Learning Mandarin and Spanish by MP3 and Skype

Travel Blog • Julia Ross • 06.13.07 | 2:45 PM ET

Learning Chinese is a long road: After nine months of full-time study in Taipei, I’m still grappling with getting my tones right and suffer the occasional blank look from the clerk at my local 7-Eleven. While I’ve learned grammar and characters in the classroom, I’ve found another, less traditional source a big help with day-to-day conversation: Chinesepod.com. It’s the go-to site for most Mandarin students I know, offering free, daily podcasts that introduce dialogues on useful topics like how to break up with your boyfriend. Lessons, given by podcast “hosts” who banter like DJs, are downloadable in MP3 format, so you can drop them into your iPod and go; more devoted students can sign up for voice lessons via Skype.

This week’s Economist gives Chinesepod a well-deserved nod for transforming the “old technology” of classrooms and books into “language learning 2.0.”

Notes the magazine:

The customers are everywhere from Berkeley to Alaska and the Vatican. In the past, when language instruction—along with haircuts and massages—was a “non-tradable” sector of the economy, many people would not have found a native Mandarin speaker as a teacher in their town at all. Now they need only a broadband connection.

Non-Sinophiles, take heart: A sister site, Spanishsense.com, has recently come online, and additional languages are in the works.

Photo by myuibe via Flickr, (Creative Commons).