Here’s an article from the Asia Times that includes my interview on the subject of learning Chinese. The interview was done over the phone and there are actually some inaccuracies in it.
First of all, I don’t recall saying anything about iTalki in the interview, because I don’t know anything about them - though I did talk generally about social networks that do language learning. Nor are some of the words mine – the author has paraphrased the quotes.
It’s clear that there has been a proliferation of Mandarin learning solutions in the last year or two. The article talks about something called Idaped – Ida who? I’m not trying to be facetious but these things are proliferating like crazy. This blog post fom yesterday mentions others I have never heard of.
And as with the Asia Times article one thing becomes clear – the perception in the market is one of ’ChinesePod and the rest’. I don’t claim to be unbiased, but I think this is fair – we have led the way for the most part since 2005. I can’t keep up with all the new market entrants but I wouldn’t want to have to enter the market now with an entirely new brand unless it had something radically new to offer. I haven’t any evidence of that so far.
Ken Carroll
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I have personally tried italki.com and it is a very good site for finding “language partners” online. That’s what the site is all about rather than just another social networking site.
When you sign up for an account you are asked which language(s) you speak and at what level you speak them. Then you are asked to specify which languages you are learning and what level you are at with them as well. There are also the other normal profile items you can add but the focus is on language at italki.com.
Though I have not been on it for a while, nor talked to my language partners all that often, I was able to easily locate about 3 or 4 decent connections within a matter of days of joining the site. I even found one guy who spoke Shanghainese!
We weren’t really compatible though because he always wanted to talk about business stuff and I am not really into that kind of thing.. so I helped him as much as I could but as it’s more than just an exchange of language but of ideas as well that interests me, I slowly got tired of the conversations.
Anyway.. definitely worth checking out if you are looking for live language partners that you can practise your Chinese (or any other language) skills with.. it’s all free (at least for now) and the only real currency there is your own language skills.
It does seem like it is ChinesePod — and the rest. With good reason. Congratulations! When new market entrants do come after you, they are going to have to adopt a lot of what you have done. Part of what I like about Praxis is that you have specifically written about methodology that others can freely adopt, without getting too secretive about it. That’s good. The competitors will end up being a tributes to ChinesePod through their challenges.