Along with the increasing internationalization of the Web, comes the language challenge. China is obviously a key Web and business market going forward, so there is currently a lot of interest in learning Mandarin.
As one solution to this, Ken Carroll recently contacted me to tell me about ChinesePod - the site he co-founded a year ago to teach Mandarin over the Web. He told me that ChinesePod uses podcasting, RSS, blogging - and other Web 2 technologies - to teach Mandarin Chinese.
Ken told me that ChinesePod has exploded in popularity over the past year - it’s had approximately 10 million lesson downloads.
ChinesePod beautifully illustrates how you can run a small, niche - but successful and moneymaking - business on the Web. ChinesePod offers enough free material to make it worthwhile for the casual visitor, but offers real value too if you’re willing to pay a subscription fee for tools and resources that help you learn Mandarin.
Ken Carroll on November 29th, 2006 at 1:48 am
Dane,
Good to see you picked up on ChinesePod. I would say that the potential for this approach is actually quite significant. It is much more efficient than the old way of producing language leanring materials - the audio-book companies need printing presses, advertising, mass distribution, and quite a few midedle-men. We don’t need any of that - we go directly to the customer.
The model could also be used to teach other languages.
Ken Carroll
ChinesePod
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