Over in the "Starting Chinese Grammar" thread we began a project to convert the (sadly unfinished) websites ZhongWen Red, ZhongWen Green, and ZhongWen Blue into a google documents spreadsheet and a set of audio files. This thread documents that project.

These resources combined are perhaps the Chinese equivalent of Tae Kim, the first few hundred kanji of KO2001, or iKnow Core2k. ZWR/G/B can be used effectively as soon as you have finished RTH. It assumes no prior knowledge of Chinese, and will teach you high-frequency vocabulary and grammar structures.

If you would like to contribute to this project, please post here or email me to let me know which lesson block you will be handling. I will then grant you write access to the spreadsheets.


ZhongWen Red - Sentences
ZhongWen Red - Dialogs
ZhongWen Red - Audio TBA

Sentences:
1-3 :: mafried
4-27 :: dbh2ppa
28-30 :: mafried
31-40 :: ???
41-50 :: ???
51-60 :: ???
61-70 :: ???
71-80 :: ???
81-90 :: ???
91-100 :: ???
101-111 :: ???

ZhongWen Green - Sentences
ZhongWen Green - Dialogs TBA
ZhongWen Green - Audio TBA

Sentences:
1-10 :: deathtrap
11-20 :: ???
21-30 :: ???
31-40 :: ???
41-50 :: ???
51-59 :: ???

ZhongWen Blue - Sentences TBA
ZhongWen Blue - Dialogs TBA
ZhongWen Blue - Audio TBA

Sentences:
1-10 :: ???
11-20 :: ???
21-30 :: ???
31-38 :: ???

I know of a great but probably illegal project for Chinese learners: Going to chinesepod.com, downloading the learning podcasts and manually splitting them into sentences and putting in a spreadsheet with the transcriptions from the website. The sentences are read by natives and it's natural conversations.

Of course, all of those podcasts are obviously copyrighted so I doubt it would be legal. But man, what an AWESOME source.

Tobberoth Wrote:I know of a great but probably illegal project for Chinese learners: Going to chinesepod.com, downloading the learning podcasts and manually splitting them into sentences and putting in a spreadsheet with the transcriptions from the website. The sentences are read by natives and it's natural conversations.

Of course, all of those podcasts are obviously copyrighted so I doubt it would be legal. But man, what an AWESOME source.

I'm interested... Haha, Prosecute me.

I have solely almost completed a whole Anki Deck with Audio for Zhongwen Red in the last 2 days, I suggest that everyone just focus on the other 2 if you plan to use it in Anki because I plan on releasing the deck on this site as soon as I finish.

I plan to finish by next mon, or Tues., Since I'm flying into NYC next Weds, hell yeah
ITS VISA/MINI VACATION TIME!

Then on the 20th off to COMMUNIST CHINA! HELL YEAH! I mean the People's Republic of Communist China... ooops I mean just the People's Republic of China....

Come on guys, they're not that communist anymore, they just don't have human rights now, but they can still purchase and own shit! And you know what being able to buy and sell shit is more important than personal and political freedom!(I am not so sure political freedom really exists anywhere though, ふふ） Gotta love that Mainland!

But yeah Just wait, I'll have that deck soon, so I wouldn't stress over it since Im already about done with it, just get the rest done and that'd be great.

So what happened to this project?

I got really enthused to learn Chinese via this method, only to have a realization that makes me seriously doubt the validity and/or efficiency of the AJATT-style immsersion+SRS method. I am now experimenting with other techniques.

BUT, I realize everyone's needs are different, and there are many who would still benefit from this project. I got a very substantial contribution from dbh2ppa already, and I welcome contributions from anyone else who has time to work on it.

mafried Wrote:I got really enthused to learn Chinese via this method, only to have a realization that makes me seriously doubt the validity and/or efficiency of the AJATT-style immsersion+SRS method. I am now experimenting with other techniques.

BUT, I realize everyone's needs are different, and there are many who would still benefit from this project. I got a very substantial contribution from dbh2ppa already, and I welcome contributions from anyone else who has time to work on it.

Would you mind going into detail on that? I personally found AJATT to work amazingly well for Mandarin, especially when coupled with Chinesepod. (I know like... 20 sentences in Mandarin, and I've still been told by friends who are really good at Chinese that I'm better in many ways than some people they used to study with... so yeah, I'd say AJATT works even better for Chinese than Japanese, in my experience.)

i find zhongwen red/green/blue to be a very good source of sentences, but not for the complete beginner. the sentences are read way too fast, so it's very difficult for the un-trained ear to recognize proper pronunciation (specially since the tones aren't very explicit in natural-speed speech). perhaps after a while of acatt-ing it'll be easier, but for the complete beginner, it's somewhat of a waste of time. (unless you intend to learn the written portion of the language only, that is).

@tobberoth: how do you manage to get through the chinesepods? i find them so slow it's painful. and the amount of useless junk they speak about it's unbelievable!!! who cares about their noodle preferences? (i've only listened through some of the first ones though, does it get better as you advance?)

Tobberoth Wrote:Would you mind going into detail on that?

Not at all, although it's going to be one heck of a post so I'll open up a new thread for it.

Thanks for posting dbh2ppa, I was curious how useful you found ZWR/G/B to be.

dbh2ppa Wrote:i find zhongwen red/green/blue to be a very good source of sentences, but not for the complete beginner. the sentences are read way too fast, so it's very difficult for the un-trained ear to recognize proper pronunciation (specially since the tones aren't very explicit in natural-speed speech). perhaps after a while of acatt-ing it'll be easier, but for the complete beginner, it's somewhat of a waste of time. (unless you intend to learn the written portion of the language only, that is).

Some ACATT is all you need. My wife is Chinese, so I get that exposure "for free", but I haven't really studied the language otherwise, except for the hanzi of course. I've listened and tried to understand from context enough Mandarin that ZWR/G/B is comprehensible. I wish I could give you better advice than "marry a Chinese girl", but I hope something in that was helpful for you.

dbh2ppa Wrote:@tobberoth: how do you manage to get through the chinesepods? i find them so slow it's painful. and the amount of useless junk they speak about it's unbelievable!!! who cares about their noodle preferences? (i've only listened through some of the first ones though, does it get better as you advance?)

I'm not tobberoth, but I think you'll find the later lessons much easier to work with. They refined their method quite a bit over time, and it's much more usable now (assuming they use the same structure that FrenchPod/SpanishPod does now). If I were you I'd do the intro set, then skip to the current newbie lesson and work chronologically backwards. With the more recent episodes (of FrenchPod/SpanishPod) I find that they do a good job of "sticking to the facts, ma'am" for the first half, and then relegate the banter and cultural notes to the second half so you can stop listing when you like (which even if you like the banter makes it easier to review later).

dbh2ppa Wrote:i find zhongwen red/green/blue to be a very good source of sentences, but not for the complete beginner. the sentences are read way too fast, so it's very difficult for the un-trained ear to recognize proper pronunciation (specially since the tones aren't very explicit in natural-speed speech). perhaps after a while of acatt-ing it'll be easier, but for the complete beginner, it's somewhat of a waste of time. (unless you intend to learn the written portion of the language only, that is).

@tobberoth: how do you manage to get through the chinesepods? i find them so slow it's painful. and the amount of useless junk they speak about it's unbelievable!!! who cares about their noodle preferences? (i've only listened through some of the first ones though, does it get better as you advance?)

I just listened to the dialogues, using the site to understand and see the tones and kanji. Then I just put the sentences in Anki. Bear in mind, I only did like 5 lessons. RtK technique, color coding in anki and shadowing of the dialogues several times over makes Chinesepod a simple and fun way to learn. Since they have such a huge repository of podcasts, you can choose to learn exactly what you feel like.

Tobberoth Wrote:I know of a great but probably illegal project for Chinese learners: Going to chinesepod.com, downloading the learning podcasts and manually splitting them into sentences and putting in a spreadsheet with the transcriptions from the website. The sentences are read by natives and it's natural conversations.

Of course, all of those podcasts are obviously copyrighted so I doubt it would be legal. But man, what an AWESOME source.

Even better: if you have a premium account you can go to the"Expansion" page of each lesson, copy all the sentences and paste them into Notepad (just be sure to select them all at once and then copy them). You'll see that you get the sentences PLUS the direct link to the audio. I mean, how freakin' cool is THAT?!

I notice that the compilation of Zhongwen red wasn't completed, if you still need a volunteer, I'd like to offer my services. I'd like to finish compiling the sentences first.

I'm curious though, was there an automatic way to convert between traditional-simplified hanzi or did you just type in the pinyin using a traditional/simplified IME?

Any contribution is welcome. In the end dbh2ppa and I both decided that ZWR/G/B was not a wise investment of our study time at this moment, but this project is a resource that would be useful if it were finished. I'd be more than happy to accept any contributions.

As to the traditional-simplified conversion, I just used the service built into Mac OS X. It's not 100% reliable (not even close to that, I'd guess). But my wife is Chinese and I was hoping I could get her to proofread them. It's a bit much to ask her to review each contribution when it comes in (she doesn't know how to type Chinese on the computer), but maybe when the whole thing is done we can sit down together and do it.

@Ramsses: That is pretty cool, isn't it? The LanguagePod.com's are a great resource for SRS people.

Alright I'm going to start on Zhongwen Green because I like its structure and its going to be what I will start studying. I'm going to copy your format that you did on Zhongwen Red.

Hi, I've compiled a list of lessons 1-10 using the format you used for Zhongwen Red. It can be found here Zhongwen Green sentences

However, I found it extremely tedious to do this by hand so I'm just going to write a script to grab all the sentences and export it to a file. I'll post the file here once it's finished. If you could edit the original list up top to include this contribution that would be great. Thanks.

Thanks. It's past midnight where I am, but I will make the changes soon. The contributions are appreciated.

Ramsses Wrote:Even better: if you have a premium account you can go to the"Expansion" page of each lesson, copy all the sentences and paste them into Notepad (just be sure to select them all at once and then copy them). You'll see that you get the sentences PLUS the direct link to the audio. I mean, how freakin' cool is THAT?!

Even better: There is third party tools for extracting exact those sentences. WLCP, We Love ChinesePod, WeePod and Seepod.

http://www.seepod.net/

http://code.google.com/p/wlcp/

Instead of sentence by sentence I put the whole Dialogue from a ChinesePod.com into Anki along with the Dialogue MP3 and study like that. I have every single Intermediate level podcast in Anki in this way. Each dialogue is ony 1~2 minutes long so is short enough to make sure I know the meaning of every word. I'm moving on to Upper-Intermediate soon.

Maybe I will try and put it onto Anki pre-made decks. Last time I tried uploading a deck it failed though. Is it because the Deck is too deck - does anybody know?

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=4405

here's the finished anki deck, for anyone who hasn't seen this post.

haihao Wrote:Even better: There is third party tools for extracting exact those sentences. WLCP, We Love ChinesePod, WeePod and Seepod.

http://www.seepod.net/

http://code.google.com/p/wlcp/

The pages for these tools are a little confusing, I could not find a straightforward list of features. So, are they really capable of splitting the dialogs into separate sentences, or do they just download the whole dialog (and the related materials)?