ChinesePod Review

Reviewer: Tony Chen

Rating:

Website Reviewed: ChinesePod

ChinesePod is probably one of the most popular online Chinese Lesson now. I saw their ads at a lot of places on the internet but I’d never paid attention to it. Until a month ago two of my former students bought this course and asked me about my opinion of ChinesePod. I then had a chance to closely look at the inside of this course. I’m going to share my opinion in this ChinesePod Review.   

Click here to view the ChinesePod Lessons

ChinesePod is an online course, you have to login your account on their website to access the lessons. Right now there are more than 1’300 lessons at ChinesePod and it’s still growing daily. The site offers you a very organized lesson that you can follow through. The main concept of ChinesePod course is to listen to the audios and follow to speak from each of the lesson. This is nothing new, but they provide some other features which make them stand out of other online Chinese lessons.  

 

There are five levels of at ChinesePod, Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced. Each lesson is focus on the useful language that native Chinese always use in their daily life. The length of each lesson is about 10-15 minutes. Every lesson will teaches you dialogues and vocabularies about a topic and also provide exercise for you to reinforce. In the expansion tab, it tells you how you can use the words in different situation and sentences. This is something I think it’s very helpful.  

 

They also offer a lot of options for you to listen to the audios. You can listen to the audio online while you are working on the lesson. And you can also download the audios to listen to offline. There are options of audio format you can choose. You can download the audios Full Lesson in radio quality and CD quality. You also can download the Lesson Dialogue and Audio Reviews in MP3 format. The transcripts of the audios are also available as PDF files. You can choose to download the simple Chinese version or traditional Chinese version. 

  

The main hosts of ChinesePod lessons are Jenny Zhu, Ken Carroll and John Padsen. Jenny is a native Chinese who is co-host with Ken for lower level courses and with John for advanced courses. In lower level lessons Jenny speaks in a slow speed. It’s slow enough for newbie to notice the difference of tones. There will be a lot of English explanations for in the lower level lessons. As the level going up Jenny will speak faster and less English in the instruction. 

There is also a discussion area that people can ask questions and give comments about the lessons. Questions will be answered by other members and the teaching teams. Jenny also participant in to answer questions herself quit often. 

This is a monthly subscription course. The price is from $14/month - $199/month. The basic plan is $14/month with the access of all the audio lessons and transcript. As you choose different course the price goes up the course gives you more features. With some of the course you can have the conversation with the teacher from ChinesePod on phone. And some plan will even give you class on skype with teachers. For more details you can click the link below to visit ChinesePod.

Click here to view ChinesePod Lessons