Monday, January 09, 2006

Namecards and Chinese Lessons

I have been stuck in the Han Dynasty recently, reading Analects commentaries, but I popped out to take a look at citym.org, a blog run by a friend of No-Sword Matt. There is a beautiful post about Japanese namecards of all things. The author collects them--take a look before you cry "otaku!"

There's also a post about ChinesePod, an interesting podcasting idea. You can download free Chinese-lesson podcasts, and for a subscription fee you can access some extra services. I am not sure exactly what you get other than PDFs of the script, but if anybody knows, please enlighten me.

I listened to a couple of the podcasts--they are very professionally put together and entertaining. They feature a foreigner and a native speaker covering a point or two and bantering back and forth. The foreigner has a bit of an accent to his Chinese, but that's just my gaijin griping.

Please drop a comment if you've listened to the ChinesePod podcasts and let me know what you think! I wish there were such a podcast for Japanese (preferably not made by anime freaks).

Back to the Han Dynasty for me....

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

At ChinesePod the daily podcasts are free. There is a Basic Subscription for $9-$5 (depending on subscription length) a month where we will email an accompanying PDF transcript for each podcast. There is also a Premium Subscription that has much deeper features such as Flash lectures on Chinese grammar, personal wordbank, flashcard system,etc.

If you are interested in a Japanese podcast I would recommend japanesepod101.com.

Matt said...

I gotta say, the calm, clear speech comes as a bit of a letdown after the frenzied pastiche intro....

But now I know what I'll be listening to on the train in the morning. Thanks!