Chinesepod.com: Learn Chinese on your iPod — free

Sure hope Steve Jobs doesn't see this 'cause if he does he's gonna stroke out, what with Apple's recent cease-and-desist salvos against those who would use the word "pod" as part of a product or service description.

43-year-old Irishman Ken Carroll, who first went to China 12 years ago to teach English, is the creator of a popular Shanghai-based website that offers free lessons running from 10 to 15 minutes long, with five different levels of difficulty.

All you need is a computer and a portable digital music player: once downloaded, the lessons are yours to do with as you wish.

Launched in September of 2005, Chinesepod is already one of the top five podcast sites in the world, with over 200,000 monthly visitors and five million downloads to date.

In an article in this weekend's Financial Times (FT) correspondent Kwan Yuk Pan interviewed Carroll about his website and what the future holds.

Long story in one word: "Englishpod."

Here's the FT piece.

In search of a pod of gold

For westerners who struggle to hit the right note even in karaoke, learning Mandarin — the language spoken by most people in mainland China — can be daunting to say the least.

Mandarin is a tonal language, so the slightest mistake in pitch can radically change the meaning of a word. For example, the word "ma" can have four different meanings depending on the tone. A slip of the tongue and one could end up saying, "My horse is picking me up from school" or "I want to ride on mother".

Yet for all the perceived difficulty in learning a language that is made up of more than 4,000 characters, interest in Mandarin, or Putonghua, has never been greater.

Thanks to China's growing economic might and perceived future global influence, countries from South Korea to Kenya to the US have been pushing to make Putonghua an integral part of their language curricula.

According to the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (NOCFL) in Beijing, there are approximately 30m people learning Mandarin and the agency is looking to increase this number to 100m by 2007.

However, this audacious goal could be hampered by a dearth of teachers. Even as Beijing moves to establish a series of "Confucius Institutes" — along the lines of the British Council and the Alliance Française — to promote the teaching of Mandarin abroad, the demand for qualified instructors is quickly outstripping supply.

In this context, it is inevitable that somewhere an entrepreneur sees the future of language learning as web-based.

With Chinesepod.com, 43-year-old Dubliner Ken Carroll is betting that podcasting will turn the language-teaching industry on its head. The site, which was launched last September, offers daily Mandarin audio lessons that users can download and listen to for free. It is already one of the top five podcast sites in the world, boasting more than 200,000 visitors a month and 5m downloads to date.

For Carroll, who first went to China 12 years ago to teach English and is now based in Shanghai, podcasting offers the economies of scale that he finds lacking in traditional bricks-and-mortar language schools.

"The economics of language schools are quite harsh," he says. "Here in Shanghai, for example, a language school would need a large premises in a downtown location, which means high fixed costs. Then you need to bring teachers in from abroad. And that's expensive."

Also, classes have to be small to be effective and there are other inefficiencies that constrain language schools. "For example, in the case where language learners are working adults, they prefer to take classes in the evenings. If you're not careful you can end up with your classroom space sitting idle for most of the day," Carroll says.



By contrast, podcasting, with its low entry costs and fast turnround times (especially compared with traditional publishing), is a way to distribute high-quality education to the world cheaply.

"Instead of thousands of teachers, you only need one good teacher to reach an audience of potentially millions," he says.

To understand the appeal of Chinesepod, one has to go to the website, where every day Carroll's Shanghai-based production team dishes out fresh Chinese lessons on subjects that range from the practical (haggling in the marketplace) to the fun (learning the latest urban slang).

The lessons run from 10 to 15 minutes each and are divided into five different levels. To tune in, all a user needs is a computer and a portable digital music player. Once downloaded, they can be consumed anywhere, at any time.

For Chris Hall, a 39-year-old computer programmer from Bristol, part of the appeal of Chinesepod is that the podcasts resemble a lively radio segment more than a language cassette.

"It's not stale like the audio tapes that accompany a textbook," he says.

Equally important is the online social network the site has created. Not only can students leave feedback via e-mail, they can also use an internet phone service such as Skype to contact tutors and discuss the stickier points of Mandarin with other students on a blog.

"The fact that you have a community of people out there, both Chinese and non-Chinese, helping each other out really brings the material to life," says Hall.

Having used Chinesepod for only six months, Hall harbours no illusions about becoming fluent in Mandarin by listening to podcasts alone. However, he does credit it with deepening his interest in the language.

Dr George Zhang, director of the Chinese language programme at the School of Oriental Studies in London, believes that while technology can enhance language learning, it can never replace the classroom experience. "The personal interaction that a student gets from working with a trained language teacher is irreplaceable," he says.

But for all its limitations, Chinesepod is slowly attracting the interest of those in traditional language education. As a sign of the site's growing success and influence, Carroll has recently been invited by NOCFL and Beijing's Qinghua University to work on ways of promoting the study of Chinese culture and language abroad.

The site has also inspired a host of similar enterprises, which demonstrates the fact that podcasting can be a successful business model.

Chinesepod's podcasts may be free but the group makes money from selling extra teaching materials. Transcripts of the lessons are available for $9 a month, while interactive materials such as flashcards and supplementary exercises require a premium subscription of $30 a month.

Despite Chinesepod's success, Carroll says the real money will come from using the same technology to teach English to the Chinese.

"Englishpod is the gold pot," he says. "The amount spent by the Chinese to learn English probably outstrips Anglophones learning Chinese 1,000 times."

Given Chinese wariness of paying online and the lack of an iTunes culture in China to drive podcasting forward, this segment of the market will not be developed for another four or five years, Carroll says.

He remains optimistic, however, noting that the Chinese government has said it will need 1m English teachers to meet the huge demand for learning the language.



"They'll never be able to meet that demand," he says. "Podcasts will stand out as the perfect solution."