I enjoyed the video and was a bit surprised at all the criticism it drew. It’s been such a long drought since Fiona and Gwiliym (now producing original content at skritter.com) Constance and YuQin Cai, left last year, I was glad to see some new and very current topical material. (It’s unfortunate that ChinesePod disabled the Skritter Lite writing practice for their lessons now before having a promised replacement ready, but maybe they now see Skritter as a competitor. That’s unfortunate because the services are really complementary.) Anyway, I get the impression from the company comment above that this was sort of an audition tape for Elsha and Tam and that the CPod owners decided to “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” but I would encourage further exploration and development of this type of lesson.
Yes, I know, the video had lots of errors. (when Elsha said “Cherrible” in reference to Chernobyl was that a mistake that the editors missed or a really bad attempt at a joke? Tam pronounces names two different ways when the video is trying to “reinforce” our learning, and from the captions we learn that Trump’s full name is “Trump Trump”. (“特朗普特朗普”))As to all the comments complaining about too much English, some of that can be resolved by re-classifying the lesson as “pre-Intermediate” (grin) and I do agree the political analysis not being what CPod is known for perhaps this bonus “lesson” within the lesson could have been left out, especially if not delivered in Mandarin. However, the format of a slowly read “news” story about the Iran nuclear deal with video images and captions is actually something I quite liked, and is a format that I hope CPod will repeat.