Carnegie Hall: Chinesepod subscription report

Very VERY old joke:

Lady (to man on street): Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?
Man: Practice lady, practice.

I'm about half way through my first month of premium Chinesepod subscription. I took this extra expense on for two reasons: 1) I wanted to check out what it had to offer before deciding whether the Practice level (higher cost again) might be worthwhile and 2) my face-to-face lessons here in Cork are over for the next few months and I really don't want to lose any gains I might have made so far this year.

In these two weeks I have noticed that I am actually studying a lot more. Because the information and activity is organized in one place (on the web site), and probably because I am paying for it anyway, I find myself gravitating towards the web site for the best part of an hour each evening, and learning new stuff each time. This works much better than just perusing through my notes. I'm getting obsessed - a necessary obsession. A result of this extra activity is that when I try to form sentences in my head, they tend to come a little more easily now. Some of them may even be correct! Thanks to the expansions I can see many more examples of well-constructed Chinese sentences (I am increasingly impressed by the flexibility and applicability of one of the first constructs I ever learned: the humble shi4...de (是。。。的) is even more elegant and rich than I had ever imagined (比我想象的还好 - see!!）

You can't beat a little hard work and invested time. What Chinesepod has done is given me a nice place to work.

What I would like to see on Chinesepod next would be more exercises (e.g. "write the following in Chinese") and more leverage from the vocab (e.g. a Google gadget to show me one of my own vocab items refreshed every hour for example) . The possibilities are endless.