ChinesePod is (arguably) one year old today. Sometimes people like to reflect on birthdays. Not me, for some reason. I did decide, however, to listen to this podcast from September 6th last year, to see what it prompted. (This is actually the second lesson we released, but that’s pretty close!) Here are a few observations I jotted down as I listened this afternoon (we’re talking ‘live blogging’):
- First off, the topic is very general – ‘Culture, Useful basic adjectives, asking basic questions“. Whoa! I guess one of the key lessons that I learned about this medium is that it is much more suited to specific topics, than general ones. Nowadays its’ more likely to be The Doggy Bag, or Looking Up Characters in a Dictionary.
- This show was done in the old studio: the audio quality is nothing like the more recent stuff.
- The intro is way too long – 33 seconds. It was distinctive, but it must have been a nuisance to have to sit through each time. That’s the difference between radio and podcasting. I had worked for radio for years before these recordings. On the first podcasts I remember thinking to myself - I know this is different, I just don’t know how yet.
- We used to talk about the lesson number, as if we were following a linear format. Boy did that change!
- Coaching. The coaching was much more general than now. It was more like study tips than language specific things. Now I think that the broader level, motivational coaching is better suited to the blog than periodically putting it in the podcasts.
- Jenny is way in the background in this lesson. I guess she’s finding her feet. I had only ever interacted with her on about 3 occassions at this point. I can’t say I even knew her. God knows what was going through her mind at this time. Maybe we could ask her.
- The basic format is there – listen 3 times, break it down, but overall it is less structured than recent lessons.
- It was also slightly less cognitive than present shows. By February of this year I had articulated what I wanted to do in terms of a more cognitive approach. I remember thinking that this post was a radical one that was going to get a huge response. It really tried to put the ‘top down’ approach into perspective and I think it actually achieved that reasonably well, but all it got as a paltry 9 replies. Sigh! (In fact, most of them came from myself and ‘David’ aka, Lantian, as he is now known. Thanks Lantian.)
- EEEK!!! I do the dialog with Jenny – I’d truly forgotten that I used to do that. No comment.
- Who were we speaking to? How many people listened to this podcast when it was released? I reckon probably about 5. Since that, maybe 100,000! (A hell of a lot of people want to go back to the first lessons.)
- The timing is different – these days we give the listener a bit more space to think. I didn’t know how an iPod worked back then, or if people could strop/start the things. (I still don’t know how an iPod works. How does an iPod work?)
- There’s much more extrapolation from the patterns in these old lessons. Now we tend to do that in the Learning Center.
Anyway, that’s what came to mind for me. It has also prompted a bunch of ideas for new innovations that we could bring to the lessons. I’ll save those for now and ask you for your impressions/ideas. Let’s hear from you.
Ken Carroll
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Happy Birthday!
Although I joined in February, like most people (I guess) I went back to the initial lessons and started from there. Even then it was clear this was going to be better than the usual book+tape combination. Since then its got even better
, particularly now with shorter intros (my old player did not have the ability to fast forward or rewind, which makes a big difference).
Peversely, I would like to hear more (real*) adverts, though not necessarily in the podcasts. By this I mean selected TV adverts (perhaps hosted by youtube) or radio adverts, aimed at Chinese people in China. Ads are often fast, snappy, high density basic vocabulary about everyday things – and annoyingly catchy. Could be fun, and might introduce some nice cultural information…
Again, Happy Birthday,
Carl
* not targeted at Chinese Pod audience; but ones you’d hear/see if one was listening to a radio or watching TV in China.
Ken, All CPod Staff and of course all us CPoddies
Happy Birthday to us all. We are the POD . I have no idea what the measure word that goes with POD.
I know few will believe me but I happened to start listening to Chinesepod with the 2nd lesson. Heard about it on forumosa.com the website mainly for expats here in Taiwan.
I guess I still do not understand how this incredible internet works that draws people from all over the world together for a very specific area of interest. If I look at the map on the Forum it is amazing.
Ken I would love to hear you explain how you and Jenny just started podcasting to WHO? on day one and two ,,,, and how did you expect people to find it?
Equally perhaps all of us outside of the CPOD Factory can say how they found this place .
I am having a cranberry and vodka to celebrate as I write and here’s a Best Wishes that we all get better tones, speak more everyday in Chinese and personally all visit the CPOD factory and give Jenny a hug. What you do to show your thanks to Ken and Aric your on your own.
Mike in Jubei
Oh Mike, of course I’d give Aric and Ken a hug too!
Happy birthday ChinesePod. Thanks for hanging in there through all the ups and downs, we appreciate everything you do! Please keep on doing it.
Hi Cpod,
It’s been a good long chat. There’s still more beer, soda or juice in the fridge.
天长地久 cheers,
David
aka 蓝天
Hey Ken,
Cpod has come a long way. Yeah, the intro was cool to begin with, but then it got annoying as it took forever to find out what the lesson is about. And if you were searching through an MP3 player with no lcd screen, finding the podcast you wanted meant a lot of wasted time.
By the way, how did you find Jenny? Was Jenny your first choice? She didn’t talk much at all back then, did you know she had a great “podcast personality”?
I wasn’t here from day 1, but I have listened to all of the lessons. There has been marked improvement.
I didn’t even know there was a blog back then.
Last thing, we need to get together and have a “buy Ken an iPod” fundraiser.
My tribute to ChinesePod:
http://pandagator.info/blog/?p=46
Pendagator,
Maybe by next year Ken can buy Apple.
Mike in Jubei
Pandagator,
That’s a great review. I really appreciate the time you to to write it.
I sometimes I feel this is just like a great, big family.
Ken
Happy Birthday.
Accordingly to my account history, I started my free trial on 19th Oct 2005 and 3 days later I switched to a premium subscription I didn’t even use all of my free trial, I knew straight away it would be a good investment.
HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US ALL!!!
Mike, I can believe that ‘coz (well, believe it or not…
), I found ChinesePod just when they posted thier 1st podcast. I was – and still is – an internet junkie / geek back then and so I picked up on the idea of podcasting right away (I found ChinesePod by playing around with iTunes). Also, at the time, I was studying Mandarin here in Shanghai and so ChinesePod was a great supplement to my everyday lessons.
As Bazza stated, ChinesePod is a great investment! I know people will accuse me of being biased but I can assure you that the people working behind ChinesePod share the same – if not, even more – passion for ChinesePod as many of our users do!
Happy birthday. Feliz cumpleaños y los mejores deseos.
Happy Birthday ChinesePod!
I happen to be an American of Polish heritage and when someone has a birthday we say “Sto lat! Sto lat! Niech zyje, zyje nam.
” Good Luck! Good Cheer! May you live one hundred years.” So that is what I would like to say today to Ken, Jenny, Aric, John, Eileen and the rest of the crew as well as to all my fellow C-Podders. Sto Lat!!!!
One other thing. I think that Carl’s suggestion is a very good one. So many words and phrases enter a language through television and radio commercials. If you have never seen or heard the commercial you might have no idea what someone is talking about and many of these phrases are in common usage many years after the last time the commercial was broadcast. I am sure that everyone can think of a few from their own country that might sound very odd to someone from another culture.
Mexico Bob
生日快乐!
Ken, I had the exact same thought as Pandagator as I was reading your thoughts, “How did you find Jenny?” I also wonder how you found John. The two of them make it easy for me to understand the intermediate lessons, and even the upper intermediate lessons (when my mind is functioning at its peak). The basketball equivalent of Jenny and John is Stockton and Malone . I thought of saying Yao and McGrady but the two haven’t played together enough to show me how good they are.
Keep up the good work and keep innovating! You have a terrific staff.
Art
Happy Birthday ChinesePod.
I started in July. Since then, my Mandarin learning has been almost exclusively Chinese Pod. I really like the lessons.
I had done a few Newbie Lessons at random when I decided to pick a topic and study it. Being me, I downloaded all of the food lessons. I quickly learned about the different difficulty levels. When I listened to an advanced lesson, I said “Wow, I bet I would learn a ton if I could get to a level where I could learn from this at all.” So the goal of my Chinese learning lately has been to get to the point where I can do the ChinesePod Advanced lessons.
I did all of the newbie lessons. Then I did the elementary lessons. Intermediate is most definitely a challange. But the best resource I know for learning Chinese, and getting good enough to do the intermediate lessons, is ChinesePod.
Every step of the way I have been amazed at how much I have learned from ChinesePod. My Chinese learning can be broken into two segments, before ChinesePod and during ChinesePod. I don’t think there will ever be an after ChinesePod.
Having traveled back through the archives a few times, I can say that ChinesePod just gets better and better. I can’t wait to see all that you do in your second year.
Sheng1re4kuai4le! Gong1xi3, gong1xi3 to the whole team.
Happy Birthday Chinesepod! I’ve only been a member for a month but I love ChinesePod. Thank you for all the work you put into it everyday. I’ve been going back and downloading archived lessons and I am really impressed by the lesson evolution and how teachers have incorporated user feedback.
Also, thank you to all the users who share their experiences and feedback on these lesson and blog discussions. It wouldn’t be the same without Bazza, Lantian, Mike in Jubei, AuntySue – I’m studying Chinese independently and the discussion banter here makes me feel like I have classmates suffering frustration and celebrating success with me.
So, all of us who got in under a year get to call ourself “Charter Members”, right?
Let the party begin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL37IgrhfHw
Happy Birthday ChinesePod!!!
You Guys are amazing !!!
Happy Birthday to y’all!! I have listened to the first shows and returned again and again, with some kind of anticipation, until the growth of ChinesePod and the growth of my wish to learn chinese found a natural intersection.
You are doing a great job. Keep the party going!
Oops, wrong button… This had to be continued: Having met the “natural intersection” somewhen in spring, I never looked back to “Elementary Chinese Readers” or any other textbook. ChinesePod rulez!
I found Chinesepod right before Christmas. I remember because several of the early lessons I listened to were about the holiday. I first saw the podcast mentioned at another Chinese website I was looking at. I was impressed from the start. I did the free trial and signed up for premium. It has been well worth it. I brag about you to anyone and everyone I meet who is studying Chinese. I feel like the old saying, When the student is ready the teacher WILL come. Thank you for being there for the past year. My chinese has improved so much.
I’ve been listening to those first pods, those are very useful to me to realize how much chinese I’ve learnt thanks to you. Thank you and happy birthday.
Happy Birthday…
1 Year is a REALLY long time in the internet so the fact that you not only survived but flourished is testament to the fact that people had been waiting years for something like ChinesePod.
My question is are you going to revisit those older pods? Some seem to have been superseded or could just plain be redone better. Ken you also took a few lessons to find your feet
.
The reason is I got one of my friends to sign up for a trial account and he was complaining that he wasn’t that impressed and he didn’t get what I was going on about… Until I showed him some of the newer lessons… to quote him “Well those other ones were crap but now I get it” I wonder how many people you don’t catch because of that. 21 years of school and how ever many years of life have taught us to start at the beginning, even though that’s not really necessary in this learning paradigm.
Thx for all the kind words. As to how we ‘found’ Jenny, we didn’t – she found us! She had just returned to Shanghai from Australia last summer. She was working in my language school as an English teacher. It was obvious that she was smart, super-fluent in in English and had, er, a personality. Now to be honest, the school has close to 100 teachers in all, so I didn’t even know about her. In fact, it was Aric who brought her to my attention. And while we’re at it, Aric himself was working there as a teacher too. (Boy, this gets complicated.) So, thank him. We tried a number of other people but Jenny stood out from the beginning.
Charles, My point in this post was not that the first lessons were ‘crap’, as your friend described it! They weren’t crap and I think I knew exactly what I was trying to do. (Transparency has it’s drawbacks!) There was no precedent anywhere that we coudl look to. It was quite a big creative leap to say “This is how we’re going to do this”. We took a chance and the response was positive. That format stil works to this day. Although I critique it in this post, I stand by the first lesson (the first ever Mandarin podcast lessons) as pedagogically sound.
Ken
Feliz Cumpleaños! Joyeux Anniversaire! La-breithe mhaith agat! Sang njiq khwa loq!=生日快乐！Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Maligayang Bati Sa Iyong Kaarawan! and so on. All the best to you all and 万事如意 to you all for providing such a wonderful resource! Keep it up the way you have, and I’ll be here for goodness knows how long. I’ve only been here since March, but I’ve enjoyed myself thoroughly, and even learnt some Chinese (believe it or not!).
Will,
“Feliz Cumpleaños! Joyeux Anniversaire! La-breithe mhaith agat! Sang njiq khwa loq!=生日快乐！Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Maligayang Bati Sa Iyong Kaarawan!”
That’s easy for you to say!
Ken
Thank you Aric for “discovering” Jenny.
Chinesepod is such a joyous and dynamic learning community…such an array of talented staff getting it all together. It’s simply been a never to be missed (if at all possible) part of my daily life since finding it 6 months ago now. Amazingly, it continues to grow & get better & better, helped mostly by the exchange of ideas of its participants & continued tech improvments.Congratulations & many happy returns to all of you who are part of it!!
To me the most valuable thing Ken and company have provided is the development of a community. Free lesson podcasts and free community. Just look at the comments, we consider ourselves members (charter or otherwise) of Chinese Pod, not subscribers of a service. I’ve been listening since January and don’t ever recall Ken ever promoting “membership”. So congratulations for not being just an on-line flash in the pan and making it to the one year point.
Happy Birthday to ChinesePod
Coincidentally it seems that my 6 month premium subscription was scheduled to expire on 5th Sept so my birthday present for you is an extension for one year! I must admit that my first subscription was limited for two reasons; one of which was would it be right for me, and the second being would CPOD go the distance? I am happy to report that it is right for me and CPOD seems to be investing and just getting better and better. It is great to see how the show has absorbed all the feedback and developed so much in such a short time and the forums have become as much a part of my daily reading material as the South China Morning Post. I look forward to extending my subscription next year, by which time I hope to have mastered the intermediate levels.
I think I found you in the very early days and, since then, there hasn’t been a day without ChinesePod. (In fact, I tried the 7-day trial twice because the first time I used whatever name and then stopped using that as my online persona. And it took a long time for me to convince myself that the Premium subscription wasn’t a frivolous use of money.)
So happy birthday to you geniuses who invented, enabled, implemented, distributed and then refined refined refined ChinesePod into the second-best Chinese learning tool anywhere. (The first-best is a really good Chinese teacher.)
Happy birthday and congratulations. And here’s to a hundert un tsvanstik mehr. (Transliterated Yiddish.)