Suggestion for the third Chinese course

I spend 3 - 4 hours every day listening to Rocket Chinese and after nearly two years of study (and living in Taiwan) my Mandarin listening and speaking have improved tremendously.

Although, I live in a Mandarin speaking environment the opportunities to exercise the full range of my developing vocabulary are limited.  Either the conversations escalate into vocabulary realms beyond my comprehension or (most commonly) conversations are limited to the same vocabulary word set - day after day.  So, I use RC as my private tutor.  RC knows my vocabulary and has perfect enunciation, and this technique of utilizing a significant portion of my vocabulary on a daily basis is working for me.

This leads me to a suggestion for a third Chinese language course and that would be a "private tutor" program.  What I suggest is that a thematic lesson of words, phrases and sentences be constructed and allow the entire lesson to be played without the listener having to interact - no mouse clicks required.  The student could read along or not.  If this automatically played lesson could be custom adjusted (for example, options to 1) replay the lesson upon completion, 2) control time of delay between words, phrases, and sentences, 3) control the number of times each word, phrase, and sentence is repeated, etc.), the learning experience could be greatly enhanced.

The RC libraries already contain a significant amount of vocabulary that could be used to constitute these thematic lessons.

Thank you for your excellent program and the language skills that you have provided.

J. Dallas

Hi n-ng-f,

Thank you very much for all your feedback and kind words, we truly appreciate them. I will forward your message to our Product Development Team for their consideration; in the case a third Chinese level is released.

Please let us know if you have further comments or questions. All the best to your learning course!!
 

I have a comment that some may not have considered. eg: Download some of the Mp3 lessons, reviews etc. and then transfer them to your music file of your mobile phone in a new playlist. Whenever you are travelling, waiting for a bus or plane etc. or just in your lunch break you can gain some real benefits. Even if you don't understand much of the lesson, by hearing it over and over you may be surprised just how much you can retain.

In the third Chinese course that we now know is being developed, I would like to suggest that the writing lessons go through all of the radicals, show what they mean, and show some characters contain them.  I know that radicals often give the meaning while other give the pronunciation.

Also, as I have said elsewhere, I would like to see the same tests that the other lessons have be including in the writing lessons.  A test where we read the hanzi and say it out loud will be a good addition, and this would be good to add to all lessons.  Also, a test where we read the hanzi and write the pinyin would be nice.

RC,  I have a serious suggestion for your next Rocket Chinese release that may greatly expand your customer base.  Many times when I recommend RC, the first question that comes back to me is whether or not the program uses Traditional or Simplified characters?  Many people of my acquaintance are interested in learning Chinese using the Traditional character set.

My suggestion is that RC allow the user to configure the program so that the student can select the desired character set.

For myself, the Traditional character set would be much more useful.

Thanks,

JD 

 

I add to your suggestion - all three RC course (the current two and the new one) should allow users to choose traditional or simplified.