Ανακάλυψα τον ιστοχώρο σας Ιανουαρίου 2008, άρχισα από το μάθημα 1 και προσπάθησα να προφθάσω όσο το δυνατόν γρηγορότερα (μερικές φορές 4-5 ώρες ημερησίως) - και ακριβώς σήμερα είμαι εκεί, μάθημα 198!!! Κάνατε μια μεγάλη εργασία που αναφέρει τη μέθοδο (από να εξηγήσει στην αγγλική στροφή όλο και περισσότερο στα κινέζικα ή πώς επιλέγετε το νέο λεξιλόγιο και το επαναλαμβάνετε) και εσείς βρήκατε μια συμπαθητική ισορροπία της εξήγησης της γραμματικής ή παίρνετε ακριβώς μια έκφραση όπως είναι. Ξέρω, μπορεί να είναι δύσκολο, επειδή οι σπουδαστές θέλουν όλο και περισσότερο την εξήγηση, αλλά μερικές φορές κάνει την ουσία να περιπλέξει επίσης και γίνεται ένα εμπόδιο για την άνεση.

Τώρα είμαι πραγματικά ευτυχής, που βρήκα έναν τρόπο να συνεχίσω και να βελτιώσω τις δεξιότητές μου ακούσματος και ομιλίας. Συμπαθώ πραγματικά τα βίντεο και τους διαλόγους. Ξέρω, δεν ήταν αυτοί δύσκολοι για με, επειδή ξέρω οι περισσότεροι από τους χαρακτήρες από τον περασμένο χρόνο και πρέπει να πάρω τώρα την προσοχή, ότι δεν χάνω τη διαδρομή με τη νέα ουσία. Αλλά είστε μεγάλο motivator και έτσι φαίνομαι προς τα εμπρός μαθαίνοντας περισσότερων.

Ακούω συνήθως πρώτα το νέο μάθημα που βλέπει, πόσος καταλαβαίνω ακριβώς με το άκουσμα (επειδή είμαι αρκετά κακός στο «tingli» - μέρος στις hSK-ασκήσεις, αλλά είναι ένα τέτοιο καλό συναίσθημα, όταν ακούτε τους φυσικούς ομιλητές και καταλαβαίνετε πραγματικά, τι που μιλούν για!). Μετά από αυτό το πρώτο κυριώτερο σημείο ή την απογοήτευση Ι η τυπωμένη ύλη η απλουστευμένη έκδοση και περνά από το μιά φορά ή δύο φορές (bian bian kan κουδουνισμάτων), εξετάζει έπειτα τις σημειώσεις (συμπαθώ επίσης τις πολιτιστικές σημειώσεις) και πηγαίνει μερικές φορές στο τμήμα λεξιλογίου και επιλέγει μερικά exercices (σειρά των λέξεων!!) ή ακούστε εκεί μερικές χρονικές για (για με) νέες εκφράσεις να συνηθίσετε τους σωστούς τόνους. Επιτέλους πηγαίνω στις σελίδες ασφαλίστρου, ακούω το δεύτερο διάλογο και δοκιμάζω τις μεταφράσεις - πραγματικά ως τελευταία δοκιμή. Και έπειτα - απολαμβάνω το βίντεο (όταν εκεί is/was ένα - βλέπετε εγώ τους χάνετε).

Στο σύνολο λειτουργεί αρκετά καλά όπως αυτό. Αλλά ξέρετε το συναίσθημα στα σίγουρα: You always get the idea, that as soon as you “turn around” all chinese just falls out of your brain… I guess we are now on a level, where we understand quite a lot (above all when it’s written down - for me in simplified characters), but when it comes to talk and build our own sentences, it gets bad. So I need (!) the sentence-builder-exercises and translation-part to reassure myself.

I’m recommending your website to all my friends - there’s kind of a podcast hype starting in Switzerland and an increasing interest here in China’s language and culture. A really nice thing!

CLO is progressive so it helps reminding the bases and the written language (thanks to the new feature that teaches how to write the characters). It is also a real online “tutor”, and everyone knows that repetition is the only way to learn a foreign language with efficiency. I also use Chinesepod as a complement for spoken language. I think these two chinese podcasts should not be considered as competitors, but as complementary tools. I hadn’t spoken chinese for three years until I found your website. I am so happy to recover my former level and even more. Kirin is really a fantastic teacher (One on One). Thanks.

Hi Adam. Just a few words to tell you that I appreciate the New Characters feature. With the translation, the Test your pronunciation, the Sentence Builder, and the sound features all on the same page, it makes a very nice package. I also like the worksheet. Thanks for your nice work.

Just want to say you’re doing a wonderful job here!

I’ve lived in Beijing for a year, but since I’m back home last summer and started working, I didn’t find the time to study Chinese anymore. Thanks to your podcast I’m picking it up again.

Keep up the great work.

I checked out your site recently and saw the site was on level 3. I tried out the premium features and found them quite useful. Kirin and Rapheal are also fantastic. They speak very clearly. I’m listening to your podcast when I’m on the run, walking around town, on the MRT, Bus, etc.

I’m looking forward to level 4. I think you all did a wonderful job on the level three lessons. The audio is clear, the native speakers are excellent, and the content is VERY well managed. I really like the way that you alternate between dialogs (which you break down and slow down) and full conversations between Kirin and Raphael. The way you’ve slowly weaned out the English and explain everything in simple Chinese is wonderful. It’s really great to get a solid 10 minutes of Chinese without having to flip back into “English Mode” all the time. I’ve been recommending the podcast to everyone I know who’s trying to learn Chinese. In level four it would be great to see even more of that in the premium podcasts. For instance asking the listeners to give you a sentence with the opposite meaning of Chinese sentence, etc…

For the past couple of months I’ve just been listening to the 2 podcasts. I haven’t visited the site much. But that changed a couple weeks ago once I picked up an iPod Touch. I often hit the site while I’m waiting for the bus and read a quick couple of lessons. Great little gadget

(Comment in German):

Ich bin immer mehr von ChineseLearnOnline begeistert.

Inzwischen gibt es nicht nur den Podcast, den Dialog, den Dialog mit Nachsprechpausen, die Vokabelliste als Download, sondern auch PDFs (Englisch, Pinyin, Simp. und trad. Zeichentext, sowie Lerntips). Und natürlich Videos, Flashcards, Wordbank, Exercises. Momentan 172 Lektionen!

Das Lernen macht wirklich Spaß mit CLO! Und daß alles etwas mehr Taiwan-orientiert ist als bei ChinesePod (alles sehr VRC-orientiert und mit einer Vorliebe für die vereinfachten Zeichen), finde ich mehr als klasse! Super!

Im Gegensatz zu ChinesePod kann man hier Schritt für Schritt seine Kenntnisse aufbauen und braucht sich nicht mit den Schwierigkeiten und Lücken beim Sprung von einem Level zum nächsten (bei ChinesePod) herumquälen! Das empfinde ich als einen der größten Nachteile bei ChinesePod, neben dem ziemlich hohen Preis!

You can read the complete post (in German) here.

I’ve been following your Chinese course for several months now (I am on lesson 22)and I recommended it to other learners since it’s the most professional course I could find on the internet. The course is highly systematic and, at each step, motivating.

I really enjoy your way teaching Chinese. It’s so helpful to hear/read how you are breaking the sentences down and how you repeat words and phrases of former lessons etc. and I can see the difference from books and DVDs I had bought before I found your course: Your teaching method is worth the subscription fee!

Your website and podcast have been extremely helpful to me in my recent trips to China. I’ve become a premium subscriber because it’s been so useful. I’ve tried several other Chinese language resources,but have found yours to be the best.

I am a performer and I decided that since I would be spending so much time in China, it would be nice to learn some of the language. I thought it would be respectful to at least try, and based on my experience, the Chinese people love it when Americans try and speak their language. I managed to learn to speak 90% of my act in Mandarin.

Regarding your course, I am relatively new to it, and am only on lesson 17. I must confess that I skipped around a little to learn words that I knew I needed right away. But I am going back to make sure I have the previous lessons learned before I get too far ahead of myself. I like the approach of breaking down words to their roots. it has helped me with cab drivers, restaurant workers, store owners etc. One thing I found out by being in China and trying to get around, is that when I am shopping, shopkeepers will take out calculators to show you the price they are asking, and then I can take the calculator to make a counter offer. So learning all the numbers up to 1000 wasn’t as urgent to me as some other things. But you can only learn what it is you need to know by being in China, (or Taiwan). There is no substitute for jumping right in and trying to make yourself understood. After that, try to understand what people are saying to you, then try and understand what they are saying to each other. I had just started picking up things that people would say to me when I left. It was so much fun ! A cab driver told me my Chinese was very good, I was so happy to hear that, and understand what he said. A lot of the people in our group would ask me to go with them, because I could translate a little for them. I would also suggest to your listeners to try and learn a few phrases in the local dialect. When I said Thank You, Your Welcome, Hello and Good Bye in Shanghai Dialect, the people loved it ! It made feel good as well. A simple act of respect can go a long way.

I think the difficulty between lessons is OK. As in learning anything, practice, practice, practice. Without practice, it doesn’t matter how much or how little the difficulty increases, you won’t learn anything. I am fortunate in that I have been going to China, so I have a need and a place to speak what I learn. There is a Chinatown in Boston, near where I live, so I may go there to try and to speak some Chinese. ( I tried to speak Chinese to some people I’ve run into, but there are a lot of Vietnamese people around here, and I’ve embarrassed myself a few times. I can’t tell what part of Asia people are from by sight.) I will also be going back in February and May of next year. Hopefully I’ll be much further along in your excellent course.

I like your course because of the way the words are broken down to their roots. I like the fact that they are always broken down, even if you’ve already explained it 3 times in previous lessons. It’s hard to fall behind with your course. I like the way you explain which tones are being used. Like I mentioned, I’m a little hard of hearing, and I haven’t developed an ear for the tones yet, so for you to tell us which one it was is very helpful. You must be a very patient man to go over things so thoroughly. I like the support materials for premium subscribers. Again, I need to see the words, it helps me remember them. The practice exercises are helpful as well.

One thing that I do to help me learn is to have an imaginary conversation with someone, could be a bus driver, or a cab driver, store owner, person attending the festival and try to uses as many words as possible. That’s one way I discover what I haven’t learned yet, but need to know.

Keep up the good work. I think you’ve helped a lot of people learn what they once thought to be a difficult language.

…I think the podcasts are really good. The grammar explanations are well done, they give good attention to teaching proper tones, and the subject matter of the lessons is on par with what Chinese Pod covers. They certainly don’t cut any corners. And since the teachers aren’t all from just the mainland or just from Taiwan, listeners are exposed to the slight accent, vocabulary, and tonal differences they’re likely to encounter in their daily encounters with Chinese people from different areas of the world. That’s a big advantage that this site has over Chinese Pod because not everybody who speaks a given language speaks it with exactly the same accent. So the more exposure you get to different regional accents, the better your listening comprehension will be. You still won’t get as much exposure to as wide a range of [bad] Chinese accents as you’re likely to encounter in real life, but that’s actually a good thing; you don’t want to learn sloppy Chinese, anyway. It’s a difficult thing to achieve balance between exposing students to what they’ll encounter in real life and teaching them correctly, and they do a good job with it. It could potentially prove a bit confusing to beginners, but as long as they keep in mind that the differences are simply a matter of accent, they’ll be just fine…

You can read the complete review here.

I’ve been learning Chinese characters for a couple of years (after I learned Japanese for a while). Reading simplified characters is therefore relatively easy for me, but there is a big gap to my listening and speaking skills, incl. usage of grammar.

What I like most about Chinese Learn Online is really the English-to-Chinese practice, something others (incl. ChinesePod) don’t have enough of even though it is THE key skill I believe. The more is really the better here. I just feel the CLO approach is more organized, at least it helped me more.

The other good thing about Chinese Learn Online is the gradual phasing in of Chinese conversation into the lessons. I think you are doing it right. Example: For texts that I would easily understand from its written form (Simplified) but never if spoken, I get a chance to grasp the listening comprehension because you have both the natural and the slowed-down version. Other example: Lower-level lessons may be very easy for me if I read the text, but they are just the right level (short with very common words) to train my listening comprehension.

Bottom-line: I find multiple levels of CLO a good fit, depending on the focus I want to place.

Thank you! I tried a lot of Chinese learning programs before finding your site (ChinesePod, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone) but none of them really worked too well for me. Some went too slow, some went too fast, some just kept you stuck at the same level. CLO really teaches Chinese at a great pace, with short lessons, and progressively. I love that every week you can get better and better and never feel like the jump from one lesson to the next is too big.

So far, the premium services are great! I think if there’s one thing that the original podcasts lacked, it was an opportunity to practice producing the language, which the review podcasts and practice exercises do wonderfully.

My name is Anesia and I am a participant in Taiwan ICDF workshop on Community development and the Tourism Industry. Today, I’m writing to you to thank you for your site where one can learn chinese. A friend from St. Vincent introduced me to it while I was at home because I wanted to be able to say a few words in mandarin while here in Taiwan.

Well, I can truly say that your site has helped me. I don’t know a lot of chinese but my pronounciation seems to be spot on! At least, these are the comments I get from the Taiwanese every time I say something in Chinese. recently, each participant had to give a country report and I thought it would be a good idea to introuce myself-my name, say hello and my nationality in all 4 main languages represented among us: Mandarin, Spanish, French and English. I did it and was met with a big applause from the Taiwanese. Now, I know they are often happy to hear even just a small word in Mandarin but it was more than that for me. They told me on more than one occassions now that my pronounciation was very good and wanted to know where I had learnt Mandarin. I was happy to tell them about your site.

I’m so busy at work that I didn’t have alot of time to learn Mandarin from your site but I put alot of effort in when I did go through the lessons. So once again Adam, thank you! And may God continue to help you as you seek to help others develop their Mandarin speaking skills.

I think you have done a really great job on the site… In practical terms, the content is all really useful with no (overkill) unnecessary ‘extras’…. In terms of user-friendliness, the layout/presentation of the content is also well planned… I hope to make a lot of progress with my Chinese while I am with your site.

Thanks for doing this,

What you are doing right and the others aren’t is two fold.

First of all, you have a progressive series. A person can actually start from the beginning and work their way up to a conversational level. All the words are accounted for. You remind people of what is new and what has been covered already. You remind them in Chinese and use English sparingly.

This is the way that it should be done. After the initial stages, a language should be taught in the target language as much as possible.

The second thing – Lessons are introduced in Chinese. It isn’t until new words are introduced that English is heard. This puts the person in Chinese mode.

I stumbled upon this excellently programmed podcast back in Spring and I am ever so glad that I did, because I think it is one of the major reasons for my improved listening ability. One of the things I believe Stanford’s program doesn’t get right is the listening speed. We learnt grammar properly, vocabulary was good and we spoke about as fast as beginners at our level ought to, but we sucked at listening. This is because the teacher always spoke at a slower-than-normal speed which we could easily understand. In fact, when she sped up just a little bit, most of the class stopped understanding what she was saying. Also, when we heard our teacher talking with other native speakers, it felt so uncomfortably fast that it sounded like a whole other language. Basically, the course did not place enough emphasis on listening exercises.

This is where CLO excels because the best and most useful feature of the podcasts, I believe, is the 正常语速的对话 (dialogue at normal speed). The average podcast goes like this: conversation at normal speed (basically, fast), conversation at slowed down speed, conversation explained at slowed down speed. In the average podcast, I tend to grasp all the general meaning and 80-90% of the exact meaning during the 正常语速 section, and by the end of the 慢语速 (slow speed) section, I’ve usually grasped 100% of the exact meaning. Occasionally, I stop listening to the podcast at this point because the explanations are unnecessary. However, this proficiency is something that I have developed since June with CLO’s help. One of the key aspects of the dialogues in the podcasts is that each of them introduces only about three or four new words every lesson and this actually makes it possible for students to understand most of the content. Another is that all the explanation is done, as much as possible, using Chinese, and this has gradually increased as the course has progressed. For one, this makes the student feel better (or, cooler) and just immerses the student in a complete Chinese environment for a few minutes.

This course is a fabulous way to learn a language. Adam is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher who has used his computer programming skills to present an entertaining and reasonably priced course. He has truly leveraged the internet to present a variety of teaching aids, such as being able to choose translations, Chinese characters, or pinyin - with a mouse over effect of getting 2 of the 3 possibilities. So if you choose Chinese characters, placing the mouse over the characters will provide pinyin as a highlighted callout below the Chinese characters. This allows one to practice reading Chinese characters with a quick pinyin translation if you get stuck. Adam has thought of things that are important and made
adjustments to suggestions. One feature that I like is that one can easily increase the size of the Chinese characters. I also find useful the premium podcast reviews. I have tried other methods but this method is by far the best. I have even put the website on my cell phone!

Anyone considering learning Mandarin should seriously consider signing up for this course and becoming a premium subscriber.

There are many good books, CDs, and websites out there that teach Mandarin but this course beats them all.

The founder of the website, Adam Menon genuinely wants to help people learn Chinese. Since Adam is a non-native Chinese speaker, he has an appreciation of the problems non-native speakers of Chinese have in trying to learn Chinese. I feel his teaching methods are more appropriate that say a Chinese academic who decides to write a book on how to learn Chinese. What may seem obvious to us in our own language may not be so obvious for a foreign person trying to learn our language.

The course is aimed at absolute beginners to intermediate level speakers. As the weeks pass the material of the later lessons on the site will gradually increase in difficulty and eventually it will include material for more advanced speakers.

Structure of the course

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At the time of writing, the course consists of 132 lessons divided into 3 levels with 60 lessons in each level. The course is currently on the 12th lesson of level three.

There is over 27 hours of downloadable audio lessons currently available to premium subscribers and around 40 minutes of new audio is added every week! Three new lessons are provided every week with each lesson lasting on average for about 10 minutes. Premium subscribers also get lesson summaries which are the Chinese parts of the lesson without the English explanations. They also get supplementary audio material which consists of further examples of word usage in different context and question and answer sessions which make you actively think more about what you are learning rather than just passively listening to it.

Teaching method.

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The teaching methods used in this course are very effective and are superior to learning from books and CDs. One problem with learning from a book and CD is that the lessons are often too long. It is very discouraging to realise you have to get through 20 pages to finish 1 lesson. Books usually provide you with a few short texts which are covered but not explained on the CD. It is very frustrating to try to keep up with the audio while flicking back and forth through pages a book. Books also provide you with a long list of supplementary words that are not covered in the CDs and sometimes these words don’t appear anywhere else in the book. One of the biggest problems with learning from books is that they confuse you with strict grammar rules and technical linguistic terms that require you to have a PhD in linguistics to understand them.

This course gets around these problems brilliantly. Since the lessons are short, learning never becomes a chore. The material is wide and varied and never becomes dull like the predictable stories of students in a university that most books use as their lesson topics. Each lesson will provide you with around 5 new words or phrases, so you are not overburdened with long lists of vocabulary. Words used in earlier lessons are repeatedly used in later lessons. It is this continual usage of words that allows you to memorize them and learn them by heart. Adam gives the translations and explanation in each course and he uses native Mandarin speakers such as Kirin for the Chinese Dialogue. Kirin has one of the clearest voices I have every heard. Since you can clearly hear everything she says this helps enormously. Other native Chinese speakers from various parts of China are also used in the lessons. Some speakers are easier to understand than others, but that is life. Adam is trying to get the listeners to cope with the different dialects that they will hear, so it is a great feature of the course.

The course does cover some grammar where necessary, but the main philosophy of the course is to teach listeners to develop an instinctive feel for when something sounds right or wrong. This can only be done by repetitive listening and using words in context. That is how we learned our own language from being very young. We can all understand, speak and write our own language, but not many of us could write down the grammar rules of our language. The fact is that when speaking and listening in any language, you just don’t have time to apply grammar rules. We need to learn Chinese words to a level where we know their meaning without converting it into our own language. If we find that when we are communicating in Chinese and we are translating what is said in our heads into English, then that is too slow and we would miss most of the conversation.

All the audio lessons and premium lessons are downloadable to an iPod or similar device, so you can listen to them anywhere and anytime you want. If you have a 5th generation iPod, you can also include the pinyin, simplified and traditional characters as the lyrics and you can view them as you listen to them on your iPod. It is considerably better than struggling with a book and CD!

Other material and resources

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The course also provides a plethora of material for premium subscribers.

1. Premium subscribers can view and print the full lesson transcripts, lesson dialogue and lesson summaries in English, Pinyin, Simplified characters and Traditional characters! This is brilliant. I don’t know any other course that provides this amount of supplementary material in all four formats.

2. A searchable word bank containing all the words and phrases from all the lessons. Again this can be viewed in English, pinyin, simplified and traditional characters. The databank can be searched in many ways including type, so if you search for hotel, you will get all the words and phrases related to hotels, such as booking a room etc.

3. A very useful on-line flash card system so you can test your pinyin, Chinese character recognition and listening skills.

4. Some lessons are accompanied with short videos

5. Pong Audio forum which allows you to record your voice and improve you Chinese pronunciation.

Summary

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You can spend a lot more money than it would cost to subscribe to this course on a much inferior course. The premium subscription is worth it for the pinyin and Chinese character lesson transcripts alone. When you include the many other resources such as the word bank, flashcard system and premium pod casts then it is an absolute bargain. If you are not sure whether to subscribe or not, then you can tryout all the premium content for the first 4 lessons of each level for free.

This is a progressive course in many ways. There is an increase of difficulty from one level to the next, as each level uses more Chinese. However at no time do you ever feel lost. Every single new word is explained and reused in later lessons. Since the lessons are of good quality, short and varied, you will want to listen to them again and again.

The course is also progressive as hardly a week goes by without a tweak, to an existing feature or an addition of a new feature which make the course even better.

Dear Fellow Mandarin Chinese Students, I am a US businessman studying Mandarin Chinese. I
highly recommend Chinese Learn Online. I tried several online Mandarin Chinese courses. I found Chinese Learn Online to be by far the best. This podcast will help you learn Chinese quickly and efficiently.

Your website is not my only source for learning Chinese, but I find it very, very useful. I like the structured approach because it is reassuring and my progress sn more or less measurable. And I am confident that by sticking with your program my Chinese will get better all the time. You do a great job and I am learning a lot with your lessons.

I’m sure you’re a busy guy so I don’t want to take up too much of your time… but I did want to say how impressed I am as I explore your website. I am a recent arrivee in Nanjing, where I hope to spend the rest of my life!! I’ve been here six weeks, will be in Nanjing teaching for at least this coming school year, and I love the Chinese people… but I don’t know more than two or three words of Chinese! So I’ve been looking for a self-teaching program and have explored Pimsleur, Interactive Chinese from Sinolingua, New Approaches to Learning Chinese, etc. and just didn’t find them practical as primary resource. I really like your approach and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of all your resources and “gettin’ with the program!”

Thanks for your efforts… I can tell you’re working hard at this!

I decided to start learning Chinese about 11 months ago. I’m doing it mostly for fun and personal satisfaction. I find the culture and language very interesting and would love to be able to take a trip some day. I would like to eventually be fluent, so I will keep on truckin’. Until the last few weeks, I have mostly concentrated on listening and speaking but now have the bug to start working on the characters and have started learning them.

I have noticed that you’re often quick to implement nice changes in functionality on your site and also that you seem to be methodically keeping a database of what words are used in what lessons so as to point out to the user where to go for earlier lessons. I’ve been quite busy lately, so mostly I’ve just been listening to your podcasts (both regular and review/premium) on my commute. It will be interesting to see how far you can take this progression. Will I someday be hearing you say, “Welcome to Lesson 987″?

It’s nice to see all of the improvements you keep making to the site and the course itself. I hope you’ll keep up the good work and I look forward to trying out some of the newer features.

Hi guys. I’m subscribed to your course and making good progress. I congratulate you highly on this course. I’ve studied many languages in many ways, and I think you have a very effective product here. I can learn Chinese from this!!

I’ve been working onwards in your course, and I studied up to about lesson 90 in detail. Not that I remember all of the
content of course, but I found that by pushing on forwards, things that had come up before that I didn’t remember too well at first came up again, and so were easier to remember.

As I said before, I think it is an excellent course, and I saw that you made it better and better as you went along. Thanks again for your great work on the course.

Wow� such a great way to learn mandarin.

I have been taking a formal Mandarin class for a few months, and I am currently using your course as an add-on to my formal Mandarin class. And I have found that your program really helps me a great deal.� I am learning faster than ever!

1. I have found that the best way to learn a new language fast is to focus on listening and speaking. While my formal class focuses on speaking and writing, your podcast program really helps me with my listening skills. It�s a really great combination.

2. Your being very systematic and organized really makes it easy to follow through the lessons.
* The way you structure your class is excellent!�� I really like the way you gradually build up the dialogue from class to class. (This is infact, the main reason I subscribe to your site.) As such, listening to a phrase or a conversation (over and over and over again) makes me remember a new vocab better than remembering a word without a context or just reading the books. I usually listen to each class more than once just to get the phrases into my head.
* Also I appreciate you trying to show us different accents and phrases from each region. (e.g�Taiwan..vs.. mainland.). Its very useful.
* Also, your website is easy to navigate and very simple and clean. (There is no need to fancy it up. Simplicity sells.)
* SO Please continue to be simple, organized�. and effective!

Thank you again for such a wonderful job. I really appreciate your efforts. You really make my learning experience a lot nicer. Keep up the good work!

Chinese Learn Online ROCKS!

I am really enjoying the course and find it very helpful.

It’s a great idea. Here in the UK, it’s difficult to hear Mandarin Chinese spoken if you don’t know Chinese people personally. I am currently enrolled on a Mandarin Chinese course but find it is very book-centred. Writing and reading (pinyin and characters) is not too hard for ‘visual’ learners like myself but if you need practice in hearing the language, Chinese Learn Online is just ideal. Thank you very much for your efforts.

I am back from China! It was a very surprising and intensive experience. Thanks to you I was able to chat with chinese people, and also and very important, to bargain in the beautiful and colorful markets. No doubt I will renovate my Premium subscription to your site so I will be able to freely talk in my next visit to China.

I first sampled this site by listening and learning through the non-premium feeds, and i learnt so much just through that, now i am premium subscriber, my learning has now rocketed. Your user friendly and cheerful mid lesson banter adds a more approachable feeling to learning, making a difficult language not such daunting task to do.

After checking out the first 2-3 lessons, i developed an instant interest in what your site has to offer, i then sampled more of the non-premium lessons, then finally decided to apply for the premium package, so i consider myself lucky that i found a perfect learning site without having to wade through any other sites that could knock my interest back a few steps with excessively difficult high tier business level learning.

In terms of directing the course better, i have no issues at all with your lessons, you come across as easy going and friendly towards the listener, and add different speakers to the courses, while covering topics are easily applicable to everyday friendly chit chat to friends or even strangers, thus giving us listeners more confidence, because if you was to ever to get me to speak a word in chinese to anyone, chances where id make you wait about 2 hours so i can overcome my embaressment before muttering a few words under my breath, now after your course, i feel more confident and have shown my competence thus far to my chinese friends, and they all seem pretty impressed, i also showed your site to them, and they also believe your site could render an opposite course effect by helping chinese speakers learn english also, maybe thats another intention you have, maybe not, but either way, its very clever of you. My kindest gratitude to all on the team for this superb course.

I think your course is well organised and is great for beginners as well as more advanced. I’ve only listened to about 30 lessons so far. I like that at any time I can review lessons. It’s also great to be listening to native speakers. Unfortunately there is no short cut to learning a new language especially when it comes to tonal Asian languages. Conversation context is great.

Seeing the pinyin makes a big difference. I like to picture it in my head when composing sentences and having the tones works helps a lot. Your product is great! Especially now I can visualise the tones. Your voice is pleasant, calm and relaxed so that it doesn’t get annoying if its playing in the background.

Thanks for making this available. You guys are doing a great job. I hardly use my iPod for music anymore

I am very fond of your site and your online course. The podcasts are top notch and I listen to them every day. The website is also very well done. I will be a long-time user/listener and feel that Adam and Kirin are personal mentors of mine.

I like diversity of cultures and for me learning Chinese gives me a chance to explore China’s culture. I plan to learn as much as I can over the next year as a basis for travelling to China some time in the future. The calligraphy is also something that draws me to the language. When you had said that you had started to pick it up 3 years ago then that gave me hope I can be fluent in Chinese, too. Keep up the great work!

By the way, I was born in the year of the pig and I intend to learn and advance my Mandarin this year with your help. Xiexie.

I am travelling to China in April and I absolutely love this course - I am up to lesson 50 and am learning so much so quickly, I have never had this much success learning a new language

My wife and I have used several online Mandarin teaching sites. For us, Chinese Learn Online is the most comprehensive, user friendly and effective. The content, pacing, review, and reinforcement are superior, and we feel like we’re in a class with an instructor who really cares about our success. We have enjoyed the podcasts and lessons so much that we’ll continue when we return from China. That’s about the best feedback you can get.

WOW, so much to learn, and it goes so quickly! I’ve always wanted to learn Chinese and visit China, but I thought of it as a long term goal. Your podcast convinces me that I can do it sooner. Great structure and content! I look forward to each lesson and to using the premium membership to reinforce the podcasts. Thanks!

I love this site! I love this site! I can’t believe I’ve never known about you guys. Great lessons; I found exactly what I was searching for in lesson four, and I think I might have found something I wasn’t necessarily searching for: effective and easy-to-use lessons for learning Mandarin. I’ve tried audio CD’s before, but your method of mixing the audio with Pinyin is perfect. That was the missing link. I couldn’t see what the word was supposed to sound like, so I was always insecure about my pronounciation. But not anymore. I think I’m hooked!

My name is Araken and I am a student of Chinese Mandarin and also a Linguist. Congratulations for your excellent Course. The materials are firstclass! …My interest for Mandarin Chinese increases as I study it persistently. A friend of mine indicated your site and I immediately became interested. Your methodology is quite comprehensive and it includes important linguistic aspects of modern teaching. Please accept again my congratulations for your respectable efforts in helping people learn mandarin.

I’ve listened to most of the Mandarin language podcasts since they began emerging on the new media scene, and the good news is that they all have something to offer to the Mandarin language learning community. Being a part of this community, I appreciate the fact that choice among content providers is a good thing for all of us to have. When it comes to the Mandarin language, itself, like any language, it’s made up of the same words regardless of who is teaching it. Of course, which teaching methodology you prefer will depend upon your learning style. After more than a year of listening and searching, I’ve found the methodology that works best for my learning style at CLO (Chinese Learning Online). Here are some of the reasons why:

– Overcoming the Gap with Progressive Lessons. Each CLO lesson is a continuing buildup from the preceding lesson and a preparation for the next lesson. There are no sudden gaps between lessons or chasms between levels. If on the other hand, you expect to stay comfortably and indefinitely at the same level, then CLO won’t let you. Discrete and isolated lessons and levels are not to be found at CLO. There’s just one continuous progression upwards.

– Lesson Roadmap. Each lesson is summarized on a lesson outline, and this serves as a roadmap to show you exactly where you are in the progression of lessons. With this roadmap in hand, you don’t have the sense of aimlessly wandering around from one disjointed lesson to the next. You can start at the beginning if you’re completely new to Mandarin, or you can easily trace the lesson outline to find the starting point that’s most appropriate to your level.

– Full Transcripts. CLO provides full transcripts of all their lessons. As lessons progress to more advanced levels, and an increasing amount of Mandarin is spoken throughout the lesson (and not just in the prepared dialogues), the value of having a full transcript with translations at hand will prove to be tremendous. In addition to the full transcript, there’s a more summarized version of the transcript, which provides the lesson dialogue, vocabulary, and additional study material. What CLO gives away for free on their website is about what other sites provide on a premium subscription basis. What CLO offers on a premium subscription basis – such as the full, complete transcript – is something that you can’t even get on some other sites.

– Active Participation. While the podcasts on some other sites make you a passive listener, CLO offers you more opportunity to actively practice while you listen. Most of us learn better by actively practicing rather than by just passively listening.

– Premium Tools. The premium online tools are simple to use, are well integrated with the lessons, and offer additional opportunities to practice what you’ve learned in order to develop stronger communication skills and retention.

– Video Lesson Dialogues. CLO provides a video of the dialogues for many of the lessons. Though the videos are quite simple in their production, I find that seeing the Mandarin speakers and their natural body language, after having listened to the corresponding lesson, helps me to understand the language and the culture at a deeper, perhaps more intuitive level.

– Extra Features. There are also many other extras, such as lesson notes and hints & tips for each lesson. New online tools and additional features seem to appear all the time.

– Responsiveness. CLO is truly responsive to listener feedback in a way that I haven’t experienced at other sites.

– Reasonable Price. The price of CLO’s subscription is about half of what some other major sites charge, though the overall methodology is more effective. For me, this made subscribing to CLO a no-brainer.

I’ve summarized some of the key reasons why I not only listen to CLO’s podcasts but decided to support it with a premium subscription. I haven’t really tried to provide an all-inclusive list, so I’m sure that I’ve left out many other good reasons for doing so. But I hope that, if nothing else, I’ve been able to point out how the Mandarin language learning community has been enriched by having this new podcaster enter the world of the virtual, online classroom.

好好学习 (Hǎo Hǎo Xuéxí) !

I started listening to your podcast when you first started, maybe a week or two behind. I just returned from China. Your lessons helped a lot. I gave listened to a lot of Chinese lessons and I really like yours. I like the way you describe each individual words with literal translations. I did not realize you just started learning 3 years ago until today when I heard the lesson. What I like about your lessons is your precise, deliberate pronunciation of each word.

Your site has lot’s of toys that I like. I love the way you move the cursor over the words and it translates. I also enjoy the notes in the lyrics section of each pod cast. I really like your approach to learning Chinese. I usually download then convert to CD’s then listen to them in my car. I put all the reviews on one CD and listened to just the reviews for almost a week. Now I have the “hot setup”. I have made CD’s now that have lesson then the review. This is a nice collection. I listen to a lesson and review follows. I have 8 CD’s so far and I don’t think it includes any lesson this week. What a great learning set. I think this 8 CD set would retail for $100 easy! I have bought Commercial CD’s that I have spent a lot of money on that aren’t half as good as your course.

There are several native speaking courses out there, but I choose yours as my favorite. I also love the literal translations which helps as a building block for learning. It’s like the light comes on when you describe the new words. With you being a native English speaker, you understand how hard and confusing their language can be.

I have been enjoying your podcasts. Well done lessons! I have been enjoying the lessons with your company as a way to prepare myself for my next trip back in October. My wife and daughter will be making a trip in the Spring so my wife has been using the lessons to prepare her more for that upcoming trip. So, thank you for the podcasts and the good job of presentation.

As a former language educator, I can see many strong commitments in your lessons to your theory of how second languages are learned in adults. Reaching the learner with contextualized and i+1 content is very important, as I am sure you know… your lessons do a good job on the comprehensible input side of things. It is usually up to the teacher to show the learners the theory of language learning that they, the teachers, believe is best. Actually, you do this already on your podcasts when you explain how the lesson will build on past lessons while introducing some new things to mix in with the old. This is a very i+1 approach… You also have shown that you believe there is variability in language use and that a second language learner needs to be aware of that variability. This is evident in your explaining about the different ways to say the same phrase depending on the area in China of the speaker…

I find that your podcasts are very accessible to me as I have encountered most of the vocabulary many times before. I enjoy the lessons very much because they aren’t a great reach for me. I find because of that I have more attention to work on my tones, which are admittedly very bad.

I think Chinese Learn Online is definitely one of the better programs out there. It is a gradual course which takes the learner from total beginner with no previous knowledge, and builds up from there. I used several of the podcasts for a Conversational Chinese course that I taught at our local junior college, and the response from the students was very positive. The methodology is very sound, and the real advantage is that students are not overwhelmed in the beginning, nor are they permanently stuck in a lower level. There’s plenty of review to consolidate what was previously learned, and enough new material to make steady progress.

I really like the variety of speakers, voices and accents, and they don’t speak too quickly for the beginning learner. And providing the free pinyin on the website is a nice feature which nobody else is offering as far as I can tell! I’ll continue to recommend this to my students and to anybody who is interested in learning Chinese. Keep up the great work!

In preparation for a trip overseas, I looked around for months trying to find a podcast/website that would help me learn Mandarin. So many were complicated to navigate or had really boring lesson plans. Some podcasts had audio that was not clear or were chanted by dull teachers. Some are just lists of vocabulary or phrases that you memorize, without context. A lot of bad teaching. I had almost given up and then found Chinese Learn Online. What a difference! The lessons are brief, memorable and logically arranged. The audio is clear and the narration friendly and very informative. The amount covered in each lesson is just right for an adult who wants to learn at his/her own pace. The teachers are very responsive to suggestions and to questions about the lesson content. The website design is very clean and crisp and easy to navigate.

I strongly suggest that new learners sign up for the very reasonable Premium content. By downloading the lessons you can always have your studies at hand and the podcast notes are great. Obviously I’m a happy customer and recommend the site to all Chinese learners. For me, the pace of the programs is really fine: they move along quickly enough to keep me thinking “forward” and pushing my concentration, but also with explanations in English, sidenotes, points of interest, etc., that give me chance to breathe let the ideas sink in.

Although I continue to listen to a couple of other podcasts of Chinese learning (and especially to study with a book I found), your podcast series is the centerpiece of my Chinese study. When there is only time to listen to one program, it is yours I go to.

I truly support your site and think you have something great here. Keep up the good work… What I think is most valuable from each lesson is the Complete transcript and the Premium transcript… If I could only have one resource for learning Chinese I would pick your site. I think you have the correct blend of audio and visual information for aiding retention of the lessons… The mouse-over capability is a big plus… that is one of the features of your site that I like.

Thorough explanation of each new word as it arrives in each lesson. Emphasis on, ’see and hear’ , motivation tips, hints, cultural backround. Lesson notes etc. Emphasis on tones, which aids listening and pronunciation. Literal translation of dialogue, which helps with grasping grammar and aids memory. Creative combinations of new words and phrases (for a beginner), which reinforces lessons. What has pleasantly surprised me is the ability to use of your site for each lesson. You are well postioned to become a real choice for learning Chinese… Your web site is real value for money… The biggest compliment I can give is that I am on your website and using it fully.

I think your Chinese lessons are fantastic. I am learning a lot listening to it spoken and the written form that goes with it helps as well because what you think your hearing is not necessarily right. The two together work really well. I love it.