The Thomas Crampton Channel

Why Web 2.0 works for learning Mandarin

Posted by Thomas Crampton, June 24, 2008 10:02 AM

Ken Carroll, co-founder of the Shanghai-based Chinesepod language teaching service, explains to Thomas Crampton why Web 2.0 tools work particularly well for learning Chinese in particular and languages in general.

 

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There are currently 7 Comments for Why Web 2.0 works for learning Mandarin.
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Comments on Why Web 2.0 works for learning Mandarin

YouTube is so damn slow in China. Got a transcript?

Posted by: DamnFoolMonkey | June 24, 2008 1:22 PM

Sorry about that! Have a near transcript in this posting.

http://www.thomascrampton.com/china/ken-carroll-chinesepod-praxis-shanghai-language/

Posted by: Thomas Crampton | June 24, 2008 6:05 PM

Yeah its very complex...
How did such an inarticulate bastard become so successful? It's so painful to watch, not to mention his crow barring in a plug for that shitty website to boot

Posted by: du ke nu ke | June 25, 2008 8:16 AM

Man, Ken is a lot older than I pictured!

Posted by: Mike | June 25, 2008 10:50 AM

Yeah, Web 2.0 is great and all, unless of course you're on a China Telecom ADSL connection, in which case sites like Chinesepod are next to useless.

Posted by: Anonymous | June 25, 2008 9:16 PM

@Thomas Crampton: Thanks, much appreciated :)

@Anonymous: Chinesepod's streaming audio is basically unusable, but you can still download their MP3s and listen to them once they're done. If you got scared off before you should give it a try, it's actually really useful.

Posted by: DamnFoolMonkey | June 26, 2008 4:31 PM

You can totally explore in a book on your own, too. But Chinese is really difficult, and benefits more from multimedia than say, a language more similar to my native language. (I could learn Spanish flipping through a book, but Chinese is a many-tentacled beast.)

I like ChinesePod. I pay them cash. I even opted for their Praxis Pass for an extra $10/mo to play with their other languages.

-danny

Posted by: Daniel Howard | July 2, 2008 11:02 AM

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