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With the increasing importance of China in international trade, a mastery of the Chinese language is becoming an ever more valuable asset for non-native speakers. In Britain, about 100 schools have now started teaching Mandarin Chinese and at least one school has made the study of Chinese compulsory.

The latest podcasts can be downloaded automatically into a dedicated podcast tool or an RSS reader such as Omea Reader (seen here). The PDF transcripts are only available to subscribers - but you can try them out free for a week.

It’s been a long time since I was at school and I was starting to feel that my ignorance of Chinese was leaving me well behind the times. This undeniably difficult language with its strange ‘tones’ and its hugely complex system of writing poses considerable problems to the lone learner.

I have written before about Web-based resources for students of Chinese and other languages. I have recently discovered a new Internet site for Chinese learners - and I have to say it’s definitely one of the best.

ChinesePod only went online in September of 2005 and already it has become a terrific resource for Mandarin Chinese learners. As you might guess from its name ChinesePod teaches using podcasts. In short, that means that it releases regular audio lessons in MP3 format. You can download these and listen to them on your desktop computer or, if you prefer, you can copy them onto a mobile MP3 player such as an iPod. The daily downloads can be automated by subscribing to the ChinesePod feed using either a podcasting application such as Apple’s iTunes or a general-purpose RSS reader such as (my current favourite), the Omea Reader. Alternatively, if you don’t want to subscribe, you can simply download the lessons one by one from the ChinesePod site.

The podcasts themselves generally take the form of a dialog which is read out by the two presenters - Ken Carroll, an Irish man who’s lived in China for over a decade and Jenny Zhu, a native of Shanghai. Ken - in the lessons I’ve been following, at any rate - is the principal presenter while Jenny provides examples of perfect pronunciation and helps to clarify the fine distinctions of meaning. The combination works well. Other Chinese courses which I’ve sampled, both online and CD/DVD-based, either tend to skimp on audio or (in the case of The Rosetta Stone, for example) provide repetitious audio lessons with which are high on monotony but low on explanation.

In essence, ChinesePod adopts a style which somewhat resembles my two favourite online language resources - the Deutsche Warum Nicht? German course by Radio Deutsche Welle and Catchphrase Welsh by BBC Wales. You will find these reviewed in the Bitwise guide to online language leaning. Just like those two sites, ChinesePod works on the basis that the most important thing which a new learner requires is access to plenty of listening material. While reading and writing are important, these skills can largely be learnt from books. To engage in conversation, however, you need to be able to understand what is being said. And in order to arrive at that level of comprehension you need to have listened to a great deal of spoken Chinese.

The lessons provided by ChinesePod are graded into levels - Newbie, Elementary and Intermediate. The Newbie lessons contain a good deal of explanation in English. By the time you arrive at Intermediate level, the lessons are predominantly conducted in Chinese.

All the podcasts themselves are free. There is also a linked Wiki, providing additional help plus Ken’s Blog. Optionally, additional content is available by paid subscription. There are two levels of subscription - Basic and Premium. Basic level subscribers have access to PDF transcripts of the lessons. These include the dialogues in Chinese script (the simplified form used in mainland China), plus the phonetic Pinyin version, the English translation and a list of relevant vocabulary. The latest PDF file can be emailed to you whenever a new podcast goes online. You can also download PDFs selectively from an onsite archive.

In addition to the PDFs, Premium subscribers also have access to various online tools including multi-choice tests linked to the lessons and an online dictionary of commonly used words and characters. You can click selected words and phrases in order to add them to a personal word bank for later study. The text of this word bank can be downloaded for offline study and it also supplies words to an on-site ‘Flash card’ system to test your reading comprehension.

Premium subscribers have access to extra tools such as this Flashcard system

You can try out the subscriber service free for a week. After that, the charges are $9 a month (Basic) or $30 (Premium). Six month ($42 Basic / $150 Premium) and yearly subscriptions ($60 Basic / $240 Premium) are also offered.

I have to say that while I am extremely impressed by the podcasts themselves, I am not entirely convinced by the subscription schemes. The annual Basic subscription may, for some students, be worthwhile but the Premium subscription does not strike me as an attractive option. In my opinion, you would do better to spend your $240 on one of the standard written courses to complement the comprehension drills provided by ChinesePod.

Personally, I would like to see ChinesePod continue and prosper so I hope that they will re-think the subscription schemes. In my view, there needs to be a major reduction in the price of the Premium subscription and, perhaps, the option of buying a paperback course book as an alternative to the PDF downloads. However, the core content - the podcasts - cannot be faulted. On the basis of these, I strongly recommend ChinesePod to students of the Chinese language.

Huw Collingbourne

January 2006