What are these like?

[JayR9]

I don't know if I am posting this in the right place or if these have been mentioned before. I apologize if they have.

Has anyone used or tried these following websites and are they good? worth it?

FluentU
LingQ
italki
Livemocha

Some you have to pay for but I don't want to pay if they are no good.

I am trying to learn Mandarin and if these can help then great, but I don't know much about these so any help will be much appreciated.

 

I have pimsleur, Assimil, MT, ChinesePod, FSI and NCPR but also don't know which to use as my main and what else to use with it.

Thanks

[Ruben von Zwack]

I have used livemocha in 2012 (or was it beginning of 2013?) and wouldn't want to use it again, but this was before they got together with Rosetta Stone.

It was recommended to me then by a British guy who had learnt Brazilian that way, so it had worked for him.

 

So this is just my personal subjective opinion on their Mandarin lessons for beginner before they teamed with Rosetta Stone:

One thing that struck me was how you see the word 女孩 nǚhái , but what the audio says is a heavy  女孩儿 nǚhair (apologies, I don't know how to represent an erhua correctly in pinyin).

I am all for encorporating speech variations, but if it's in a first lesson for beginners, and not indicated, then I believe it is just sloppiness or a mistake.

 

They changed their system, but when I was using it, you had to correct other people's work to get points. So I got to see a lot of German lessons, and felt sorry for the brave people who did them, because the sentences they had to pronounce were just so pointless.

[陳德聰]

I lingered on LingQ for a brief time for Spanish. Very brief. Super super super brief.

 

When I went to take a look at how it handled Mandarin and Japanese, I found that it was not developed well and word segmentation was done extremely poorly. Would not recommend for beginners, though it does seem to have a lot of random content that makes for fluffy reading on a variety of topics.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I really like Imanadarinpod for intermediate. I have no idea how their beginner's material is, they call it elementary. You may want to look for yourself:
Imandarinpod Elementary 初级

 

What I like about the intermediate:
You can see someone actually put some thought and effort into there, wrote a script, took the time to explain new vocabulary in terms of already known vocabulary. The topics seem interesting to me.

You can access and download the audio for free, and read the main dialogue text online, but if you want the "learning guide" (which I personally like), then you can only download that for one month for free. After that, they will be asking you for a USD 10 subscription/month.

The learning guide consists of a transcript of what the teacher says, which is great because those are normal useful Chinese sentences as far as I can tell, so they are really a lesson on their own; and of the vocabulary, of a transcript of the dialogue (the same one you see for free on the website no matter if you are subscribed or not), and of questions about the lesson.

Downside: it is not like a textbook where lesson builds upon lesson. For example, the lesson about snow, you are expected to know words like yesterday, falling (as in, snow is falling), etc. Or you could of course learn them from the transcript (learning guide PDF).

 

I have been dodging paying for online lessons so far, but I do like them so much, I may make an exception for them, now that my trial period is over

[JayR9]

Thank you for your replies and opinions. I will check out Imandarinpod and see what it's like for beginners.

 

A lot of sites what money from you but are not that great with content. They offer very little in return. I am hoping to find a really good site that I can keep going to instead of having to open lots of different pages at once. Searching though is taking time off my actual studying.

 

I need a good study plan and stick to it.

 

Thanks again to you both.

[Demonic_Duck]

I have used livemocha in 2012 (or was it beginning of 2013?) and wouldn't want to use it again, but this was before they got together with Rosetta Stone.

It was recommended to me then by a British guy who had learnt Brazilian that way, so it had worked for him.

 

So this is just my personal subjective opinion on their Mandarin lessons for beginner before they teamed with Rosetta Stone:

One thing that struck me was how you see the word 女孩 nǚhái , but what the audio says is a heavy  女孩儿 nǚhair (apologies, I don't know how to represent an erhua correctly in pinyin).

I am all for encorporating speech variations, but if it's in a first lesson for beginners, and not indicated, then I believe it is just sloppiness or a mistake.

I believe "nǚháir" is standard, albeit for a word that's already fairly informal. It's certainly not a mistake, and I don't think it's considered dialectical (even Beijing dialect).

 

As for livemocha in general, it used to be pretty good (at least for what it offered), but then it got taken over by Rosetta Stone and they made some very unpopular (read: downright terrible) changes to the site.

[renzhe]

Yes, nǚháir is standard. If there's sloppiness, then it's that erhua was not written down.

Not all erhua is dialectal, some of it is considered standard in the Mainland.

[Ruben von Zwack]

That's just what I meant, like there was a sloppy editor.

Thanks for the additional info, I stand corrected!

[tysond]

I tried FluentU for a while.  I think it's quite well done, and is a good way to study videos, however there are a few issues that meant I didn't end up using it.

 

1. They used youtube - very slow in China.   When on holidays in Australia it was quite fun to play with but in China, I felt like I was wasting most of my time waiting for loading.

2. The interface (which changed rapidly) asked you to do a lot of entry of pinyin or characters when frankly it didn't seem necessary

3. The biggest issue - I already knew so much vocabulary that I spent a ton of time basically teaching the system what I know.

 

Until someone solves the "I already know this" problem, switching between sites or adopting a new system halfway through is quite annoying.

[Demonic_Duck]

That's just what I meant, like there was a sloppy editor.

Not necessarily, it could have been intentional - though the standard pronunciation is "nǚháir", the standard way of writing it is "女孩". In native materials, 儿化音 is rarely written down, unless it's to draw attention to a distinction between words or to the dialect being used in quoted speech. However, in learner's materials, I agree that it's much better to indicate it for clarity.

[PBolchover]

For an early beginners lesson, I would argue that it would be best to not include any erhua until they are at least confident in the "standard" way of pronouncing pinyin syllables.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Thanks everyone for correcting me, and sorry this has hijacked JayR9's question a bit. I wanna say

[Demonic_Duck]

I believe "nǚháir" is standard

 

Yes, nǚháir is standard

 

For an early beginners lesson, I would argue that it would be best to not include any erhua until they are at least confident in the "standard" way of pronouncing pinyin syllables.

 

...huh?