Listening to chinese lessons on your iPod is a great way to enhance your learning of the language. The best way to do this is to sign up for an account with ChinesePod. The folks at ChinesePod are based out of Shanghai and they offer five different lesson levels: Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced.
Although ChinesePod has a number of subscription packages for different levels of access to the site, if you are a beginning Chinese learner, you can access all of their Newbie lessons for free. All you need to do is go to iTunes and search for ChinesePod and subscribe to their feed. They usually have a new Newbie lesson for you to listen to every week which you can then listen to on your iPod or iPhone.
The newbie lessons are quite easy to follow. The hosts Jenny Zhu and Ken Carroll are great teachers and they explain things at a slow pace for easy understanding. Each lesson consists of a dialog in Chinese, the dialog's translation into English, followed by a more in-depth discussion. Each lesson centers around some real world topic that you might encounter if you were ever to visit China. The podcasts average about 15 minutes in length, so you can easily finish listening to a complete lesson or two on your way to work.
If you are not a beginning Chinese learner and would like access to the more advanced lessons, you will have to pay a monthly fee. For five dollars a month, their basic package allows you to listen to every podcast they offer. With a premium subscription you will also get additional access to all the supplementary material like transcripts, dialog expansions, exercises and quite a bit more. ChinesePod does offer a free seven day trial, so be sure to take advantage of it and see if it will meet your Chinese learning needs.
Chris Fong is the author of the free and open-source chinese flashcard software ZDT. He is also a longtime listener of ChinesePod for many years and has found it to be a great help to him on his chinese studies.
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