I really enjoy listening to every episode of this podcast. As an American heritage learner, I have some background in Mandarin but appreciate the opportunity to immerse myself even more. Thank you for including specialized vocabulary and giving specific examples where phrases can be used. I also have some suggestions for improvement and future topics. I read some other reviews that also mentioned this, but I’d find it more challenging if the hosts only spoke Mandarin. I understand if for beginning levels, it is helpful to have someone speak in English. However, especially for the upper intermediate lessons lately, it might be better to only speak Chinese. I’d also like to suggest topics that are also suitable for younger listeners. I respect the writers choosing topics that might be used by adults like the Love Tangle Series, but might I recommend choosing conversations that could be used by high schoolers as well, or simply featuring younger characters. I completely respect Chinese Pod’s topic choices and truly appreciate all the work they put into this podcast. I don’t know the target audience or the average age range, but I’d just like to say as a high schooler, I would appreciate content applicable to my life now. Again, thank you so much for putting this podcast together and for getting to the end of my review. Please continue your good work!

It’s really too bad that they take this approach. Going back-and-forth between English and Chinese while learning is pretty counterproductive. This is well-established in the language learning community. I understand the need for comprehensible input, but this can be done in many ways. Granted, it is harder in a sense for the educators to try to speak in a comprehensible way and describe what they are saying using Chinese. But that is what makes a good language teacher. The effort should be going teaching the teachers how to speak comprehensibly and use the target language to explain the target language. This should definitely be possible at the intermediate level most of the time . In those times where you must absolutely use English, make sure it is as little as absolutely necessary, and you never actually say something in English that you could say in Chinese.

After living in China for a few years, I returned to America to find that there were very few Mandarin speaking opportunities. This podcast has been so helpful in keeping my mandarin proficiency at a decent level. I love challenging myself with the Upper Intermediate!