Here is my dilemma; I might as well just share it with you all. Maybe you can come up with some ideas or recommendations.

1). I would like to continue with a series of better-organized lessons using the similar approach in the past lessons. I recorded past lessons at home with modest equipment and the outcome was good, but not great. If I am about to spend a lot of time to prepare and record lessons, I am very hesitant to do it home, I would like to have studio recording quality – so I need to rent a recording studio. I have been contacting many studios here where I live right now (Vancouver, Canada), it seems to be more expensive than my resources allow me to invest;

2). Monologue isn’t my style. A student with the right aptitude, commitment and availability is not as easy to find as you would think, especially to get the permission to broadcast and without pay; Besides the student has to live in Vancouver, Canada…

3). You may not realize this, but I spend countless hours to maintain the site, dealing with html, css and Javascript code. Just to get rid of the spam can take easily several hours out of my precious time every month. It’s very frustrating that I can’t get the website work the way I want, given my non-technical background.

If you think you have some input to this, feel free to leave your comment here.

This is a long due response to you all! I created the learnchinesepod.com in 2006, the original idea was a kind of “test” or challenge to myself. I had taught Mandarin/Business Chinese incorporating the most innovative methods for many years and developed my personal style. My teaching career has always been a fulfilling, rewarding and successful experience. One day a friend of mine challenged me to bring my teaching and lessons on line.

It was quite difficult for me as I was accustomed to classroom experience and online learning (pre-recorded) was a new and radically different domain for me. I could remember when I was learning English, our teacher would let us listen to a lot of cassette tapes (no MP3 at the time) and I hated them. They all have those “standard” British accent, with a very cold and dreary voice and it was all scripted . It was not fun and it’s definitely not a language learning product which I would like to take part in.

At the time, there were a lot of questions. How to convey those body gestures I use in the class? How do I explain tones without association of facial expression and hand movement? How do I use eye contact to involve every students to ensure learning outcome? How do I personalize content on the fly to teach by employing progression principles? How to cope with student mass with diverse background and learning aptitude? How to structure the lessons? How to eliminate the street noise outside my living room while I am doing recording? How to improve my English skills and oral presentation skills so I can express myself clear by only use sound? Technical issues? etc….

One could probably could never answer all these questions. But I thought for several weeks and with some planning and hard work, learnchinesepod was born. Due to personal reasons, I relocated several times and now re-establish myself in a complete new country and environment. For a period of time, I needed to deal with so many personal things that I forgot about the project.

Now that I am settled. I would like to soon came back to the project. Before I restart, I would really appreciate your help by submitting some of your overall comments, opinions and ideas toward the current podcasts. I promise that I will read them all and take them into consideration for the forthcoming pod casts.

- Pinyin : A great collection of Chinese Pinyin Quiz to testing your listening comprehension of Pinyin and Chinese Pinyin tones. It’s fun, highly recommended!

- Pinyin Table: An Interactive Pinyin Table, you can find all Chinese Pinyin and hear Pinyin sound and tones.

- Chinese Pinyin Chinesepinyin.org has a great tool to convert Pinyin and teaching you how to type Pinyin. You can also find some Chinese lyrics, for free!

- Chinese mp3 Chinesemp3.org, as the name indicates, has a huge collection of Chinese top hits songs audio to play online, you can also find lyrics in Chinese Pinyin and Chinese characters.

- Chinese chat http://chat.quickmandarin.com is a great online Pinyin chat tool, you don’t need to register, don’t to give E-mail address or names, just go and start to chat in Pinyin. Sometime you may need to be lucky to find someone to chat with. But mostly are Chinese learners there and even Chinese native speakers… but all Chat use Pinyin

- Online Chinese dictionary This is an amazingly simple to use online Chinese dictionary, it’s not only great for beginners but also a very advanced dictionary for native speakers. Just type in whatever in your mind, it can be a Pinyin like (wo, wo3, zhong1guo2, zhong), an English word or even a Chinese character, this Chinese dictionary lists you all the matching entries without even a click… nice…

- Quick Mandarin Library Here you can find a collection of great learn Chinese textbooks. You can find beginner Chinese textbooks, advanced Chinese textbooks, and Chinese character textbooks and more, all produced by Quick Mandarin, the best place to learn Chinese.

- Chinese Characters If you are learning Chinese characters, you will find this Visual Dictionary very entertaining. Over 6000 characters are nicely ordered (by frequency of use) in a beautiful interface, you can easily navigate through and hear the sound of each character and even see the English translation… This is also a great tool to gauge how many Chinese characters you actually know.

I drink tea
Wǒ hē chá

In this lesson, Yao and Kevin will be learning together learning a very useful word – to drink in Chinese. We will be also learning how to say several common drinks in Chinese, such as tea, coffee and water. Have fun!

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

This is my book
Zhè shì wǒde shū.

We are going to teach you how to express persessive in Chinese: my book, your chair, my tea, your coffee etc. The key word is “de”, similar to the French “de” and Spanish “de”. The possessive is fairly straight forward in Chinese, it can be expressed by a simple formula: Pronoun + de + object.

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

She is Evelyn and she is a nurse.
Tā shì Evelyn, tā shì hùshi.

We learned two pronouns in the previous lessons: I (wǒ) and you(nǐ). We are going to teach you how to say he and she in Chinese. We will also learn several interesting words about profession such as teacher, student, doctor, and nurse.

Have fun!

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

Is that a watch? – Nà shìbúshi shÇ’ubiÇŽo?

We are going to learn how to say cup, watch and telephone in Chinese. We learned how to say “this” in Chinese already and I am certain by now you must be very comfortable using it. So in this session’s learnchinesepod we would not bring it up again to bombard your ear, we are going to discover “nà ” – the brother of “zhè”.

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

What do you eat? – Nǐ chÄ« shénme?

In this session’s learnchinesepod, we teach you how to eat! No, just kidding! You will be learning how to say “ I eat…” , “do you eat…?”, “what do you eat?” in Chinese. We will also serve you a very rich dinner if you can order them in Chinese: chicken, beef, pork, rice etc…

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

What is that? – Nà shì shénme?

You have learned so far two different way to ask questions:
1) with “ma” – Yes-or-No question
2) with “shìbúshì” structure
Questions are important and they are key to our daily conversation since not only you can obtain information from other person, you can also show your interest!

We are going to teach you another very useful way to ask questions using “shénme”. This episode is important, because the three new words we are going to learn appear frequently into any conversation.

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!

PDF file download:
The complete scripts here!!