I’m investigating how people learn to speak a new language.
More than a million people have signed up with Chinese Pod to learn to speak Chinese.
Co-host Jenny Zhu filled me in on how this Shanghai-based company is helping adult learners, 60% of them from the U.S., attain fluency. Podcasts, more than a thousand of them, are part of the answer, but it takes more than exposure to 12-minute podcasts to master a language.
Most of Chinese Pod’s learners are 25-50 year old adults who are learning Chinese for personal growth, as a hobby, or because they have Chinese spouses or kids. 75% are native speakers of English. Increasingly, they’re abandoning their desktops and using smartphones and tablets to access Chinese Pod. Some are expats living in China and some are university students supplementing what they learn in class.
What made Chinese Pod the leading choice for learning Chinese? For one thing, you can sign up for free. Fewer than 1% of those registered users are paying for the experience.
Also, when Chinese Pod debuted in 2005, most textbooks and training materials were disembodied from real life. Few teachers had ever visited China and knew little of Chinese culture. Chinese Pod’s approach was to focus on providing something useful; the alternatives were merely academic.
Personally, I think I’m immune to learning languages in a classroom. I’ve studied French, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and German and can’t speak any of them. If I wanted to learn Chinese, I’d give Chinese Pod a try.
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Me too, Jay. I learned French intensively in the classroom. However, I have lost it now. My son learned Chinese very fast … through singing, playing, dancing, and other activities.
I think, human spiritual being and his expression is unlimited and unlimitedly rich. Therefore, the mode of human learning as one aspect of human expression must be suitable with the unlimitedness of human spiritual being and his expression. Then, human learning including learning languages must be as “unlimited and unlimitedly rich” as possible: through living, through life activities, through life experiences, either personally private or personally social.
Great article. I don’t know Chinese pod but I like the way it uses time in a more effective and productive way. The only other thing I’d like to see is more practice and reinforcement. Literally chat rooms for people to practice chatting! Thanks for sharing Jay.
Nice Post. It seems POD are the best way to learn any new Language. Weather it is Chinese, English or other.