the SpanishSense Blog

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

XS2China: Communicating in a Mobile World
2007-11-13 02:45:00
ChinesePod users understand that learning Chinese is a fun and rewarding challenge. But what if you need to speak Chinese, like now? And you haven’t learned it at all yet? And the taxi driver is waiting for you to tell him where to go, in Chinese? While in Amsterdam, co-founder and CEO Hank ran into some people who created a very interesting high-tech solution to that problem. It’s called XS2China. You download the app, and your mobile device does the talking for you. Check out this video: Now, we at Praxis still think that learning the language is the best way to go, but in certain situations, XS2China’s solution is very attractive. It knows place names, common phrases, and even pickup lines. (It’s kind of scary to imagine that your mobile device could get you a date… and then maybe even do all the talking for you on the date as well??) Anyway, we’re happy to showcase cool language solutions in this digital mobile world. If you’ve got ...
More About: Mobile , World

Do schools kill creativity?
2007-11-11 08:21:00
  Here’s a must-see video of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the TED conference. (Not sure if it’s from this year or last.) Sir Ken is a tremendously entertaining speaker and passionate advocate for re-thinking how our schools work. He argues, convincingly to my mind,  that the traditional educational system, designed for another time and place, was designed to educate us out of creativity. In our industrial past it was decided (with some merit) that schools had to concentrate on things that would help graduates find jobs in the ’professions’ - medicine, accounting, law.  That was the route to a successful career in the past and education reflected that. This approach is now irrelevant. There’s such a diversified global economy out there now there are endless endless opportunities for people with talents other than the traditional, ‘left brain’ disciplines. As an Irishman sitting in downtown Shanghai working at ChinesePod, I ca...
More About: Schools , Creativity , Kill

Audio interview on the ChinesePod approach
2007-11-05 10:25:00
Here’s an audio interview I did last week, with the China Business Network. The network was set up by my friend, Christine Lu. They have some really interesting stuff over there. Worth a visit. Ken Carroll
More About: Audio , Interview

‘A vision of students today’ is insipid agitprop
2007-10-27 17:10:00
Here’s a video that recently did the rounds with the edubloggers. (I can’t access it in China at the moment - transcript is here.) It was produced by Michael Wesch, assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology as Kansas State University.   The video has received much acclaim, including from people I admire, but I must say I developed an instant aversion to it.  The problem for me, is how Wesch portrays his students: whiny, helpless victims. They look like the dupes in his little agitptop drama. Improbably, Wesch portrays pampered, middle-class students as an oppressed (or deprived?) group. There’s plenty of bourgeios angst to go around. In fact, he elictis hundreds of examples of it, and students write their grievances on cards, holding them grimly before the camera. (Merciful God, no! He has them write on cards to symbolize that they have been silenced by The Man/the machine!)  But it gets worse.  He posits their whiny, bourgeois angst a...
More About: Students , Today , Vision , Prop

SpanishSense Changes
2007-10-19 05:02:00
As regular listeners will already know, SpanishSense has recently gone to a 3-a-week lesson publication schedule. It’s time to reveal why… SpanishSense has been running for 6 months now, and it’s been a real learning experience for us to grapple with a new language. We’ve worked hard, creating new tools to teach verb conjugations, and new premium exercises tailored to Spanish, but to be honest we still don’t think the site is hitting the standards to which we aspire. Therefore, we are slowing down the production of lessons while we make some changes. One of these is the addition of two new hosts to the team - JP Villanueva (from Seattle), and Liliana Mata (from Mexico City). Right now, they are busy behind the scenes preparing a fresh approach to the lessons. You’ll be able to hear their first shows in early November. Also, we are preparing a cultural show for SpanishSense, and adding the Extras section that is so popular on ChinesePod. There are...
More About: Chang , Chan , Nish

ChinesePod on NBC
2007-10-18 11:58:00
ChinesePod was featured as part of a “learning Chinese” segment that aired as part of this week’s “China Rising” series on NBC Nightly News.

The ChinesePod Practice Plan: a personal look
2007-10-16 09:32:00
Hi fellow CPodders, This week Yves Goulnik, one of the core members of our community, dropps by the CPod factory and graciously accepts our invitation to join us in the studio to talk about his ChinesePod Practice Plan experiences. Take a listen to the whole interview here! Also, don’t forget to check out our Practice Plan page to learn more about the program and how it can benefit you today! Eileen
More About: Personal

Back from the National Day Holiday!
2007-10-08 03:58:00
We hope you didn’t have any problems, but if you found us slightly less responsive over the past seven days, it’s because we’ve all been enjoying the October 1-7 Chinese National Day holiday (AKA “Golden Week”). Well, all that “vacation” nonsense has finally come to an end, and a Monday of torrential downpour is ushering in another sweet workweek here in Shanghai. That means we’ll be more on the ball again! See you in the comments… -John
More About: Holiday , Back , National Day , The Nation

We are Hiring!
2007-09-25 07:27:00
If you are a professional Marketing Manager, or know one, read on… We are building up our team to support all of the exciting initiatives being cooked up behind the scenes, and have a vacancy for someone with 10+ years marketing management experience who shares our enthusiasm for technology and language learning. We are looking for someone who can build and lead an entire marketing team, and who can contribute to our future plans about how to develop Praxis Language. For more info or to apply, click here.
More About: Hiring

Practice Plan Promotion
2007-09-25 05:08:00
Chinese is increasingly the language of global business. The world’s most spoken language is also the language of the world’s hottest economy, and knowledge of Mandarin is quickly becoming an essential skill in the repertoire of modern businesspeople. The ChinesePod Practice Plan perfectly complements the portable ChinesePod lessons, providing reinforcement of material already learned and expanding your understanding of the language. If you sign up for the Practice Plan between now and the end of October we’ll give you five free sessions — that’s a week of focused learning for no cost. Your suppliers speak Chinese. Your customers speak Chinese. Your competitors speak Chinese. Do you?
More About: Promotion , Romo

Is knowledge delivered or constructed?
2007-09-18 04:24:00
   One of the questions discussed at Learning 2.0 was this: Is knowledge delivered or constructed? Let’s take a look at it. Deli vering knowledge Traditionally, the task of the educator was to deliver knowledge: teachers took pre-packaged data and dispensed it to learners. Teachers were active, if not dominant (dispeners) while students were passive (receptacles). Obviously, data can be delivered. Books have done an incredibly good job of delivering information for centuries. Notably, however, the internet takes that to a whole new level: more data, and faster than any channel ever known. Almost any web search yields thousands of results, with text, audio, visual input, as well as discussion, differing perspectives, and so on. We suddenly have a much more powerful way to gather and deliver information.  In fact, professor Google is so successful as a source of raw information, that it now makes the classroom look like the wrong place to deliver lectures, h...
More About: Knowledge , Liver

‘Unconferences’actually work.
2007-09-18 02:36:00
The recent learning 2.0 conference included a number of ‘unconference’ sessions - free-form discussion groups that set their own agendas, rather than pre-ordained powerpoint presentations. I had been a bit skeptical about how these might work in practice. I thought they might lack focus. In fact, the sessions worked really well. Instead of just listening, you’re listening and talking (ie, doing something). This notion of doing is significant, and it was one of the themes of the conference. This leads me to the second thing I learned at the conference …which I’ll post later today.  Ken Carroll
More About: Work , Ally

Learning 2.0 conference kicks off
2007-09-15 04:32:00
   This weekend sees the Learning 2.0 conference at the Concordia International school in Shanghai. The focus of the 3-day event is ‘Communication, Collaboration, Connection’ and how web 2.0 will affect learning. This Ning site offers lots of information and insights from the event. I went along with ChinesePod sound engineer, David Xu, who recorded the opening session (Fri evening). You can listen to it here.  here  This was a lively, if at times unwieldly discussion that took the form of a  round-table with 9 experts and questions from the attendees. It is well worth the listen. The first part of the audio is fairly lengthy intro to the event with thanks to the sponsors and so on. These are done by the hardworking organizers John (don’t know his surname)  and Jeff Utecht.  (Michael Webber worked very hard behind the scenes to make this happen, too).  These guys brought the spirit of web 2.o to the proceedings by enabling blogging, interaction, a...
More About: Kicks , Conference , Kick , Earning

Faster, simpler dictionary search
2007-09-13 09:18:00
One of the things that first drew me to FireFox a few years ago was its integrated search box. Being able to search Google or Yahoo without actually going to the page was a huge improvement, and has probably saved me hundreds of hours over the years. Now we’ve brought a little of that functionality to the ChinesePod Dictionary ! If you use FireFox and you go to any page in the ChinesePod Dictionary, you can install the search plugin. Just click on the down arrow to the left of the search box and select Add “ChinesePod Dictionary” (see the screenshot to the left). This will immediately add the option to search our dictionary to your in-browser search box. Combined with the “related lessons” list provided for any word that we’ve used in lessons in the past, finding a ChinesePod lesson about a topic you’re interested in has never been faster. - John B
More About: Search , Aster

The ChinesePod Integrated Chinese Blog
2007-09-06 09:21:00
In case you haven’t caught word of it in News and Features, there’s a new blog in Chinese Pod town (wow, where did that come from??), and it is the ChinesePod Integrated Chinese Blog ! In case you haven’t heard of it, Integrated Chinese (IC) is perhaps the most widely used textbook in the Chinese language programs of American universities. (Yes, we realize not all of our users are American, and we dearly appreciate their splendid diversity, but every now and then we also like to connect with the American contingent.) Allow me to quote myself here: Over the past two years, ChinesePod has built up a ton of free online resources for learning Chinese. Still, most university students probably have their noses stuck in Integrated Chinese and don’t even realize the advantages of online learning. Sure, IC is a great textbook and it’s a great place to start. But ChinesePod will be using its online tools to specifically target IC content. You’ll be able to find all IC v...
More About: Rate

ChinesePod and SpanishSense Class of ‘08
2007-09-04 08:17:00
For most university students, learning languages means attending lectures and reading textbooks, and trying to memorize different grammar points and tons of vocabulary. But here in Praxis Language, we believe that it can be so much more than that! Combined with our podcasts and myriad of study tools available on our websites (Cpod and Span ishSense), we can help you supplement your class curriculum right in the comforts of your own home - or wherever you may be. If you are currently an enrolled university student with an active .edu email account, we’d like to help you get a head start on your studies! For only 99 USD, you get 8 months of premium access to all the study tools available on the site (ChinesePod or SpanishSense) and a chance to be part of the ever-growing international community of learners. Why not learn Chinese and Spanish together with us? For more info, please choose the appropriate logo below and sign up now! Eileen
More About: Class , Nish

Technical difficulties
2007-09-03 05:20:00
Hi guys, We are experiencing some technical difficulties at the moment. Please do bear with us whilst we try and bring both sites back up again. Kind regards, Eileen Update: We are now back online!
More About: Technical , Diff , Technic

PICNIC’07
2007-08-27 05:16:00
Just a quick note for anyone that will be in Amsterdam on September 28th. I will be representing ChinesePod at the China Language Bridge at PICNIC’07. From the Event Brochure (PDF): As China’s Economy is growing rapidly, cultural exchange between the Western World and China is flourishing. However, one of the largest barriers is language. New media technology provides us with creative solutions. Chinese Radio Amsterdam invites you to take part in our PICNIC program. We will give you an overview of state-of-the-art media and technology to bring the language barriers (email, mobile, podcast, game, wiki). Leading-edge entrepreneurs will reflect on how new media empower cross-cultural understanding. Should be an interesting discussion. Registration is free for anyone interested. Hank.
More About: Picnic

ChinesePod: Redesigned Pages and a Better Dictionary
2007-08-23 13:35:00
New Home Page We mentioned recently that SpanishSense had a new Home page, and that we’re tweaking it a bit before launching it for ChinesePod. Well, the time has come, and the new Home page has arrived. Here’s what ChinesePod Home used to look like: Here’s what it looks like now: I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but just to sum up briefly what you get now: The lessons you’re working on now on your Home page (bookmark them!) All the new lessons you want to see (So you can see every new lesson, or just the ones of the levels you’re interested in) Downloads directly from the Home page Latest comments on the Home page Dictionary look-up from the Home page (more on the dictionary below) If you were one of the few users using the calendar, your scheduled lessons have been moved to your Home page (they’re bookmarked). You can manage these lessons by clicking on the “Your Archive” tab on the Home page. You can control what ne...
More About: Pages , Rede , Ages

Praxis Language Office
2007-08-22 03:13:00
With the launch of our new players to syndicated ChinesePod/SpanishSense lessons on your own blog, website, etc. (see SpanishSense now and ChinesePod on Thursday), it seemed appropriate to use Google Maps newly released embeddable map for ourselves. If you have ever wondered where the Praxis Language office is in Shanghai: View Larger Map
More About: Office

Your Favorite ChinesePod Lessons
2007-08-20 10:45:00
About two weeks ago ChinesePod crossed the 600 lesson mark. (Sure, if we wanted to, we might also count the 52 Saturday Show episodes or the 27 Extra lessons, but we’re far too modest for that.) For some, such a prolific two years of lesson creation might be cause for tooting one’s own horn, but we tend to get all introspective about this kind of thing. What we’ve been thinking about is this: what are our best lessons? We’re not talking about a good line here or there, we’re talking about the lesson as a whole, including the dialogue content, the instructional content, and even the banter between the hosts. What lessons connected with you the most? What lessons are the funniest? What lessons have turned out to be the most useful? What lessons saved your life? What lessons earned you a wife? Ummm, anyway, we want to hear from you all. We’d like to see a few top ten lists. You guys pick your own criteria for “best.” After 600 lessons, we...
More About: Lessons , Favorite , Favor

Celebrating SpanishSense’s 100th lesson!
2007-08-20 10:33:00
5 months have passed since we first launched Span ishSense to the general public and we are now proud to announce that we have released our 100th lesson today entitled “Visita a la Fábrica (advanced)“! That’s right, we now have 34 newbie, 34 elementary, 13 intermediate, 11 upper intermediate, and 8 advanced lessons in the lesson archive. If you look through the site, there are also more than a hundred lesson comments, an increasing variety of lesson topics, and hundreds of users dropping by everyday and choosing to learn Spanish with us. The site has really grown into its own too with the recent release of the SS pronunciation guide, Facebook app, The Fix (found in every lesson page), and an SS original feature: The Verb Conjugator. This is indeed a momentous achievement and we couldn’t stress enough how much the community has played a role in helping us mold SpanishSense into what it is today. Your support and feedback have been incredible! As always, the t...
More About: Lesson , Nish

Fancy a SpanishSense mug?
2007-08-15 11:23:00
Hi guys, There’s a new promotion over at Span ishSense that I’d like to share with you. From now until the end of August, when you subscribe (or upgrade) to a 1 year Premium susbcription, we will be sure to send you your very own SpanishSense mug free of charge! Tell me, what’s more comforting than having a mug full of warm coffee while listening and browsing through those SS lesson pages? Nothing, I say! So go ahead, sign up for a 1 year premium subscription now and after that, be sure to watch out for our email regarding your free mug! Eileen
More About: Nish , Fancy

A New Home
2007-08-13 10:31:00
Over the past few months we at Praxis Language have been considering various ways to put the Home page to good use on both SpanishSense and ChinesePod. Today we have launched a new version of the SpanishSense Home page which displays more lessons and more links to those lessons. This is the previous version of the Home page: This is the new version of the Home page: Here are some of the changes that went into the update: The links that used to take up the main column of the page are now in the top right. Under the links are a preview of the latest comments. (Obviously, you’ll see a lot more if you go to the Conversations page, but this gives you a little preview.) Latest lessons are no longer three small links at the bottom; they take up the main column. You now have links to all the main parts of a lesson, including the downloads (MP3s, PDF). Free or Basic users will have some of those download links grayed out. The lessons in the main column are not just the three most re...

Robotic Teacher Dilemma: Attack or Instruct
2007-08-13 06:08:00
Hi everyone, As users of The Fix know, one of the things we’ve been focusing on over the last while is improving the tools we have to help people practice oral Chinese. We’re all studying Chinese, it helps to have more opportunities to speak it. With this in mind, we’ve been in touch with a Chinese software vendor that markets speech recognition software with a pedagogical twist. Much like the open source SpeakGoodChinese project, their software seems to use pitch and tone analysis to grade and correct student tones. Since it’s a robot doing the grading, we assume it’s also less picky about conversation topics than a real teacher might be. The company has also done some interesting work with Chinese speech synthesis. While we think their tools are interesting, we aren’t sure exactly how they might fit into YOUR study methods and habits. Which is where you come in. If you’re interested in helping us test out the tools these guys are offering,...
More About: Robotic , Teacher , Dilemma , Teac , Robo

Huzzah for the ChinesePod Dictionary!
2007-08-02 11:06:00
As August creeps round and Shanghai settles into the sort of air-conditioned coastal complacence that drives Wuhan residents mad with envy, I’m pleased to be able to announce the debut of an old project we’ve been quietly refurbishing: our ChinesePod dictionary. Those who have been with us since the transition to V3 might remember our old site glossary, and be curious about what exactly sets this new dictionary apart from its predecessor. The answer is “a lot“. We talk a bit about the changes in this new News and Features podcast. Whether you listen or not, we hope you’ll agree that the new dictionary offers a number of concrete improvements over both the older glossary, as well as many other reference texts both offline and online. Here are some of the major changes/features: More Authoritative Search: the new dictionary has approximately 160,000 entries, and comes with a large number of neologisms and proper nouns which simply aren’t found in t...
More About: Dictionary

Vote for ChinesePod
2007-07-31 06:39:00
ChinesePod has been selected in the Podcast Awards for 2007.  The results are based on a public poll.  We’d appreciate your votes over there. It would be nice to win the thing. Apparently you can vote once per day for the next 2 weeks or so.   Ken Carroll
More About: Vote

Spanish Verb Tables
2007-07-26 08:56:00
July has been a good month for Span ish Sense - first we released the SpanishSense Fix, and now we are releasing the first resource that is unique to SpanishSense - Verb Tables . The rules governing verbs in Spanish are a real advantage for students (although they don’t always feel that way!), because learning a few simple rules gets you communicating in all kinds of situations. To help you see how the rules work, SpanishSense now has reference tables for all the verbs that appear in our lessons. We’ll use today’s lesson - Let’s Dance - as an example of how you can use it. First you’d listen to the lesson, read the dialogue and sample sentences, and complete the exercises. You’d learn that ‘avisaré’ means ‘I will tell’ and it derives from the verb ‘avisar - to tell’. But this wouldn’t tell you how to say ‘you will tell’, or ‘they told’, or ‘I would have told’. That’s...
More About: Nish

Gearing up for the Olympics!
2007-07-26 08:10:00
Were you planning to attend the Olympics next year but were afraid that you’d get lost in the sea of people? Were you secretly panic-stricken by the thought that no one’s there to guide you as you trek your way through the Olympic village or, at the very least, tell you where the nearest vending machine is? Well, here’s where ChinesePod comes to the rescue! As you gear up for the Olympics, ChinesePod is right there with you. When you sign up for a 240 USD subscription from today until August 8, you will receive a 4 30-minute free counseling sessions with one of our Practice plan counselors (that’s 1 session for every 3 months). They will help you plan out your study schedule for the year and check up on your progress right up until that Olympic flame is lit! Also, if that’s not enough, we’re shipping you a specially-made 100+ ChinesePod Olympic flashcards box set too that you can bring along on your trip to China. The flashcards come complete with Characters, Pinyin an...
More About: The O

Exam Nightmares and the ChinesePod Test Playground
2007-07-23 06:56:00
You’re not sure how it happened, but you’re back in school. Instead of the honorary doctorate you vaguely remember being promised, you’re confronted with a 40 page exam on post-modern game theory. Being a ChinesePod subscriber, you’re feeling chuffed about the portion of the exam in Chinese, but even so are having trouble focusing without your clothes. We’ve yet to blog about it, but it’s true that one of our core principles at Praxis is not inducing nightmares in students. That being said, tests clearly have a role in education: they help measure progress, are useful tools for identifying weak spots, and can also be fun. And so I’m pleased to announce the release of our latest beta-initiative: the ChinesePod test playground. The site is currently quite sparse and utilitarian (and it’s hosted in Asia, so might be a bit slow for surfers in North America or Europe), but this latest labs project will be our holding pen for experimental on...
More About: Test , Exam , Round , Mare , Nightmares