I’m coming up to the 10 month mark of my study of Mandarin Chinese using ChinesePod. I had 2 goals when I signed up for ChinesePod last January:

#1- To learn as much Chinese as I could in one year.

#2- To assess the effectiveness of the ChinesePod instructional design and delivery model (podcasting, e-learning, social networking, personalization).

Here is the short answer: I have learned a lot of Chinese, and the ChinesePod model is very effective.

Here is what has worked for me:

Continuous and flexible learning: I made a commitment to listen to at least one ChinesePod newbie/elementary podcast every day. Each podcast clocks in at around 10 minutes or so. I figured that I could find at least 10 minutes per day to listen to the podcast, and I believed that my comprehension of Chinese would increase greatly if I could keep this comittment. Aside from a bit of slacking during the summer months of July and August, I have been able to keep this commitment. Ken and Jenny (my podcast teachers) have become part of my daily life. I listen to the podcast on the subway going to the office, when I have a break at work, when I’m on a flight to visit an out-of-town client, when I’m doing the dishes at home, when I’m shaving, whenever I have 10 extra minutes. Continuous and flexible learning, even if only 10 minutes per day, has given me better results than I achieved in 2 previous attempts to learn Chinese in a classroom setting.

Personalized learning ChinesePod offers a “My Feed” option which enables me to select which podcasts I want to receive on a daily basis. I can choose from nearly 700 available podcasts, and I can tailor my learning schedule in a way that suits my own personal learning needs. This is “Just want I want” learning. I do not have to sit through an entire course or complete an entire online module, if only parts of it are relevant to my own needs. Rather, ChinesePod provides learning content in a self service fashion, and provides tools that help me to organize learning content into a personal learning playlist.

I am aiming for 1 year of continuous study of Mandarin. At the end of this period I will be able to make some solid observations about what it means to be a Web 2.0 learner. What will happen at the end of the year? Perhaps I will continue with ChinesePod and work to be an intermediate/advanced speaker of Mandarin Chinese. Or perhaps it will be time for Spanish at Spanish Sense (brought to us by the producers of ChinesePod).