Hello Listener,

Every Chinese learner wants to better at Chinese and say everything they’d like to say…without mistakes.

But how can you get to that level of Chinese awesomeness?

You need feedback from an actual Chinese teacher. Someone to tell you…

And now you can get speech analysis from your own Chinese teacher at ChineseClass101! How? We just released a brand new tool called Premium PLUS My Teacher!

New! Perfect Your Speaking with Premium PLUS My Teacher!

Premium PLUS My Teacher, exclusively for Premium PLUS subscribers, gives you 1-on-1 access to a teacher. Just record your voice and send it to your teacher for feedback!

You can record anything – a self introduction, a speech, a shopping list – up to 2 minutes in length. Your teacher will listen and give you professional analysis and feedback on what you should improve within 1 business day. Your teacher can also send you a recording for you to use as a model!

Premium PLUS My Teacher lets you…

• Perfect your speaking and pronunciation with voice analysis from your teacher
• Send casual exchanges in Chinese or ask questions
• Get overall advice on how to best learn Chinese
• Contact your teacher on the site while you’re using ChineseClass101 lessons
• Get 1-on-1 learning on the go with your mobile device via a Mobile Web App
• Get detailed and visual feedback on your writing (messages are limited to 750 characters)
• …And master Chinese even faster!

That’s the power of having your very own Chinese teacher!

Your teacher will give you personal attention and fix any Chinese problems you have. Imagine how fast your Chinese will improve when someone’s guiding you every step of the way!

My Teacher is for Premium PLUS subscribers only.

Want to upgrade to a Premium PLUS subscription? You get the best of both worlds – unlimited ChineseClass101 Premium access, which includes 960+ Audio & Video Lessons, PDF Lesson notes, Study Tools and more – plus, you get a teacher who creates a personalized assessment plan and guides you along the way.

We rarely discount this plan, but if you’d like to upgrade to Premium PLUS and take advantage of this new feature, here’s a quick 20% OFF. Hurry! This offer ends Wednesday, November 12th, 2014.

Click here to get your own Chinese teacher and save 20% on Premium PLUS!

To your fluency,
Team ChineseClass101

P.S. Want to learn Chinese with your own teacher and unlimited ChineseClass101 access?
Get the best of both worlds with Premium PLUS at 20% OFF! Unlock unlimited ChineseClass101 access, including 960+ Audio & Video Lessons, PDF Lesson notes, Study tools and more. Plus, you get a teacher who creates a personalized assessment plan and guides you along the way. This offer ends Wednesday, November 12th, 2014.

Click here to get your own Chinese teacher and save 20% on Premium PLUS!

Hello Listener,

Imagine having your very own ChineseClass101 teacher. They give you personal attention and fix any Chinese problem you’ll ever have. They can…

• Correct your writing
• Be a source of constant Chinese practice
• Give you insider tips on what words sound more natural in Chinese
• Correct your Chinese pronunciation (something most native speakers are too polite to do!)
• Point out your weaknesses
• Tell you how to best master Chinese

Access to your own Chinese teacher was already available in our Premium PLUS subscription, but mostly via email interaction.

Now, there’s a new Premium PLUS feature that gives you 1-on-1 instruction on the website or on the go via an App: Premium PLUS My Teacher (formerly titled Premium PLUS Messenger).

Get 1-on-1 Chinese learning with My Teacher!

What is it? It’s a new App exclusively for our Premium PLUS subscribers. You get 1-on-1 access to your teacher on the site or on the go, anytime. Contact them while you’re studying with ChineseClass101 lessons or for any Chinese problems you have.

When you log in, you’ll see a message open up with from your instructor. Or, look for the “My Teacher” option in the upper right hand corner of ChineseClass101, by “My Account.”

More specifically, you can….

• Send casual exchanges in Chinese or ask questions
• Get advice on how to best learn Chinese
• Contact your teacher on the site while you’re using ChineseClass101 lessons
• Get 1-on-1 learning on the go with your mobile device via a Mobile Web App
• Have your them correct, cross out and add feedback to your writing inside My Teacher (Messages are limited to 750 characters)
• …And more!

Want to send longer texts (over 750 characters) or send a recording of yourself? Simply send your teacher an email and they’ll fix any mistakes and provide crucial feedback.

That’s the power of learning with a native Chinese speaker.

They give you personal attention and fix any Chinese problem you have. Imagine how fast your Chinese will improve when someone’s guiding you every step of the way.

My Teacher is for Premium PLUS subscribers only.

Want to upgrade to a Premium PLUS subscription? You get the best of both worlds – unlimited ChineseClass101 Premium access, which includes 920+ Audio & Video Lessons, PDF Lesson notes, Study tools and more – plus, you get a teacher who creates a personalized learning plan and guides you along the way.

Click Here To Get 30% OFF Premium PLUS & A Free Audiobook!

To your fluency,

Team ChineseClass101

P.S. Get 30% OFF Premium or Premium PLUS & a FREE Audiobook!
300 Million Lessons downloaded and we couldn’t have done it without you! So, join the 300 Million Celebration! Get 30% OFF Premium or Premium PLUS AND a FREE Chinese Audiobook! Unlock our entire Chinese learning system and master Chinese for as low as $7.00/month! Ends this Friday, 10/3/2014!

Click here to get 30% OFF Premium or Premium PLUS & a FREE audiobook!

Greetings from Team ChineseClass101!

We’re stopping by the blog today to tell you about an exciting new feature we’re slowly rolling out on the website. A few select users have been chosen to test drive the new Dashboard feature.

Log in to your account today to see if you’re one of them!

The new Dashboard aims to help you track your Chinese learning quickly and easily. We’ve produced a lot of lessons in our lifetime and while we pride ourselves on offering a wide variety of lessons to our users, we realized that it can been pretty overwhelming for some.

Where do I start? What level is best for me? What series do I move on to now?

These were common questions coming in from avid users like you, so we set out to solve these commonly asked questions, and the Dashboard was born!

We’ll of course continue to listen to our fans and tweak the Dashboard to provide the very best experience for everyone. If you have questions or feedback for us, send us an email here.

To help you get started, here are a few of the big changes:

• Your learning progress

• Recommended lesson alert

• Your learning profile

• Account information

• Quick links to useful tools

We hope you enjoy the brand new Dashboard! Stay tuned for more tweaks and updates to the site and head over to ChineseClass101.com to test out the new Dashboard beta.

It seems to us that studying through rote memorization is the best method for retention. While it works (to an extent), unless you encounter what you’ve memorized on a constant basis, you will forget it. After all, how much do you remember after you took that last test at school?

Somehow, we’re under the impression that if we reread and repeat things enough times in our head, it will magically get stuck there. In a way, it’s the lazy and painful approach to studying. The difficulty lies in the fact that we’re introducing a new concept to our brain with nothing to relate it to.

Do logarithms make sense to you? (let the non-math lovers answer please)

The concept itself may have no relation to you or anything in your life. It’s too abstract and thus hard to remember. Think of it as placing a pebble into a big web – it will fall right through because it’s not connected to the web and has no relation to it.

So, what do we do?
We make the complex simple by associating it to something we already know.

In other words, we make the abstract more tangible, and thus easier to understand. While this takes a bit of creativity, the time you spend on making associations and remembering them will be significantly less than the time you spend memorizing and returning to it when you forget it.

1) Association is a fairly general term in terms of using it as a study method. There are many ways to utilize it, from using mind maps and acronyms, to drawing pictures and creating stories.

You’ve probably ran into some already without realizing it.

Take the acronym PEMDAS which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, and Addition and Subtraction. Remembering those mathematical terms would be more challenging had we nothing to associate with, but since we all know the letters P, E, M, D, A, and S – we can make a connection between something simple and something complex.

Mind you that this is a simple example that can be taken to complex concepts. You may need to stretch your imagination a bit to create a connection but as Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

2) The Loci Method, in a sense, is association in practice.

Say you have a list of 9 words to remember – first, think of a place you know well, such as your house, apartment, school, or work place. You know where all the rooms are in relation to each other. (Avoid using a place you’re not familiar with as it would be tough recall it.)

Once you’ve decided on a place, say your home, and can visualize it, go ahead and place those words in different rooms, but associate unusual images with them – the more bizarre it is, the better you’ll remember it.

If the word “orange” is on your list, replace the TV in your room with a big glowing orange. Once you’ve spread the words out across the rooms in specific places(it’s okay to place more than 1 word per room, as long as they’re in unique locations), imagine yourself going from word #1 to word#9 in that place.

For example: 9 random words to remember: muffin-blaster, croissant, hair-gel, zombie, platypus, logarithm, snowball, snack-a-holic, orange.

As I open the door to enter my apartment, there’s hairgel on the knob and it gets on my hand. I take off my croissant shaped shoes at the doorway, and proceed to the bathroom on the left. There’s a platypus surfing in my bathtub. I go to wash the gel off and in the mirror and see a zombie looking back at me! I walk out, towards the living room and there’s a big orange TV glowing in the center – my roommate must be home. I go to the kitchen and see that snack-a-holic raiding the fridge. There’s nothing left in the fridge except a snowball. As I walk out, I get hit in the head with a muffin – seem my roommate has gotten his hands on my muffin-blaster I ordered online. I enter my room, look out my window and there’s a tree log that has exceptional rhythm, dancing to salsa – a logarithm!

The fact that you turn it into a story, associate bizarre images with it, and place the words into a familiar location reinforces those words several times over making memorization a lot easier.

More so, the effectiveness lies in using a familiar location in which you organize the list of data. You know where your kitchen is in relation to your bedroom, bathroom, etc. and based on that you know which room contains which set of data.

Take some time out and research learning strategies! Tell us what works for you!

How to Really Learn Chinese in Just Minutes a Day and Stick with it

The Myth

What if I told you mastering Italian wasn’t that hard. That actually learning the language itself is not nearly as difficult as you may have heard. And that the problem to progressing is an age old one…failure to execute.

The Real Issue

Said another way, “People don’t progress ’cause they don’t do! If you don’t do the work, you won’t reach your goals.”

Read the rest of this post »

Dear Chinese Students,

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of ChineseClass101.com. This is a joint project between Popup Chinese and the folks at Innovative Language Learning.

If you’re familiar with the Innovative Language approach to teaching, you’ll know the strength of their materials has always been tight, step-by-step progressive lessons for beginners. At Popup Chinese, we’ve historically geared our materials towards more advanced students, so when we had the chance to cooperate with the Innovative team and work together to build something that could take advantage of the powerful system they’ve already built we leapt at the chance, and began work designing a focused and stepwise program for Mandarin instruction.

Although a few hints leaked out (*ahem*), for the past few months we’ve worked somewhat stealthily to build the best team possible for the task. You’ll find our progressive beginner lessons hosted by none other than the famous Frank Fradella. Other big names on our roster are Amber Scorah and of course everyone on our existing team like Echo Yao and Brendan O’Kane. This is a great team and I can say with confidence I’ve never worked with a stronger one. With more than 100 lessons on the new site, our content is off to a good start too. As Frank said once after a marathon recording session, “our first twenty lessons here teach more than I learned in a whole year studying elsewhere.”

We think this is a great step forward and look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts as well. It is definitely a major step forward for Chinese language education online. There’s never been a better time to learn Chinese, or a better way to learn it online. Regardless of whether you’re an advanced independent learner or a total newbie, we hope you’ll enjoy the work we’ll be doing both here and at ChineseClass101. Thanks for your support, and 加油 everyone!

Best from Beijing,

David Lancashire

Best from New York,

Amber Scorah