The Death of ChinesePod

Chinese pod (http://chinesepod.com/)

Introduction

Chinese Pod is fun way of improving your "street-level" chinese listening. The banter-prone personalities are strong and you will probably love them or hate them (think morning radio). They range from the funny, intelligent and witty (John and Jenny) to the conceited, condescending and very annoying (Amber and Kenny). Until recently chinese pod was innovative because its base service was free of charge with the frilly features coming at a monthly rate. Accordingly CP garnered a small cult following and a regular base of lurkers and part-time users.

The changes

As of this week, years of free content will be stripped, new content will be pay only and the lesson community will be skinned to pay users only. A bloody big neo-liberal stick, PAY OR GET OUT, basically. Fair enough, it's their show and many of the hardcord users have rushed to CPod's defence and pointed to the "new content", the little carrots down the road. Videos, Iphone and all that jazz.

The cost/value

"This is not greedy! good business sense! Its only the cost of a cup of coffee every day (or however you want to dice it)!" The price deals range from Us$9 a month to $2999 (!) for 24 months. The first month where you can gather/access all the previous lessons is of course good value, although you could do this through their trial or download under creative commons.

But for me and possibly a lot of other people, I only have real interest in the upper-intermediate lessons, none of the other crap future or present. This level has around 10 lessons or so a month. running at around 10-15 minutes long each...so maybe 1.5 hours of total material for the month..for $US9...still good value? It depends on your usage i guess. But for casual/supplementary users who demand good value for what they want, watching chinese tv or following a 汉语口语 textbook seems like a better, cheaper alternative. I mean, how much should you expect to pay for banter?

Faulty business model

For me, word-of-mouth credibly, long-term lurker fans who come into the tent and a brillant community (stars member are being paid off with free membership) was the bedrocks for CP's booming success. How did it survive so well for 3 friggen years? There seems to be this blind push to EXPAND, DEVELOP THE BUSINESS and GIVE PAID USERS BETTER VALUE. But banning free-users is not going to improve the pod service and business expansion doesn't always work. The expansion is also based on the shaky premise that free users, when forced, will sign up with their credit cards. I would rather voluntarily pay than be force to pay, simple as that. Plus, i would never have heard about chinese pod, through my listening teacher, if it had not been free in the first place . I honestly believe in the previously-free-model as a way to make money. Furthermore, for me the site has great bread-and-butter pods, but the new video and grammar stuff is out of CP's niche and not interesting enough to warrant me coughing up more money.

Zhejiang university VS Mandarin capital

Mandarin Capital (http://www.mandarincapital.cn/)

Overview

Teaching Quality: Variable but the degree of flexible enables you to do things your way: any time, any teacher and any method you like.

Cost: A little bit expensive but when you do the math it is MUCH better value than Zheda, the accommodation isnt crash hot, but finding a place in china for 1500 (zheda rate) should be easy

-------------------------------VS---------------------------------

Zhejiang University Chinese Studies (http://www.zju.edu.cn/english)

Overview

Teaching Quality: variable, class sizes too big, only good for grammar and some listening (things you should be able to study at home), speaking will need to be developed elsewhere.

Cost: Relatively cheap, but not good value for money 9,000 semester, accommodation RMB1,500 for a piece of crap, the party-hardy environment is the upside (i guess).

--------------------------------THE TALE--------------------------


I spent one semester at Zhejiang language school learning at a 3.5 level (whatever the hell that means) and i was royally unimpressed.

Why? :

1) Reading, Grammar, specking, listening must all be taken at the same level (level 3 for me)

So while i breezed through reading and grammar, listening was WAYYYY above my head (class size shrunk to 2 people from 20 because it was so fucking hard). Other chinese universities have more flexibility here and this unevenness didnt correct itself.

2) Class sizes too big and full of deadbeats

By deadbeats i mean people who mostly miss class, don't try, talk in class and generally pull everyone else down to deadbeat town. It is true large unis complete with student campuses are going to be full of party animals who think they are on holidays. The serious should stay away unless they are endowed with spartin like dedication.

Classes ranged from 12 to 20+ people, not good value for money! On the class size, during speaking class you for example will perhaps say 1 or 2 things (probably from the text book).

3) Quality is uneven

Some teachers are bad, some good, there is no flexibility to escape the bad ones. My reading teacher would simply enter tell people to read and then not speak again until the end of the lesson .

Soooooooooooooo im out of here then.

But wait the new visa system prevents me from trying out smaller schools because they are considered 'businesses'. Its a racket because zhejiang wayyyy overcharges and is the only game in town to offer student visas. I dont know if this has something to do with the olympics or no.

Enter Mandarin Capital: I pick the teachers, i pick the course content and I pick the times. One on one tutoring 10 hours a week = 3000 (you'll need to fight for this rate), zhejiang was about 9000 for 3-4 months (admittedly more hours, 15ish, but half of them were a waste). I now around spend 1.5 hours a day fixing all the tonal errors that i have when i speak fast.

But it hinges on this places ability to get me a student visa (otherwise back to Zheda I go).

Ill expand some more later when the visa thing goes down.

The blog is born

This is my first blog. I have not told any friends or family, i hope for it to float freely around cyber space. It is partly therapeutic and partly as a guide to others wanting to navigate the chinese experience. I hope someone finds it useful.

Chris