ChinesePod has had a pretty viral history over the last few months. One thing that has helped it to grow has been the blogosphere. We track the comments that are being made out there in the blogosphere. Here are some of the posts I tracked today:
Okay, the future is here folks, now you can learn Chinese with your ipod, with daily podcast lessons. You listen, when you want to listen. I know it sounds weird, but don’t ya think its time to start practicing your Chinese? I heard rich New Yorkers are hiring Chinese Nanny’s to teach their children the language, for 100K a year! Dang, that’s crazy. Anyway, check out ChinesePod and think about learning a four tone language in your spare time.
From drawmyface:
I recently discovered this awesome website for learning mandarin by listening to dialogues: Chinesepod.com. They publish a daily podcast ranging from Newbie to Advanced levels. You can download the mp3s for free, but you have to subscribe if you want access to the transcriptions and countless other useful tools. I can’t afford it at the moment, but the mp3s are coming in very handy by themselves. Maybe I’ll upgrade later.
From onemanguy:
i’ve also been really excirted lately about a podcast i found called chinesepod. it’s a language teaching program and it’s AWESOME!!!
Then there’s tygarblog:
For studying Mandarin, a useful website is Chinesepod. Chinesepod has a daily podcast, at one of four fluency levels, and also sells transcripts (at $60/year — the latest transcripts include traditional and simplified characters as well as pinyin romanization) as well as interactive transcripts and flashcard learning (at $240/year). However even the free basic podcast sans transcripts is useful and self-contained. One feature I particularly like is the Japanese language version of Chinesepod which allows me rapid review of both languages.
Language teaching is one of four impressive podcasting applications I’ve seen. In future posts, I’ll discuss some of the others.
And last, but not least theres Sinosplice:
When I first discovered ChinesePod months ago, I thought, “that’s kinda cool, but a podcast a day? Let’s see how long they can keep that up.” Well, they did keep it up, and the buzz grew.
I’ll have more on the defection of John Pasden to CPod in the next couple of days.
Ken Carroll 凯恩
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Ken – here’s another for ya:
http://www.jonathanlaughlin.com/archives/000344.php
Thanks, jonathon.
In fact I did see your post some weeks ago. In the future I’ll link regurlarly and include any comments you may have.
I also saw in your post that you consder Mandarin to be much easier than Japanese. Interesting. I wonder if Lantian concurs.
[Japanese vs. Chinese]
Hi Ken & Jonathan,
Actually I’m quite curious about John P’s experience, especially as I think he’s at a higher level than me in both languages (I’d include Steve S too). I would have to say that after about one year, my Chinese is at the level that it took my Japanese two years. But the circumstances were a little different, so I wouldn’t attribute a huge percentage of that to the languages themselves.
Japanese is easier for me to ‘pronounce’, but I never did master the harder/lengthier/formal verb forms. Remembering and parsing out Chinese words seems more difficult to me than Japanese simply because there are so many words that sound similar, but these days I find the ‘total’ set of Chinese sounds seem well bounded, in other words nicely limited. I find very few good Chinese materials that have hanzi, pinyin and good English. On the other hand, Japanese materials seem stuck on teaching a very non-colloqial, almost foreigner speak, making it hard to break into socially/liinguistically.
There was really no internet when I was studying Japanese so that’s a huge difference. I’m a visual person so I really enjoy writing hanzi/kanji, hiragana/katakana so at least my handwritting looks good, doesn’t make remembering words much easier though. Katakana, typically English loan-words really is easier to guess than Chinese-English loanwords.
What I really like about both languages is attaining words/phrases with their proper emotion and meaning. This is the part that really will never translate, and which makes language so vital to communication. Some of my favorite words: 花火 J for fireworks, がんばれ J for keep it up!, おかいり J for welcome home, 感觉 C for feeling, 爱 C for love, 吃 C for eat, and a classic E word from a Cpoder: wingnuts.
Now Ken, speaker of MORE than 3 languages, how was your day?, beautiful photo of the sign by the way —you and Aric sure seem to have time to stroll around Shanghai, get back to work! Me, my latest podcasts are in the mp3 player…I’m going swimming. Lata
Lantian’s comments are much more informed, as he’s got way more experience studying Japanese than I do. I think I put that comment in my blog about Mandarin because it’s got this bad reputation as the world’s most difficult language. I don’t think that’s true at all. There are some difficulties, to be sure, like tones and the general foreign-ness of the vocab. But when you look at word order and the fact that Chinese is not an inflected language, I’ve found it a bit easier. The few experiences I’ve had with Japanese, I was a bit intimidated with the confusing word order as well as the seemingly-endless honorifics I needed to learn just to be able to communicate in a basic way.
My situation with the two languages is different as well: I took Mandarin classes in college, and have supplemented this with Cpod now. With Japanese, it’s mostly been self-study from books, so I never did get the advantage of face-to-face instruction with Japanese that I did with Chinese.
Oh, and Ken — glad you saw the post on my blog. Did you find us bloggers by Googling for “Chinesepod?”
Hi jonathon,
I use the blog search engines. The best ones are Technorati.com and Feedster.com. These offer up-to-the-minute feedback on anyone who uses your url on blogging software, anywhere in the world! It also gives you info on who is linking to your blog and much, much more. (This sounds like and ad!!!)
Ah, right. I’d heard of those but have never used them. Thanks for the tip.