted and give them access to the site. 

Thanks again to everyone!

[LeeLow]

Hi. I too would be very interested in trying out your material. I'm absolute beginner and looking for a possibility to get started. And your website looks very promising.

 

Thanks for consideration

 

Lee

[parmarossa]

Thanks a million to everyone who responded.

I have messaged you all individually to give you access to Yoyo Chinese [@LeeLow, I added you as a friend]

 

Message me here on Chinese Forums if you have any questions, and look forward to hearing your feedback!

[Mtabe]

i would love to study your material , now am in tianjin attending  begginer classes.

[grawrt]

Hey guys I just wanted to give some feedback after trying out yoyochinese for about a month.

 

The website really is targeted toward beginners, but that’s not a bad thing! I felt like the lessons really reminded me of the Chinese courses I took at my University, except you could study at your own pace. Since I'm not a complete beginner I kind of breezed through the early lessons fairly quickly. Still, they were really good to reacquaint me with things I had forgotten like grammar points or when 很is used. The best part is that the videos only cover what has already been introduced. This was a lot different than what I noticed from other websites that I have tried (such as popup Chinese). I found this helpful in cases where the emphasis could remain on sentence structure instead of focusing on new vocabulary.

 

I also liked the way the videos are split up. For instance, rather than try and cram a huge grammar point, yangyang would often instruct her viewers to watch the grammar point video FIRST and then go back to watching the current lesson. I liked this because a problem I had with my Chinese classes at school was that the professor would try and introduce a grammar point very quickly to finish reviewing a sentence without really making sense of the structure. A lot of things used to fly over my head and I didn't feel that way with Yoyo Chinese’s lessons.

 

Even though the videos are directed at absolute beginners I found they could be beneficial to people wanting to quickly review the basics. I got through almost all the videos in just one month. However, I really wished yangyang could repeat the Chinese sentences at a normal speed after saying it in a slowed down tone. I noticed this problem mainly in the beginning because the rhythm felt off but perhaps this was done to not confuse beginners.

 

And just some criticism on the website:

I found it difficult to keep track of the lessons I had already reviewed on the website because the "lessons viewed" section was always off and never at the point where I had stopped watching. I think if there was a button that could check off the lessons viewed would make it less annoying (Popup Chinese has something like this). After a while I just kept track by pen and paper so its not a huge problem, just a minor annoyance.

 

Overall I really enjoyed the subscription. The Chinese on the street lessons were fun to listen to and not intimidating at all. I especially enjoyed yangyangs admittance at when speakers were either speaking too fast, or dropping words in their sentences because I didn't feel so bad about not understanding a siiiingle thing. Thanks again & sorry this took so long!

[Ania]

I just wanted to say I'm very sorry I'm taking so long with my review, but I'm going to post it soon, I promise!

 

ETA: Alright guys, I’m finally here with my review of Yoyo Chinese. I’m sorry it took me so long, but life loves getting in the way Anyway, here it goes…

 

I started around Lesson 80, since most of the previous lessons would only be a review for me, and I wanted to see how it would work for me with new material.

 

First of all, I was very impressed with the quality of the videos in terms of graphics and things like that. It was very professional, clear and a real pleasure to watch.

 

The length of the videos was just right. For me it was perfect, because it gave me a chance to study a little bit of Chinese even if I only had a few minutes without having to stop in the middle of something. I can see that the intermediate videos are a little longer, which makes sense since the learners have better knowledge of the language, but they are still the right length in my personal opinion. You can still watch them before going to bed and feel like you made another step towards mastering Mandarin Chinese

 

I really like the fact that at the beginning of each video we have a little summary of what was covered in the previous lesson(s), especially if the lessons were somewhat related. And I like the fact that certain grammatical aspects are introduced over the course of several lessons, so as not to cram too much new material into one lesson.

 

And speaking of grammar, I found the grammar explanations extremely helpful! I’m studying Chinese on my own for now, so it was really great to have certain grammar points explained by a teacher instead of just reading about everything in textbooks. It made a lot of things a little bit clearer for me.

 

One thing about the videos that I personally would find useful is some time to come up with our own answer when we get asked a question “How do you say ….  in Chinese?” I personally would love an opportunity to come up with an answer before one is provided, but I can’t do it when there is no time for it. However, that can be easily fixed by simply pausing the video for a moment, so I wouldn’t consider it a huge flaw.

 

I also love the audio reviews. I spend a considerable amount of time in my car and I always listen to Chinese podcasts and things like that when I’m driving. Yoyo Chinese’s audio reviews are really great because they allow me to activate some of the vocabulary and language patterns that I have learned (or was supposed to learn ), but don’t have an opportunity to use otherwise

 

So all in all, I really enjoyed my experience with Yoyo Chinese, but with that being said, I have to admit that I am still a traditionalist when it comes to learning languages and I love my textbooks I use websites like this one more to complement other things that I’m doing.

 

If I think of anything else, I will add it to the review.

[Jackinmandarin]

hey ross,

i guess am probably very late,

but can I get a complimentary one month access ? 

 

- jack

[WalterLavo]

Hey Mr.Ross Cranwell My Daughter is currently learning Chinese through the Rosetta Stone software lessons, I on the other hand hoped that there was an easier way to learn this great language, and through alot of research found your website chinese-forums.com, and now that I am a member here learned of your affiliation with yoyo chinese learning videos. I have just started learning chinese, and would Love to have premium access to yoyo chinese for 30 days. I believe it would really help me learn much faster and easier than what I have been doing so far. I would be very grateful if you would consider me for one of the 5 ,30 day premium access to YoYo Chinese that you are giving away.Thank You.