XS2China: Communicating in a Mobile World
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 [...]
Huzzah for the ChinesePod Dictionary!
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 [...]
ChinesePod and SpanishSense hit Facebook
With Facebook all over the news these days, and VC-backed development teams from Wuxi to Anping scrambling to roll-out Chinese editions of the site, I’m pleased to announce our own little contribution to the social networking frenzy: official ChinesePod and SpanishSense applications for Facebook.
We’ve been lucky enough to have a bunch of brave early-adopters and [...]
Browbeating, seduction, and chaos
Bob Garfield has a piece in Advertising Age about the coming chaos in the advertising industry (and the denial amongst many of its executives). It’s a fascinating article, with observations like this:
The online space isn’t remotely developed enough — nor will it be anytime soon — to absorb the advertising budgets of the top 100 [...]
Social Peripheral Vision
A termed coined by Jyri Engeström meaning the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Jyri is a founder of Jaiku a similar service to Twitter, Groovr and Dogdeball, which are ‘micro-blogging’ systems enabling the distribution of short-messages between peers. The result is essentially a stream of life-activity [...]
Ideas converging on e-learning
Many forces are acting to change what we call learning. The biggest is undoubtedly the internet: e-learning, blended learning, social media, web 2.0 tools, etc. In the post-network society (and a billion people connected) technology is the driver, the enabler, of rapid, widescale, distributed change, including a change to how we learn (perhaps ChinesePod [...]
Changing how we learn
The British government recently undertook measures to ensure that languages other than European ones can be taught in secondary schools there. Now, 11-14 year-olds can take classes Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, etc. Since that policy change, there has been much talk about this in the UK press about the future of language learning in the UK.
I [...]