Improve Your Chinese With ChinesePod

I have been studying Chinese for several years now, and one of my favorite resources for learning chinese is called ChinesePod. ChinesePod is a daily mandarin language podcast and website for people like me. The ChinesePod folks are based out of Shanghai, China and have put together a wonderful set of practical chinese lessons for learners of all abilities. Each podcast is under 20 minutes long which makes them convenient to place on your iPod or iPhone and listen whenever and wherever you want.

The three main hosts of ChinesePod are Jenny Zhu, Ken Carroll, and John Pasden. Jenny Zhu is a native of Shanghai and studied in Australia. She is the main teacher and you will hear her on each podcast. Ken Carroll was one of the co-founders of ChinesePod. A language expert from Ireland, you will hear Ken with Jenny together on the Newbie and Elementary lessons. John Pasden has lived in China for more than 8 years and has a masters in Linguistics. John and Jenny team up on the Intermediate and Upper Intermediate Lessons.

The format for each lesson is usually quite similar. Each lesson will focus on a particular topic like "Going Dutch" or "Missing Luggage" and starts out with a simple dialogue. The dialogue is repeated three times and then the hosts will provide a translation into English. This is followed by a more detailed discussion about the structure, context and language points about the dialogue. Finally, the dialogue will be repeated again three times.

On the ChinesePod site you will also find a lot of useful extra material. For each lesson, you get access to a transcript of each dialog. The transcript contains both the chinese characters and an english translation. The vocabulary section lists the important words or phrases from the dialog as well as some supplementary vocabulary for you to study as well. There are also some extra dialogs for more practice and then finally you can make sure you have retained everything by completing the exercises. One thing I really appreciate about ChinesePod is the great community and you will really feel like you are learning Chinese together a group of eager students. Each lesson always has a lot of comments and you will even see the hosts like Jenny participating in the discussion.

ChinesePod offers all of its Newbie lessons for free. Just subscribe to them via iTunes and you can get the Newbie lessons downloaded to your iPod when they become available. To get access to the rest of the ChinesePod content, you will have to join one of their monthly subscription plans. The basic subscription runs for $5 a month and gives you access to all the different lessons. For $17 a month you get access to all the lessons plus all the additional content on the site. They also offer a free 7-day full featured trial (no credit card required) of their service so can see everything that they offer and make sure it is right for you. ChinesePod already has more than one thousand lessons in its archives so don't worry about running out of things to study.If you are still undecided, make sure to check out my full ChinesePod review.