Tuesday, September 16, 2008

ChinesePod, etc.

It's from awhile back, but I thought it worth pointing back to this post by Edwin on ChinesePod and company going paid. His essential point, as Heinlein would have put it: TANSTAAFL - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. ChinesePod's excellent podcasts were sort of an exception for a while: the premium content, of course, was charged, but the heart of the thing for many is the excellent podcasts, better in aggregate than most audio courses. Says Edwin:
When I look at the language learning market, it always amazes me how people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for language books, tools, and classes, but they expect everything free from the Internet. One thing I have found from the online language learning communities in the past year-or-so is that, free stuff has no good quality. Contents or services that are of good quality that are free are either being paid for by someone else already, or they are going out of business very soon.
Yup. Edwin also notes:
I would expect in the next few days, the Praxis servers will be bombarded by people trying to get their last “free lunches”.
Guilty as charged. But now I'm running out of FrenchPods and it is a distressing thing. I'm trying to decide whether to sign up for FrenchPod or ItalianPod, but it will be one of them this weekend.

Now that ChinesePod and company are paid, I'm getting requests to become an affiliate. And I'd love to, except that it's PayPal. It seems like I get fifty messages a week to check my PayPal account - all phishing, of course. So I quit using it. I've no idea when I last checked my PayPal account, and I love being free of the hassle. So I may become an affiliate if I feel up to the pain of the fuss. In the mean time, even though I'm missing out on the big bucks, I'd heartily encourage newcomers to check out the Newbie lessons and to, by all means, sign up. It's not that expensive and you'll get more out of it than most of the audio courses out there.

Visit praxislanguage.com for all your pod fun.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Kelly said...

I understand that it costs money to produce these podcasts and to be able to provide so many services to students from all over the world but I'm a bit disappointed that very little is now available to non-premium users. I used to listen to the Advanced and Media podcasts at Chinesepod but these are no longer available (and I admit I'm not willing to pay a monthly or annual fee to listen to a few podcasts).

I remember when Chinesepod had just started and how everything was free, even the PDFs. I remembered wishing that Chinesepod had been around when I was studying Mandarin as there was nothing like it when I embarked on my Chinese studies. I don't know if Chinesepod is really going to get that many new subscribers now that they've limited access to almost everything. Intermediate and advanced students are certainly going to be worse off and I doubt many of them are going to fork out the money for access to a few podcasts.

It's amazing how many companies have now jumped on the language podcast wagon, not to mention the numerous sister-sites that have popped up over the last few months. The Chinesepod and Japanesepod101 teams are really trying to outdo each other...

9:00 AM  

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home