Review request: Mandarin Chinese Course (YouTube videos)

[MCC - Matt]

Hi, everyone.

 

As a hobby, I have been making free videos on YouTube with a Chinese friend to try to help people learn Chinese easily (the way I would have wanted to learn it). They are about 5-10 minutes long and we have done 12 so far - focusing on HSK vocabulary and also words you generally need to know. I won't explain it too much here as it's explained in the first lesson.

 

I'd really appreciate it if we could get some feedback from you experts. Whether you think it's awesome, you have suggestions on how to make it better or you just plain think we should stop and not waste our time making them, we'd like to know.

 

You'll find all the videos here: www.youtube.com/user/MandarinChineseClass

 

We know there are lots of materials already available but I think this is a bit different than what everyone else is doing and hopefully, if people like it, we can continue making them and progress through the levels.

[Gharial]

Welcome to the forums! I've taken a look at the first lesson. It seems good (is maybe just the thing) for absolute beginners, but one beginner's feast may be another's famine (I think there can be such a thing as too much vocab control sometimes).

 

For example, one of the comments (from Fiby87) asks 'I have a question, what if you want to know the gender of "ta" in conversation? Can you assume it from some other grammatical patterns?' and you've replied 'The grammar is the same, so there really is no way of knowing without context', while saying in the actual video that the character differs, so one can be sure in writing but not in speech: 'When just listening, it is impossible to tell the gender'. Now "all that" is well and true enough, but to me it seems a bit like saying 'Imagine if English didn't distinguish between he/she and him/her and just used the word 'it' for them all. Now enjoy only sentences like "I love it!" and try not to think of Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun 2½'. Yes, often all one can go by is context, but usually students want more than ambiguity wherever possible.

 

So, call me an impatient or "problem" student, but "all that" is the sort of thing that starts me wondering what extra context might help disambiguate (or at least widen the student's range of expression), perhaps e.g. Ta hen piaoliang (I guess I need to wait until lesson 8+ for anything to do with hen etc)...then I start wondering if there is such a thing as "pretty boys" in Chinese (can't say I've ever checked linguistically, or even that much otherwise!), and on it goes LOL. I just think that a "focus on form" (grammar if not lexis) sometimes needs more by way of examples is all, as often it's not what the teachers say but what they don't say (neglect to say, or don't seem to want to say or get into at that particular moment in time at any rate) that can raise questions in the inquisitive student's mind. I'd at least want to know what people can love other than personal pronouns ROFL (but again, maybe you['ll] get into that in later lessons).

 

Anyway, good stuff (I appreciate that it takes some time, effort, and a smidgen of editing expertise to produce stuff like yours, and I for one don't have any YT videos up yet, so I've not got any right to criticize much, do I!). And like you say, we all have our little hobbies, plus it's FREE!

[MCC - Matt]

Thanks for the welcome and feedback, Gharial.

 

People will always have different ways of learning and I totally get what you're saying about the vocab control - for example, we can't tell everyone how to say "I live in... " - there always will be some personal vocab people want to learn.

 

And of course no one can foresee every possible question one might have. Asking questions is all part of the process of learning.

 

We've tried to make the videos as easy to understand as possible. Sometimes this might mean delaying a word (like "hen3") until it feels right to introduce it.

 

Anyway, hopefully we will make at least 50 and reach HSK1/A1 level. If possible, more.

 

These videos by no means claim to be all one needs to learn. I just hope people who like a structured approach find them useful.

[Gharial]

My stuff is often more the murmurings of a forum loon than top-notch feedback, but as long as you're happy to chat with me then I'm happy to chat with you, Matt. The people you really got to watch out for are the Daoist hermit sage worriers of Zu, they'll rip you a new one if you aren't careful!

 

Yup, those who hail from Dayton, Ohio should be able to extrapolate from examples given for bigger apples.

 

Anyway, I'll look through the other clips sometime and only post if I have a real nosebleed.