Mr T's suggestion is a great one. I have always wondered why there are no podcasts focussing on language production, rather than listening comprehension.
Popup Chinese could exploit this niche market and I feel it would be a great sucess.
The closest product I've seen focussing on language production (other than a teacher) is Pimsleur's course (Excellent though it is, the vocabulary is limited and could be more fun to listen to)
For elementary learners, I think that there is no alternative to English to Chinese translation, but for more advanced students one could easily produce a podcast using Chinese only to make you think (and speak) in Chinese
Switching your emphasis to the new HSK!! This is excellent news!!
The sooner,the better
@jstoehr
You can find mock tests and word lists for the new HSK levels 1 to 6 at http://www.confuciusinstitute.qut.edu.au/study/proficiency.jsp
@popup chinese
Do you plan to provide exercices to help prepare the new HSK? Outside China it is the only possible option
I fully agree that Popup Chinese is a very good way of learning Chinese and that you make great efforts to make podcasts highly interesting to listen to. Your product is high quality and substantially helps improve listening comprehension.
But I have one suggestion for improvement. Complement your listening comprehension [LC] podcasts with additional speaking production [SP] podcasts to help people become fluent in Chinese. To the best of my knowledge, no such a product is yet available.
What I have in mind is a podcast that takes advantage of the strenghts of both your generative audio reviews [GAR] and Pimsleur/Foreign Service Institute/Michel Thomas[PFM] type courses
I feel that PFM type courses are substantially less fun to listen than your current podcasts (and vocabulary used is also much lower frequency) and this clearly hinders successful language acquisition. On the other hand,GAR are very useful to review, but refer to isolated word/sentences and, on their own, do not pass a fun test.
I think that it would not take a huge amount of effort on your side to create this type of speaking production podcasts, in which you would end up producing sentences you have never heard before.
What do you think of this? I am sure you will find lots of ways of refining this rough idea
新年快乐!
@trevelyan
Thanks a lot for your detailed response on the new HSK, particularly the info on the BLCU-Hanban turf war.
If I understand you correctly, there are bound to be national (i.e. China based) and international versions of the test.
But why would popupchinese want to restrict its potential market and align with one side in this ongoing war or wait till there is some convergence between both sides in the (distant) future?
Most likely, an important share of your users does not live in China and these people may well take a Chinese test in a Confucius Institute. Why not offer them new HSK practice? Of course, to try to please everybody, it makes a lot of sense to keep producing your current HSK material
As menglelan rightly points out, your comment on the 33% sucess rate to achieve level 1 refers to the traditional HSK. In the new version, you will need a 60% sucess rate, so, unless you are really lucky, random guessing is not going to get you anywhere
Levels in the new HSK seem to be related to the Common European Framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages). There are well established exams for English, Spanish, French or German exam that fit into this framework. Thousands of students take these exams every year, so there is clearly a strong demand for these products. For instance, over 250.000 people take the University of Cambridge First Certificate in English every year (This is B2 level in the common european framework or, equivalently, Level 4 in the new HSK)
Of course, levels 1 and 2 of the new HSK (A1 and A2 in the common framework terminology) are pretty basic (They assume you know 150 and 300 characters, respectively). This makes a lot of sense, since they are designed for people who are starting to study a language. Popup chinese absolute beginner users are probably in this group (as are followers of chineseclass101). Easy exams are helpful in motivating people to keep on studying (This is probably more important for Chinese than for other languages) and mastering the basics is needed before proceeding to more difficult material.
Levels 3 and 4 in the new HSK are less basic (they require 600 and 1200 characters) and level 6 (the top one in the new HSK) is considerably more demanding (above 5000 characters). This is probably what you need if you want to study at a Chinese University (but this may not be the aim of everybody)