Transcripts for upper intermediate and advanced

Hi @YuQinCai, @Constance_Fang @Fiona and the ChinesePod team, my question is this:

Will there ever be an attempt to go through all of the old upper-intermediate and advanced lessons and write transcripts of the lessons? I don’t mean the dialogue, I mean all of the conversation between the hosts. I think this would be extremely helpful and add tremendous value to the platform, but to my knowledge no one else has broached this topic. Going forward, I think it would also be extremely useful.

Very interesting, I see how this could be valuable to help bridge the gap. I know that there would be a lot of work to go into it and have them both in simplified and traditional but I’ll definitely bring this up in our meetings.

Can I assume you are aware of the existing transcripts created by users?

Awesome Podster, you’re so helpful. Thank you!

Awesome idea! Would love to see this. Huge fan of listening and reading (hence ChinesePod subscriber Personally, I would be spending hours on Chinesepod listening to the dialogs and reading through these extended dialog transcripts.

I wish I had more time to explain exactly what I would like to express, but the idea is more significant than it first appears. Because the majority of the content produced by Chinesepod is found within the lesson, outside the dialogue, you aren’t able to take full advantage of your content or able to manipulate the data in the most effective way. If you had all of the transcripts properly digitized, you’d be able to organize lessons according to the vocabulary level of the listener VERY precisely, organize it by HSK level, and develop better review systems for the content. You’d also have a much better understanding of what you have and haven’t covered. Right now, 80% of Chinesepod’s potential is locked within those upper intermediate and advanced lessons. If Chinesepod digitized that information, the possibilities are endless and Chinesepod would be head and shoulders above the competition. There would be no need to use any other services as the amount of content on Chinesepod is sufficient to attain fluency. Instead of focusing on new content, I think Chinesepod should focus on figuring out how to properly utilize what it already has instead of simply making more videos. Ultimately, even if you didn’t make use of any of that data, you’d still be providing a tremendous learning tool for learners that cannot be overstated. Lingq gets this right, but they lack the content and organization of Chinesepod.

Wonderful! I’m so happy to hear about this need for this. Thank you.

https://chinesepod.com/community/groups/view/transcripts-with-tal-173

It’s no secret that CPod’s content is inadequately curated, but I’d suggest that you not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Even if CPod were to hire a team to transcribe the thousands of lessons’ audio content and then try to mine it for HSK vocabulary frequency it still wouldn’t be organized by grammatical features. To do so sounds more like a cutting-edge AI project with programming inputs from linguists. Also, to try to methodically go through the CPod library based on HSK content is contrary to the whole CPod founding concept of being “top-down.” And listeners’ level of known vocabulary would not necessarily follow HSK levels. Unless someone went from knowing zero Chinese to enrolling in cram courses for HSK 1, HSK 2, etc. it seems unlikely that anyone’s vocabulary would precisely correspond to HSK levels, so it may be an exaggeration to say that your proposed project would allow CPod to organize lessons “VERY precisely.” As a practical matter, I would suggest:

1. If you want to select lessons where the level labels (newbie, elementary, etc.) really mean something, stick to the ones where John Pasden was there and actively involved in organizing the lessons.
2. If you want transcripts, there were quite a few created collaboratively under the user group “Transcripts with Tal.” The users who did the transcripts got the added benefit of adding a new dimension to their learning experience.
3. Use CPod for what it is: a place to learn Chinese based firstly on subject matter that interests you, at a level that at least approximates or is only slightly above your current ability.

I hope my criticism does not seem harsh. Your idea is an interesting theoretical use of information technology, but would not be practical to produce or as useful to as wide a user base as you suggest, it seems to me. I hope have understood your meaning fully; I did not get the reference to Lingq.

I’d just like to confirm that HSK isn’t very good for measuring frequency in colloquial speech (which seems to be what Chinesepod is about). I remember in the HSK list they had the formal 咀嚼 (jǔ jué) but not the much more common 嚼 (jiáo). I used 咀嚼 in a conversation with some Chinese friends which was apparently so weird it made them laugh. The HSK list misses some very common words, while at the same time contains some rare highfalutin (SAT/GRE type) words which would almost never appear in a conversation (and so probably have never been seen on Chinesepod)