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Yes, ChinesePod is Changing!

Change Can Be Exciting!
#1

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Change can be exciting!

We know that change is hard and it can be very frustrating, but change also brings opportunity. And we are using this opportunity to improve our technology, expand our programs, develop new lessons, roll out new programming and introduce a new mobile app!

Trust us, we’ve been busy!

We know you are anxious for new material and to meet the new hosts, but we want to bring you the same excellent quality we have in the past and quality takes time.

We are interviewing talent from all over the world to find the right hosts to help us develop new and engaging programs. We will have multiple innovative, exciting programs for you. We have several great courses in the works, and will be introducing a sampling very soon.

You can help us! Do you have any suggestions for improvements or changes? Now is the time!
Share your ideas on how to make ChinesePod even better right here!

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#2

Hi chinespod Team,

I trust you , but you must understand also that the money we paid monthly or anually is not based on trust but on realities and the reality is that, in the last months, there are few new lessons and, if you are now serching for new host,etc…this also will take time and we are paying for that and not having new materials.
If your managenment decides to change the hosts or anothing else ,they need to do it having a replacement for them and not starting again from another point ( now in New Zealand???) and waiting the people go on paying without saying nothing.
If they are doing this in this way , I think they also have to freeze the suscriptions until everything is running normally and then start invoicing normally for the service they are giving to us for our money. ( and yes I know there are thousands of lessons in the backup that we could check but it´s not the same-…)

Kind Regards.

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#3

Agreed. I for one am like to not renew my monthly subscription if the new hosts are not presented by the end of this month.

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#4

Greetings CPTeam,

First, I would like to say well done to the previous team who seemed to do an amazing job releasing plenty of material with some really interesting topics. I think the addition of video was a welcome move and I enjoyed the Say It Right series.

However, I have been disappointed by the lack of new content in the Intermediate and above levels (since October of last year output has really tailed off). However, this has made me delve into older lessons and I’ve been finding some of the older series’, like Movie Madness and the Media lessons very entertaining and good listening practice. Could these be brought back in the future? I feel the media lessons are particularly interesting and useful as they are 99% in Chinese but someone from Int/Upper Intermediate can still understand enough to be interested in the discussion. They would be even more interesting if they were current.

In addition, listening back to older pods it seemed like there were more presenters involved so there was a greater variety of accents to listen to.

I’m not able to comment on the previous transition of presenters but it seems that subscribers just have to put up with less content for an unspecified period of time while this takes place. Although achieving quality does take time, you can understand that this may not sit well with paying customers who are not usually expected to wait for a product to be made after they have already paid for it. As for change, bring it on, the sooner the better!!

A hungry learner!

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#5

I’m a newbie, started using ChinesePod late last year and am sorry and troubled by the sudden unexplained departure of the wonderful team of Fiona, Constance and Gwylim. I haven’t been around long enough to have developed a lot of trust, so I hope you find some great hosts soon and start posting new lessons. Or you give F, C and G whatever they want to return.

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#6

To be fair and to maintain your reputation, Chinesepod should extend the subscriptions of all members for the length of time it is taking to post new lessons. Otherwise we are paying for nothing.

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#7

I wouldn’t say you are paying for nothing. There is a great number of lessons stretching back more than 5 years for you to listen to and while these are not new they are still a great resource for learning Chinese.

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#8

I’ve been a member off and on for most of that time. Ive listened to most of them.

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#9

Without change, we would all still be eating raw ants, hitting each other with clubs day by day and never live past the age of 30… So, please go ahead and use this opportunity to further improve the service.
That said, new lessons and working on the infrastructure (APP) should not be suspended for too long, please.

I have been on and off with Chinesepod since 2007, always on upper intermediate level, with the occasional advanced or media sprinkled in. I loved the show back then with Jenny and John. Then I was more off than on for a couple of years, but using my Chinese a lot at work. Coming back 2017, the new hosts were great, too, but I was missing John’s constant humorous wondering about many aspects of life in China which made him ask all the questions I would have wanted to ask. And he used to crack some good jokes. On the other hand, Fiona’s deeper insight of both sides allowed her to explain things better. I have learned a lot from all of the hosts so far, thank you, Laoshimen! Actually I do not mind another team of hosts or even frequent changes, as everyone brings in their own unique background and experience. As long as all of them are Putonghua native speakers – I am looking forward to it.

Just a few suggestions from my side, which are my personal opinion only, of course :

  1. More world news : I would appreciate more lessons about current news topics (especially on upper-int). That way, learning Chinese could at the same time cover some aspects of what is going on in China and the world. It would also boost my motivation, as sometimes I find topics like A4 size waist not really that interesting. Lunch and dinner conversation is most often about kids, weather, food, but also business and politics, I find.
  2. Shorter, but more example sentences in Audio Review: More focused on the vocab at hand and sentences for all of the vocab, not only a selection.
  3. Color coded transcripts : If the characters in the transcripts could be color-coded by tone like in Pleco’s dictionary (e.g. red for 1st tone, green for 2nd tone, blue for 3rd tone etc.). That would allow to read the transcript aloud with spot-on tones all the time.
  4. Improved App: Please improve the availability of downloaded audio, transcripts and other written content when offline.
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#11

I would like to suggest lessons at a level between Intermediate and Upper Intermediate. The jump to all Chinese oral content is too big for me and the Intermediate lessons are almost too easy for my HSK vocabulary level.

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#12

Thank you very much for this very thoughtful post. We appreciate your insight and will use this information as we are improving our programs!

#13

Hi, Hungry Learner! We certainly agree, the sooner the better. We also appreciate your comment about the lack of new content in the Intermediate and above levels for the past 4 months. And yes, the Movie and Media lessons are something we are testing right now. This is an area that we agree has been missed in recent years.

The idea of multiple presenters with a variety of accents and teaching styles is another area we have considered and think would be a positive addition.

We will be launching a think tank of insightful students like yourself and hope you will be interested in joining.

Thanks for your continued support!

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#14

I agree changing the structure of Audio Review would be a great idea. Not only to have shorter and more numerous sentences, but allow time between sentences for the user to try to repeat the sentence. This would be more like what one hears in Pimsleur recordings.

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#15

Thanks, Podster! We will work on the structure of the Audio Review.

#16

I have been a chinesepod subscriber for many years now, and I have actually reached my current intermediate to upper-intermediate level practically through it. I really appreciate your efforts and I am certainly I discovered chinesepod when I started learning Chinese (about a year after I started).

Having said that, and since I have tought several english and german classes myself (at all levels), I have a number of suggestions, which could make the lessons even more attractive. Especially given the fact that most chinesepod subscribers are per definition lone learners (that is, they do not rely on class interaction to acquire new knowledge).

Some improvements regarding the app:

  1. incorporate exercises in the app
  2. make it possible to go to the next sentence with the “next” button (instead of going back and reclicking play
  3. make it possible to play a sentence without having to open it (that is without reading the translation or the pinyin first)
  4. On my iPad 3 mini the sentences in the dialog do not show fully unless I open them and the close them again. Please look into that.

Some improvements regarding the lessons altogether:
5) I understand that the actors try to talk naturally, but they really talk too fast (much faster than my Chinese colleagues among them in everyday life). Even at higher levels, we are still learners!
6) Perhaps restrict the vocabulary to more standard than Taiwan specific
7) In the exercise section also include open-end questions, rather than only multiple choice.
8) In the listening exercises include other sentences too, not only repetition of what is already present (one can simply copy and paste).
9) Very important: Create repetition exercises comprising of several lessons.
10) Create vocabulary lists of (a) relevant words, (b) phonetic series. But please restrict them to the respective level.
11) I know this is a personal thing: please also include occasional explanation of the character etymology or simplification processes. This can help tremendously remember how they are written.
12) When discussing new characters, sometimes also discuss (or remind us) of some relevant words (two-character words typically) and also give exercises for this. This is a standard technique to help strengthen vocabulary.
13) Whenever new characters are introduced, please also make listening exercises to train distinguish them from other similar ones (especially homonyms with different tones, or from a different context).
14) In video lessons (especially the newer ones), I sometimes wish more information than simply watching the presenters talk. For instance some mind-maps. I know you have them, because often you can see them in the background!
14) Include more complete vocabulary exercises (i.e., antonyms, words with similar meaning, words that are colloquially used differently, groups of words, etc.)

George

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#17

Yes, Podster, I totally agree with you. I think it will boost retention of any new vocab if there is a chance to repeat it in the context of a short phrase. Maybe this could be optional? I could certainly speak Chinese to myself loudly when driving my car, but I would rather not do so while riding a crowded subway…

#18

Many good suggestions, I think.
I would like to pick up on item 9), repetition exercises: Repetition in general is very useful for studying, especially repetition of difficult words or characters in other contexts.

I found that some years ago with the older podcasts I would learn a new word and then be very pleased to encounter this word again in the following lesson. I am not sure if this was on purpose, but I saw it a lot and it was very useful. I did not find that in any newer lessons recently.

Why not pick a “core vocab” of, say, 15 very common useful words and/or characters and then go make 5 consecutive lessons that all contain these. Or you could focus on certain characters and present them in different words. How useful would that approach be for duoyinci? There could still be other vocab, but a certain “core” that is really violently drilled into the learner’s brain…

If that sounds tough, I personally would not mind to have 5 consecutive lessons on similar topics, so you can really dig into one issue. With so many lessons already in store, I think the most basic conversational problems are all covered and it would not be a waste of time to go into detail a bit more, expecially at the higher levels. And issues like Beijings fight agains pollution, the North Korea Crisis, housing prices, Brexit or more everyday life stuff like exercise, driving a car, even shopping can easily fill up five lessons or more. It would even reduce the time and money needed to make them…

#19

I agree with this, although actually I am studying the Upper Intermediate and Advanced lessons. The reason I agree is that is that I have noticed the Upper Intermediate classes getting harder in the last couple of years, to the extent that I would say the they are now at about the same level as the Advanced classes used to be, especially in terms of the amount of new vocab introduced in each class. It is just a guess but this might have been because the super-advanced Media classes were discontinued which meant the hosts coming under pressure to up the level of the Advanced classes to keep providing something challenging for that group. Without having listened to any of the Intermediate classes in recent years I found myself thinking that the Intermediate/Upper Intermediate gap must be getting quite daunting. So whatever you call the levels, I definitely think there is room for one more in total to ease the transition between each one.

#20

The older Advanced Lessons with Jenny are easier than the new Upper Intermediate lessons.

#21

Hey ChinesePod,

I have noticed that you have responded to none of the posts asking about what will happen vis-a-vis subscriptions. $200 is a lot to pay for an annual membership with a complete content freeze and absolutely no update on when normal service will resume.

Are you going to continue to avoid the situation or are you going to do something to address it?

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