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Chinesepod.com - Chinese podcasts


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Posted

I just sat through a couple of the advanced lessons, nothing struck me as terribly difficult, except for a few words that I wouldn't have studied before on specialized areas. If you have been living and studying in China for a while, you are better off listening to the radio in my opinion, the advanced dialogs and can be frustrating slow at some times.

Posted

If you want dialogues and transcripts as well as lessons for free, go here: http://chinese.rutgers.edu/index.htm

Not to knock Chinesepod, but this site has way more stuff and it is all free. Not only that, but it has grammar lessons explaining the sentence structures in the dialogues. The are a couple of bad things. 1. It isnt updated or anything. Once you finish the lessons (around 90 or so..maybe more) you are finished. 2. The site isnt as streamlined as chinesepod. You have to play around with it for a while to find everything. Perhaps the lessons aren't as "cute" as chinesepod's (i.e. "how to flirt..etc..), but the site mentioned above has way more content for free (Ive also put it in the links section). Of course, chinesepod has a higher entertainment value, but why pay $30 a month for transcripts when you can get transcribed lessons for free?

Posted

Its pretty good Mandarinstudent... I didnt really look or notice in the quick peek I have just done but is it downloadable to mp3 player or do you have to do the record thingy...

Posted

Yeah, you can download the lessons and put them on an MP3 player. I couldnt believe it when I found this page...THEY should be the ones charging money, not chinesepod. Chinesepod doesn't even really explain grammar.

Posted

Woo hoo... thanks for the link... I will spend some time next week puting the lessons onto my mp3.. Cheers

Posted

No problem, glad I could help. Dont forget the "new words", "grammar", and "example sentence structures" parts of the lessons. I think if you combine all these things with the mp3s and transcriptions, you have a better product than chinesepod.

Posted

I gave chinesepod a try and I think it's pretty descent. A bit slow though with all the repeating so perhaps there are more time-efficient ways of learning. Maybe I'll use it as listening practice.

Posted

So, I have this friend who wanted to charm me when I was blue, so he went to Chinesepod and learned how to say that I am charming and beautiful. (I love my friends!)

We were sitting in his office last night and he said something I did not undestand, and he said, "That's ok, let me show you". He picks up his ipod, and there are the sentences from the lesson. Free. Just sitting there. :clap

If you click on the center of the ipod a couple of times, it will go through volume, tracker, chinesepod image, and then, to the text. It's brilliant! No pinyin, but characters and translation.

I hope this is not a mistake on their part, and if it is, please please please chinesepod, don't fix it.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

That's right, Serge from www.melnyks.com speaks with some east european accent in English, but when I played his lessons to my Chinese gilrfriend, she thought that he was Chinese:-). I wish that my Chinese could be as good as his.

Just curious, how long do you think it takes to speak Mandarin at a decent level?

Posted

when i first heard of chinesepod last year it wasn't too good. lessons too simple and easy etc.. but i think its improved quite a bit now. i just listened to a few advanced lessons and found them quite good. i had little trouble understanding it which makes me think its probably not hard enough to be labelled 'advanced' because i know im not that good yet.

i think they're good though i hope chinesepod keep up the good work.

as an idea perhaps they could make the lessons a little more interesting such as do 'interviews' with chinese people that dont slow down or anything for the lesson.. maybe do some on the spot interviews and ask things like "who do you think is going to win the world cup?" "what do you think is hard about english?" "why isnt china good at soccer?"

im not very creative so i cant think of any good topics apart from what is considered 'sensensitive' which i dare not mention but im sure others can think of some!

Posted

Is anyone else having problems downloading the ChinesePod mp3s??? I can get some/a few of them to download, but most won't download. Don't know if the problem is my computer or their website.

Posted

Hi Jonny,

I havent had any problems so far (except for one file but I got that eventually)... Of course now I am touching wood to make sure I havent spoken too soon... :D

  • 3 months later...
Posted

Not sure if anyone is interested, but this site is selling individual Chinesepod transcripts for a few dollars each - I'm not sure how similar this is to what subscribers to Chinesepod itself get, but might be worth a look for anyone who dips in and out but doesn't want a full subscription?

Roddy

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

Besides the non-native Ken speaking alot of Chinese in some podcasts, Jenny 分不清前鼻和后鼻音, that is to say, she usually doesn't contrast n/ng endings. While I generally have no problem with accents, for learning the language it makes it difficult to look words up in the dictionary if contrasts are missing. Also, as English speakers, we'll tend to assign a vague sound as either 'n' or 'ng' because English does have this contrast, so Chinese people will notice it as a mistake, and we won't know how to type it in pinyin, etc.

  • 1 month later...
Posted

There's a free trial membership for Chinesepod. I tried it out and found it quite challenging at intermediate level. It can't be called easy. The discussions half in English and half in Chinese are somewhat confusing though, I wonder whether this is a good idea, I mean having to switch between two languages when listening. One weak point is that there's no systematic approach to grammar. I didn't register for full membership because I have other ressources that I want to exploit first. I may come back to Chinesepod for advance learning though. I suspect the Chinesepod format comes into its own when you're already conversational but need rather advanced material related to your special points of interest.

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