Chinesepod (chinesepod.com) Review

[adamnhms]

Chinesepod

 

Back in February, a friend had mentioned Chinesepod to me.  At that time I'd been approaching what would be considered the intermediate level, with a solid base of vocabulary, grammar, and conversation.  Regardless of what amount of knowledge you have regarding Chinese, Chinesepod exists to provide the exposure and explanation that you can only usually find in a classroom environment.  If you're like me, who's only self-learning, Chinesepod should serve as a great learning tool for your studies.   In my analysis below, I'll rate each important aspect of the website on a scale from one to ten, one being the worst, ten being the best.  You should note that I'm covering as much as I can, however, I may not be able to fully demonstrate just how much content there really is.  There's alot that Chinesepod offers!  Let's take a look!

 

Layout: (8/10) 

 

Chinesepod offers 8 different levels of Chinese, 5 of which correspond with a level of difficulty (Beginner...Advanced) , the other 3 which offer language exposure to subjects such as the news, media, etc.  Overall, there are 15 courses to choose from.  Each course offers hundreds of lessons, each laid out in a similar fashion.  There is the audio for each lesson, which is conveniently located on the left of the screen along with two options below it marked as "Bookmark" or "Mark studied".  These features will be elaborated later.  There are seven individual tabs for each lesson, each are as follow: Discussion (where users post questions), Dialogue (对话), Vocabulary, Expansion (elaboration of words/patterns used), Grammar (elaboration of grammar used), Exercises (a randomized quiz that tests your knowledge of the lesson), and Classes ($$$). Overall, everything is laid out so to be easily navigated by the user, which only makes the learning experience that much easier.  

 

Content: (8/10)

 

The amount of content is endless.  Period.  Chinesepod offers thousands of lessons, covering thousands of different topics.  The only problem I have with the content is sometimes there's not enough!  For me, I like to see the usage of words/phrases used over and over, which you can only find over the course of multiple lessons.  Each lesson is structured so to focus on just a few concepts and eventually build your understanding regarding those concepts, which makes sense.  As a learner though, the more exposure the better, so while I would like to have more conversation per each lesson, I understand Chinesepod's approach of not overwhelming the user.  

 

Features: (6/10) 

 

Chinesepod makes an effort to help their users succeed.  Each audio lesson is co-narrated by a native Chinese speaker and a native English speaker.  The explanation of the dialogue is given and the review of each line of the dialogue is also given, with highlights to the style of speaking, grammar, uses, etc.  For each lessons, under the Vocabulary tab, you are able to save the selected vocabulary that is used from that lesson.  Then, you are able to access all your compiled vocabulary and test your memory using Flashcards, Matching Game, or Writing.  Personally, I don't care for the vocabulary, as it's more convenient for me to learn vocabulary via HSK / Vocabulary lists that are available and more easily accessible.  The Writing option is very useful though.  Powered by Skritter, the Writing option allows you to write out each character, choose the tone, and review each word/character carefully.  In addition, Chinesepod allows you to customize which levels you would like to study and reserves a 'Self-Study' section for you to be able to view all your Bookmarked lessons.  They do have a functioning app for iPhone and Android devices, but the user capability isn't as free as I would like it to be.  On iPhone, I've also had problems with lagging of the app and have even experienced a complete deletion of all my Bookmarked/Studied lessons (which Chinesepod was unable to resolve for me).  They also offer online lessons with one of their consultants, however, for the average learner, this is a very expensive option.  There is a search engine to find lessons, grammar concepts, etc.  However, I find it a bit disappointing when I remember a great sentence, but am unable to find the lesson just by only having the sentence.  I recommend that you keep notes on which lessons hold the most valuable learning concepts, so that you don't have to sort through the thousands of lessons.  In addition, Chinesepod recycles their demonstration of words/phrases in their Expansion and Grammar section.  So while you may learn a few new concepts every lesson, you will be reviewing the same concepts with the same sentences, which after awhile, don't help as much as they're intended.  If each lesson had it's individual Expansion/Grammar concepts, with different sentences each lesson, the application of the word/phrase would be easier to grasp, as each different sentence would show you the different situations and moods each word/phrase is used in.  While there are many great features, there are some not-so-helpful/redundant parts of Chinesepod.  

 

Value: (7/10)

 

After a month of subscription ($.99 coupon offer at the time), I purchased a one year subscription for $250 even.  No coupons.  No discounts.  While I value Chinesepod as a learning tool, it should only be one of many learning tools you should apply to your understanding of Chinese.  I feel like I didn't get too bad of a deal, considering how much work has gone into the website and its content, but then again I didn't feel like I got a good deal, considering there's still much that could be improved.  

 

Final thoughts:

 

If you're just beginning to learn Chinese or plan to continue, Chinesepod is a great website.  I think there's a lot of other good websites out there that would supply more exposure regarding Chinese, but perhaps none of those websites are able to cover each conversation with such detail and clarity.  Sadly, I know I'm missing some features/explanations.  Since I'm not able to cover as much detail as I would like to,  I encourage you to try a one month subscription, to see if Chinesepod is for you.  Regardless, I wish you luck on your learning.  :-)

 

P.S. If any of you have additional thoughts or see anything wrong with my review, post it!

[Edenborg]

I agree, the content is fairly good.

[Bad Cao Cao]

Their content is, actually, quite limited. It is pre-scripted content with discussions mostly limited to the vocab of the dialogue (and a lot of unnecessary English).

 

If you want to improve Chinese quickly you need to get natural, native content as soon as you can - and for this - you need to look elsewhere, this site doesn't have it. 

[simc]

Well yes, you do want to get to native content. But it might take a long time to acquire enough proficiency for it to be comprehensible. ChinesePod provides semi-natural content which allows you to get to the level where you can start using native content.

[adamnhms]

Well yes, you do want to get to native content. But it might take a long time to acquire enough proficiency for it to be comprehensible. ChinesePod provides semi-natural content which allows you to get to the level where you can start using native content.

 

Exactly.  Could not be said any better!

[Ania]

I myself am a huge fan of ChinesePod! Not as a primary learning tool, but as a provider of supplementary material. And even though it is not based on authentic native material, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing for someone at my level (around HSK3 still). Besides, I use ChinesePod in a very specific situation - when I'm driving my car and I can't possibly use any other methods of learning. And sure I could listen to authentic native material, but what would be the point if I wouldn't understand anything? I think the immersion method would work for me if I actually went to China, but with about 2 hours of listening a day I'd rather someone explained some things to me. ChinesePod's dialogues may be scripted and all, but their format works for me and I see that I am learning and remembering many things better thanks to them. I guess that's the most important thing. 

 

Eventually I would love to achieve a level that would allow me to listen to authentic material and get something out of it, but that moment hasn't arrived yet, so I'm very grateful to ChinesePod for providing something I can listen to in the meantime

 

Unfortunately I cannot really comment on any of the extra online features, because the only features I use are the audio podcasts/reviews to listen to in my car and sometimes the PDFs when I get home

[Johnny20270]

I tried ChinesePod for a while and I really wanted to learn from it as the content seem very natural and useful. However, it just didn't suit my style of learning. I was constantly becoming frustrated listening to a lesson from Chinespod only to read an excellent grammar book (called Basic Chinese Grammar) which would contradict some of the colloquial sentence structures used in Chinesepod. That's the nature of language though.

 

Also I used to find Ken Carroll's Irish accent somewhat irritating.

 

Each to their own learning style of course.

 

I may have another bash at it.

[adamnhms]

Also I used to find Ken Carroll's Irish accent somewhat irritating.

 

Haha, I couldn't figure out where Ken was from, but this brought some enlightenment!  As for Chinesepod, Ken and John (sinosplice, here on Chinese-forums) are gone, both the primary English narrators.  As of recently, they have making smalls tweaks to the features of the website which have been an improvement thus far.  

[Johnny20270]

Yeah I am being unfavorably bias towards Ken (as I am Irish too and never like hearing my own accent) but I'll bet that is a Dublin accent, and in particular, from South Dublin

[Johnny20270]

Just to updates from me on Chinese Pod

 

I have signed up to a full year about 2 months ago and started using it. Whilst it never seems to suit my learning style I am coming around to it. I can see its usefulness as a companion to other study material. I wouldn't say an essential companion but definitely a useful one.

 

adamnhms review above seems fairly accurate to me biut from my perspective I would add a few casual observations

 

 

Cost: I paid $150 and I think its worth it. I see there are a pile of pdfs and audio lessons all torrent websites but I do think its worth paying for. You can get the data out of the pdf's but the website is much easier to navigate / bookmark / highlight items etc. I think $250 is getting pricey but if you use it every day, then at <$1 a day its probably ok.

 

Features On the website you can see the dialogue in text version (rather than a pdf) and I used this to easily copy and paste for sentences I quite like. Also the ability to save a selection of words from a lesson is quite nice. . 

 

Style. As I said the style might not be for everyone. I like the fact its is more real life but many posters of forums don't particularity like that the hosts are white. I am not too bothered by that but thge first thing that hits you is that lesson dialog are very heavily Americanized and have over-enthusiastic hosts who overuse the words 'amazing' and 'awesome'. I felt like I was listening to an episode of friends with Ross and Rachel getting all emotional every 10 seconds.     If Chinese pod was run by Germans / British / Italians for example it would flow a lot different I think. My point is they should try have more hosts from different countries to keep it universal. The comments section is only so useful while some good points are raised it is diluted too much by regular posters overpraising Chinesepod or creepy comments from guys about amazing or hot Jenny Zhu is. Its a bit weird. 

 

Cultural tips. I quite like this dotted around the lessons. Most other 'cultural tips' I seem to have read in Pimsleur and other material are just cringy. Using pimsleur as an example when I mentioned some phrases such as (对不起，我得失陪了) to my Chinese friends, they said, "ahh that is cringy never say that, you sound weird!".

 

The real gem in Chinese pod is the dialog (noting what I wrote above). Most other podcast material I see, seems to be orientated towards a polite conversation with a mother-in-law.