Popup Chinese Is The New ChinesePod

I've been listening to a new chinese podcast course lately, and it's called Popup Chinese. Although I had always been a big fan of Chinesepod, I didn't like the fact that only their newbie lessons were available on iTunes. To access the other lessons on the site, you have to signup to their site first. Popup Chinese doesn't do that. Instead, all their podcasts are available for free. You do have to pay for the supplementary materials, but that's ok.

Compared to Chinesepod, the difficulty of the lessons is a notch above. The hosts only repeat a sentence from the dialog once, which is good in the sense that it really forces your listening comprehension skills to improve. The dialogs are short and sweet and they cover a wide variety of different topics. This allows Popup Chinese to cover many different grammar points and introduce their learners to some varied vocabulary. Overall, I am very impressed with the site and I recommend that any chinese learner check it out.

My Top 3 Reasons To Join ChinesePod

Listening to chinese lessons on a music player is a really nice way to help you learn the language. It helps with your listening comprehension and will improve your ability to have conversations in mandarin with other chinese speakers. One of the best places to find chinese lessons on the net is a site called ChinesePod. ChinesePod is produced in Shanghai and they offer audio lessons for every level of chinese learner. Whether you have just started studying Chinese or are looking for more practice, ChinesePod can definitely help you out. Here are the top three reasons why I love listening to ChinesePod.

1) Lessons are short but practical. Between work and other things, I don't normally have the free time to listen to a half-hour or hour long lesson every day. ChinesePod lessons are all about 15-20 minutes long which enables me to listen to a lesson on my way to work or while I'm riding on the subway. For someone with as short an attention span as I do, this is great.

2) The hosts have great chemistry together. I enjoy the back and forth between Jenny and Ken. Jenny and John are also great as well. Each of the hosts have their different strengths and they really play well off each other. Nothing would kill a show faster than bad chemistry and thankfully ChinesePod doesn't suffer from any of these issues.

3) Never run out of lessons to listen to. There are currently over one thousand lessons in the ChinesePod archives and new lessons are added every day. Getting new lessons is as easy as subscribing to the ChinesePod feed in iTunes and having lessons synced to your iPod. You're never moments away from learning something new.

I hope this peaks your interest in signing up for ChinesePod. Newbie lessons are available for absolutely free. To access the other levels, you do have to pay a small subscription fee. However, before you do, check out their 7 day free trial. You don't have to give out your credit card, and the full featured trial will give you a taste of the ChinesePod experience. You can check out my full ChinesePod review here.