Along with the increasing internationalization of
the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business
market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin. As
one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod - the site he co-founded a year ago to
teach Mandarin over the Web. He told me that ChinesePod uses podcasting, RSS, blogging -
and other Web 2 technologies - to teach Mandarin Chinese, which he described as "an
emerging lingua franca".
Ken told me that ChinesePod has exploded in popularity over the past year - it's had approximately 10 million lesson downloads and currently occupies a prominent position in places like Yahoo Podcasts.
Visiting the ChinesePod site is a pleasure, as it is very well designed and a visual treat. And the business model is surprisingly simple - subscriptions to language-learning materials. This complements the free offerings - basically, the Mandarin podcasts - very nicely. For example, if you want to dive into learning Mandarin straight away: select one of the episodes, plus you can participate in the discussions. The first level subscription is called 'Basic' and gets you a PDF transcript of the podcast. If you want get really serious about learning Mandarin, sign up to the premium subscription service and receive learning resources such as Review Materials and Lesson Plans.
I think ChinesePod beautifully illustrates how you can run a small, niche - but successful and moneymaking - business on the Web. ChinesePod offers enough free material to make it worthwhile for the casual visitor, but offers real value too if you're willing to pay a subscription fee for tools and resources that help you learn Mandarin.
The community aspect of ChinesePod also shows what can be done with read/write Web technologies. Check out the Community page - which has a forum, wiki, blogs, photos, rss feeds. All the usual pieces, but what I like about it is that each has a practical purpose. The wiki has extra links and information, the forum is well-used by users, the photos are lovely (of China), and there are a lot of great rss feeds to choose from.
Unfortunately I don't have time to learn Mandarin right now, but if I did ChinesePod would be my first port of call.
Comments
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this was fun
Posted by: lemon obrien | November 21, 2006 3:23 PM
Love this site.
Thanks for profiling a (very) niche application. Measured by activity, many generalist sites would be envious of the activity and interactivity seen here.
Posted by: Sameer | November 21, 2006 6:27 PM
Do you think it's really a small niche?
Chinese learning is the actual boom! People all over the world are learning chinese, websites are created everyday.
A nice one, with online audio course, a dictionary and nice resources and forum:
http://www.chinese-tools.com
Ni hai bu hui shuo zhongwen ma?
Good luck!
Posted by: Learn Chinese | November 22, 2006 9:53 AM
Great site.
Mandarin is my mother tongue so I don't know what it's like to begin learning it in adulthood — the site seems great for teaching conversational speech if you already kinda know your way around the language (by giving you samples so you can learn the tones). But for your average Joe with absolutely no previous contact with the language, I do think it'll be almost impossible to reach even 10% fluency level without a writing/character/tone component factored in to the website (I imagine that'd be extraordinarily hard, it took us years in school).
Perhaps due to how this language is extremely difficult, if one has no grasp of tonal languages (each syllable has four possible sounds; each sound has thousands of possible meanings), listening to even the simlest podcasts might feel a bit like fumbling around in the dark.
That said, the concept was implemented brilliantly.
Posted by: popagandhi | November 22, 2006 9:58 AM
You might also be interested to see the site I've started-that teaches Egyptian hieroglyphs online:
http://www.glyphdoctors.com/
Posted by: Nicole Hansen | November 22, 2006 6:43 PM
Richard,
Thx for the supportive words.
Ken Carroll
Posted by: Ken Carroll | November 23, 2006 4:17 AM
Another point that you left out: for sites like CP, one of the best tools to advertise and get to their target audience, is to go after the popular bloggers. You are one.
Posted by: Gabriel | November 23, 2006 5:17 AM
VERY INTERESTING. I AM LOOKING FOR A KIND A OF ENGLISHPOD,SO MY KIDS LEARN PERFECT ENGLISH. I AM A LATINO AND WANT TO PERFECCIONATE MY ENGLISH,DO YOU KNOW A PLACE OR WEBSITE,THANKS
Posted by: guillermo serrano | November 26, 2006 6:32 PM
Guillermo,
try
http://www.ondemand-english.com/
Posted by: Laurent | January 4, 2007 7:10 AM