• My Chinese listening goal for 2012 – Majority of Chinese dramas are too fake, too dramatic or too cute for me, but I have manages to find one show I like. 裸婚时代 is about young Chinese adults who face lots of pressure from the society and from their parents to live a life that is expected from them.
• Embarrassing Moment: How Not to Impress Your Girlfriend’s Mom – As part of our Embrace the Embarrassing Moments series, FluentFix features a reader’s story about an embarrassing moment from when they were learning Chinese.
• AllSet Learning Launches Chinese Grammar Wiki – AllSet has entered the tech realm by launching a Chinese grammar wiki. The wiki, which contains explanations and examples of Chinese grammar points organized by level of difficulty, is licensed with a Creative Commons license.
• A Simple Way to Track Your Progress – How do you measure your Chinese progress? I have often wondered whether my Chinese was improving or not. Here is a simple method to track your progress.
• China Has 250 Million Microbloggers – China has more than 513 million internet users, and nearly half of them are using microblogs (collectively called weibo). Have you found a way to use weibo as part of your studies?

• Chinese Musical Genres: a bluffer’s guide – China’s musical genres have never solely been based on style. They usually describe geographical differences but can also extend to lifestyles, access to technology and the needs of state propaganda.
• The Question of Chinese Language Podcasts | Chinese Hacks – When compared to languages like English or Japanese, the selection and variation of Mandarin content, specifically targeted towards students of the language, or even native speakers, just doesn’t compare. Dave asks, @Are there any good Chinese language podcasts?"
• All Together Now: The Annual 春运 Craziness Begins! – As the largest human migration on the planet, 春运 is one of the most important and most interesting events of the year in China. Starting this week, Chunyun is a stressful, crazy, and altogether very unique event, so it's a perfect topic for this week's ChinesePod Weekly!
• Choosing a Chinese Teacher – Greg shares the process by which he chooses his Chinese teacher(s).
• Abandoning Simplified? – Apparently, some scholars from China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea got together recently to discuss the unification of all the character sets into one standard set.

But, there is some hope. I was recently given the chance to try out a new video based service from Yabla, which promises to be “the most affordable way to study Chinese.”

Based out of New York, Yabla actually has a number of language learning sites available; Spanish, French, Italian, German, English and, importantly for me, Chinese.

Yabla offers access to “Authentic Chinese” content through a specially designed video player. The player combines a number of features to aid non-native speakers whilst watching TV shows in the language they are trying to learn.

The Yabla Player

Features include:

• Slow Play
• Dictionary
• Chinese, Pinyin, and English subtitles
• Keyboard shortcuts for easy access to stop, skip and repeat phrases
• Games to test your listening and writing

At a first glance, these features may not sound particularly innovative, but I found myself using them more than I expected. After watching a couple of shows using the Yabla player, I started to find the online audio player used by ChinesePod (my current language learning site of choice) to be frustratingly limiting. Being able to pause and repeat phrases with a single keystroke is an absolute godsend whilst my brain tries to catch up with the native speaker.

Yabla is heading in the right direction, but there are a couple of things that I think need addressing before it really begins to take off.

The Player

The Yabla player is what sets the site apart. It is clean, un-cluttered and nicely laid out. However, despite being HTML5 (a Flash player is also available) I wasn’t able to get it to work reliably on my iPad.

The dictionary lookup is fast but I found myself unable to concentrate on the video whilst looking up a word. Perhaps the player needs to pause as soon as you lookup a word in the dictionary to allow students to focus on one thing at a time.

I’ve never been a fan of slow playback on any audio player. One of the main reasons being that everyone tends to assume that slow has to mean really, really slow. When you slow speech down significantly it becomes distorted and hard to hear. This is even worse if the speaker is speaking in another language. That said, I do feel that there is a place for a “slow” feature. I suspect you could reduce the speed by a much smaller fraction, say 10%, and still make things significantly easier for the language student without distorting the speaker’s voice. Far more useful for me though, would be an entirely different implementation of the “slow” feature. I would like the slow button to continue playing the video at normal speed, but to pause at the end of each phrase to allow me to catch up. Don’t slow the audio down, just give me time to process what I’ve heard. I haven’t tried this out yet, but suspect it would feel more natural than someone speaking at 50% of their normal speed.

The Content

Yabla sells itself as a Video Immersion tool and its success will undoubtedly depend on the ability to keep adding new content. However, it is content where I feel Yabla has the most room for growth. There is no doubt that the volume of content will increase with time, but it would be really useful to be given more details about each of the shows that are available.

Some of the things that would make great additions to the Yabla content library include:
- a weekly news summary
- top new singles (music) in China
- top online videos (and why they are popular)
- links to original videos (for sharing and discussion)
- a brief introduction to the shows in English/Chinese

One of the things I struggle with as a language student is finding new, entertaining and accessible content. It is easy to search for things on Youku or Tudou, but knowing what to search for is probably the hardest part of the challenge. Yabla has a great opportunity to help on two counts here: First, their innovative player can increase the accessibility of content, but second, they have the opportunity to help language students identify appropriate content. It is the latter where I feel Yabla needs to focus their efforts next.

Yabla Chinese currently has 134 videos totalling 8 hrs and 18 minutes of content available in their archives, with the promise of regular new content available to all subscribers.

A Top Tool?

You can head on over to Yabla Chinese yourself and try it out with some of their sample videos. Yabla costs £6.50 ($9.95) per month for an individual subscription, but this reduces to £5.44 ($8.33) with an annual payment. For you subscription you gain access to the full catalogue of Yabla content.

But one question remains, Is Yabla ready to be included on my Top Tools for studying Mandarin Chinese? In short, I think the answer is, not yet. But, Yabla is definitely one to watch. As it continues to develop, I expect that a few tweaks to the player and continued additions to the content archive will see Yabla grow. There is definitely an opportunity here to disrupt the Chinese language learning market.

• Fighting Pirates and Building the Great Wall: 戚继光 – This week's ChinesePod Weekly, takes a closer look at the life, times, and death of 戚继光, born 424 years ago today!
• Resolutions – New Years resolutions get a lot of bad press. People say that resolutions are destined to fail.
• Topic prominent East Asian languages: explanation & guide – If you’re studying Chinese, Japanese or Korean (or Vietnamese, Malay, Mongolian, Indonesian…) you’ll quickly discover that the word order of these languages doesn’t seem to obey the same rules as that of most European languages.
• Mandarin Tone Changes – It is important for beginners to memorize these rules because textbooks will often not remind you.
• I have sexy legs! – A great way to practise your Chinese is to get a massage from someone who only speaks Chinese. What could possibly go wrong?

• Chinese grammar – I'm forever finding the 是…的 construction and misinterpreting the meaning as emphasising a completed action. This simple guide should help to explain this relatively simple construct.
• Review: You are the Apple of My Eye – If you want to understand what Chinese high school was like, then you should watch this movie.
• Top 10 Dream Vacation Spots of 2011 – What’s your ideal getaway? Using data from the past year, Baidu has compiled a list of netizens’ top 10 dream vacation spots (梦想之旅). The list includes 汉字 and Pinyin names for all places.
• Punning in the New Year – Welcome in the new year Mandarin style with some Chinese puns. I'm not saying they're good.

Tummy rumbles will never be the same again.

Source: Word definitions from MDBG

• First Chinese Lesson | anniegurumi – Annie has her first Chinese lesson and discovers that excitement (and I suspect passion) goes a long way when learning Mandarin.
• 5 Useful Techniques for Productive Mandarin Self Study – Studying Chinese in your spare time whilst living outside China and holding down a full-time job is no small task. Dave from Chinese Hacks shares some tips on how he manages.
• Mandarin or Dialect? « Thousand Mile Journey – Is learning Mandarin easier than learning other Chinese dialects? Here is one argument to say that it is.
• Shamed by Stinky Tofu – A trip in search of Stinky Tofu shows that without regular practice, even those of us with "advanced" Mandarin can struggle. New Year Resolution #28: practise Mandarin relentlessly.

Chinese Stack Exchange

It still appears to be in its infancy, but if the other Stack Exchange family of sites is anything to go by, has the potential to grow into a useful resource for all Mandarin learners.

http://chinese.stackexchange.com/

hold住, hold zhù

Persevere, stick with it

反正我信了, fǎnzhèng wǒ xìnle

Regardless, I believe it

伤不起, shāng bù qǐ

Too delicate to bear a blow

死了就不用写作业, sǐle jiù bùyòng xiě zuòyè

“I don’t have to do homework if I’m dead.”

一潘, yī pān

1,000 yuan per square meter

卖萌, mài méng

Purposefully try to appear adorable

互粉, hù fěn

The 互 from 互相 (“each other”) and 粉 from 粉丝 (“fan,” as used in micro-blogging terminology), combined to mean mutual fans

有木有, yǒu mù yǒu

To have/not have, same as 有没有

吐槽, tǔ cáo

To call someone out on something

蜗婚 wō hūn

Snail wedding, when a divorced couple continues living together

The full list and explanation can be found on the original post on Baidu Beat: Baidu’s Top Ten New Internet Phrases of 2011

Much of the new vocabulary fits very firmly in the specialist category, but one word in particular stood out as puzzling.

杆位, gānwèi

pole position

Individually, these characters break down as follows (see MDBG):

杆, gān

stick / pole / lever / classifier for long objects such as guns

位, wèi

position / location / place / seat / classifier for people (honorific) / classifier for binary bits

This confused me, I was certain that the “pole” in “pole position” meant first. I don’t know why, but I’d assumed that pole was one of those words that had multiple meanings in English. I couldn’t understand why the Chinese would translate this literally as, “stick position”. It turns out my assumptions were wrong. The “pole” in “pole position” really does mean stick / post.

From Wikipedia:

The term “pole position”, as used in motorsports, comes from the horse racing term where the number one starter starts on the inside next to the inside pole. The term made its way, along with several other customs, to auto racing. In circuit motorsports, a driver has pole position when he or she starts a race at the front of the grid.

I may be making slow progress at learning Mandarin, but at least I’m improving my English along the way.