Righteous indignation against the Economist

We've written about Ken Carroll's Chinesepod business before (and here). It's very interesting, well done and, as far as we can see, represents a novel take on technology and language teaching. Thanks to Fons Tuinstra, we see that Ken has started a blog and this post is a blast.

Like most of us, he holds the Economist in high esteem but takes them to task with great gusto over what he sees as a case of very sloppy reporting about Chinese teaching:

...this is probably the worst article I’ve ever read in the Economist. The writer seems to have put this together so quickly and superficially you have to wonder if he did it purely to fill a column space on a bad morning. As I said, I read and love the Economist, but this is appalling. Tell me this was written by an intern with a bad hangover, please!

The Economist article addresses what I think is an important topic: the value of the current "fad" (their word) for the teaching and learning of Mandarin/Putonghua. Read Ken's piece to find out what he thinks is the matter with the piece.

My concern focuses on the bad teaching of Chinese to unwilling kids by teachers whose main qualification is being Chinese. It's a reversal of the old problem with English-speaking
youngsters paying for their backpacking trips around the world by 'tutoring' English. Never has so much damage been done by so few...etc. If it's going to be done, it needs to be done much better and with much more careful thought.

It probably also needs to be done either much earlier or much later. Trying to drill 13 year old boys who are not interested in tones, China or Chinese must make for misery all round.

Let 100 Chinese language programmes bloom

OK, it's only 9, but today's post on Mobinode about online resources for learning Chinese is a great round-up. The main point?

Web2.0 is not just the social networks and the entertainment with videos, images etc, it is influencing every part of your life.

I would add that there are clearly business opportunities here and people making a living from this stuff. Also, these services, if they begin really to gain hold, will certainly threaten other, more traditional activities around language learning, whether it's selling books and CDs or running evening classes for enthusiastic beginners.

It includes Ken Carroll's Chinese Pod service which I use when trying to push along from that intermediate never-never land in which I find myself with Mandarin. I'm not familiar with the other 9, but they may be worth a look if you don't like this one.

Education 2.0

We may have passed on the opinion of one blogger earlier in the week that Web 2.0 was dead in China. I was very pleased, though, to see in this week's Economist how Skype and other decidedly Web 2.0-ish features (podcasts, RSS, etc. etc.) are being used to transform language teaching by one Shanghai entrepreneur.

I'm a big fan of Ken Carroll's ChinesePod service and use it to help brush up my Mandarin which has never been good enough to have got rusty. It's certainly making good use of the both the global interest in China and new technologies. Interesting to see that his company, Praxis Language, has also now turned its attention to Spanish.

This isn't a new story and ChinesePod's success has been well-reported. It's good, though, to see it hitting mainstream media and to hear that they now employ 35 people. Good for them!