Chris pointed out the ChineseBlast site a few days ago, and I find it strangely attractive. That is to say I like it, but I can't figure out why. On the face of it, it seems like like a subset of ChinesePod: A dialog with transcripts in Pinyin, Hanzi and English.
It has something that Chinesepod doesn't have - it allows users to cooperate on the transcripts of audio clips and so arrive at the understandings by themselves - like a specialized wiki.
But even without getting into that functionality, what I like about it is the immediacy of it all and the ease with which I can go back and listen again and again to the dialog in order to see if I have finally got it. My old French teacher (I'm talking about 25 years ago) used to talk about the boomerang method: constantly going back on what you learned yesterday, and the day before, and last week, but in increasingly less detail. I've found this to be effective.
With ChinesePod, much as I appreciate and enjoy the banter between Ken, Jenny and John, I would like to be able to go back and just listen to the dialog. I wonder would it represent a lot of work (and little gain) for the guys over at ChinesePod to publish a dialog-only version of each lesson, to facilitate those of us who can only devote small pockets of time and would like to use that time to maximum benefit?
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I'm not sure if I see the similarity between ChineseBlast and ChinesePod.
I do like ChineseBlast though. The idea of being able to add Audio or Video clips from anywhere on the net and having the community help you to translate it is a great idea. And the already translated clips are a great resource in themself.
Hi John,
From the point of view of a user who just goes to ChineseBlast to listen to dialogs and then read the transcripts, I find this to be a ChinesePod-in-a-nutshell experience.
It's a small subset of what ChinesePod offers, so I wondered what was it that made me like it (given that I don't use ChineseBlast's other features). The conclusion I came to was that I liked the immediacy: the ability to jump in for 5 minutes and revist just the dialog - as it's often just 5 minutes at I time that I find myself with. (I should point out that I listen mainly to Elementary Level ChinesePod dialogs, so that colours a lot of what I'm saying).
It'd be nice if I could do something similar for the Elementary dialogs in ChinesePod, though I recognize that this might present a lot of work for little demand, for the ChinesePod guys.
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