Watching China

In May of this year, I asked if there were any podcasts for learning Chinese. Yesterday, in a comment to an unrelated post, someone mentioned ChinesePod.com, which has free podcasts but require you to pay a monthly subscription fee for transcripts and review exercises. That's reasonable: those like me who want something for the bus to learn (in my case, re-learn) Mandarin have something that can go straight to their digital music player of choice, while those tha want something to print out and Flash-based questions to help review the podcast.

It looks like their in a preview mode, since until October 10th, the 'premium' stuff is freely available to those who subscribe. It's a little bit pricey for subscriptions, though: $30 a month, $150 for 6 months and $240 for a year is still cheaper than taking a university class, but I think it still prices a lot of people out. I know it would be a pretty drastic price cut, but I'd happily pay $5-10 a month for something like this, maybe a little more if it included help over email. $30 would sound reasonable if there was some scheduled live instruction or question-and-answer (akin to 'office hours', since it would be one-on-one) via Skype. I'm thinking an hour or two a month of live, voice help learning Chinese would be more than adequate in the $30/month price range.

On their weblog, they show evidence of thinking ahead, with a business module for podcasting:

At ChinesePod, we have been pushing a concept of using podcasts as an ‘on-ramp’ to a personal learning center where learning can be reinforced. While it will take some time, ChinesePod podcasts will hopefully graft the best features of podcasts so far (e.g. flexibility, timeliness, informality, interactivity) onto the methodology of how to effectively teach secondary languages. The thinking is that the typical user will start their learning by consuming the podcast and then gravitate to the website where they can (a) view the podcast transcript and key words, (b) go through a few review exercises to gauge their comprehension and, my personal favorite feature, (c) save and flashcard review key vocabulary and phrases they would like to memorize. When I first started studying Chinese, I inevitably found myself walking around with a stack of paper flashcards that I had to manually write out. I would love to be able to take this system with me via my phone and consume via a Flash Lite or XHTML interface.ChinesePod Business Model for Podcasting

What they seem to be doing right (not an exhaustive list, focussing on the tech side of things):

• They're using a blogging CMS (Wordpress) to power both the main site, so that means RSS feeds for pretty much everything, plus tags.
• They list their Skype, phone and email address, Skype being the biggest deal of the three, but as above, I can see how they could do well charging for instruction via VoIP.
• They start with Beginner level, which isn't that great for me (since I can understand everything they say and is a bit repetitive), but that's where most learners of the language are.
• There's RSS for everything, and they even have a link to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. The feeds have enclosures, which means—the way I have it setup currently—MP3s go straight to my iPod.
• The URLs are clean (the download links notsomuch, but that's okay), and the tags are useful.
• There is a weblog separate from the main site (which itself is technically a weblog).
• The "Most Popular" sidebar appears to use the same cool annotation tech found over at News in Chinese.
• They release the podcasts under liberal Creative Commons license. Of the Creative Commons licenses, Attribution is quickly becoming my favourite.

What they could improve upon:

• The about page doesn't have the prices listed. I had to find that out after signing up. It needs to be up front how much it costs each month.
• They use a WP template for their about page, when it really should be a page within the WordPress CMS database.
• The tags don't seem to have RSS feeds. Not really a big deal since I care more about the levels of instruction, which appear as if they will be the main categories, such as Beginner, Intermediate, etc.
• The annotation doesn't seem to work in Safari. Not a big deal, since I don't spend a lot of time in it anyway.
• There's some PHP breakage around a category feed.

Except for the lack of price listings before signup, those are relatively minor issues. Podcasting is a really great way to distribute language learning "tapes", so I look forward to what ChinesePod.com and sites like it have in store for those who someday wish to legitimately claim to be multilingual.

Related: see Blogchina's Podcasts, which seem to be mostly people having conversations. Conversations make for the best podcasts (as opposed to monologues, which are boring), but the level of Chinese was just out of my reach for me to be able to learn from them.