“The Chairman’s Bao” is a website that gives free access to many interesting news stories in Chinese with sound files. I am using their stories to make private lessons. New stories are added to the site almost every day. These lessons have helped me to break a boredom barrier that was slowing down my learning. Anyway, I have attached a link to one of these lessons that I have put up as a shared lesson. In this lesson I have added the TCB word list and grammar notes. I don’t usually do this, but I had a sentence in this lesson that I needed the grammar notes to understand the sentence. I added the notes on the main lesson page so I could see any LingQed words. I don’t have permission to make all my lessons public, so I have just put one in.
I was skeptical when it first started because of it’s use of “HSK levels”. I think focussing on the HSK is, generally speaking, a huge waste of time for Chinese language learners. I’m also not a big fan of intermediate content - better just to get to native content earlier.
But the real genius of TCB is in providing a lot of consistently engaging content, with audio and transcripts, and to do so in a way that approaches native content levels.
The biggest hurdle with Chinese, imo, is finding engaging content, and TCB is a great resource for consistently interesting content.
Hope they can stay afloat. There have been a number of really good sites for Chinese learning over the years that never made a successful long term business and have unfortunately fallen away.
Yes, let’s hope they continue. Four new stories today! Slow Chinese seems to only produce about one story every three weeks.
I don’t bother with the “HSK levels”. I read most of the stories and am finding that the number of words I can recognise from the written text and my understanding of the spoken text is gradually improving. As yet, I find that native content generally takes me a lot of time for a small return. I do, however, keep trying. The hover-over translators such as the Perapera pop-up dictionary are a great help.
Yeah, native Chinese content is tough to get into. I used slow-chinese and the Wolf and Huahua series to bridge over to it, but that was a really long hard road.
I basically spent a year working through just those - and five years ago there wasn’t really much choice with content. I then started putting together the SBS chat radio transcripts which helped me a lot.
These days I mainly just use native TV and radio as resources, but even now some shows are tough for me.
viki.com is a great resource for accessing native Chinese TV shows and their transcripts.
Hello synetic707, my name is Matthew Carter, Founder at TCB. As much as I love that you find the content evidently engaging and useful, redistributing our content without stating it’s source or linking to it without permission is illegal. I don’t want to have to have you take it down as this is not my nature - I merely would like you to link back to the source where the content was found whilst stating who we are and what we do for each post. Linking to us, and writing a mini-about us under ‘Provider’ is ok. Please email me at matt carter at thechairmansbao.com for this mini description.
since I stopped using this website (lingq) yesterday, I decided to delete the lessons - it should not be accessible anymore.
I will keep that in mind next time. Thanks for creating thechairmansbao.com, I’m using it daily
Matt has asked me to remove the lesson above from public circulation, as I have not had his permission to put it up. Therefore I have removed the public rating of the lesson. I am hoping to be able to put articles back on after I receive permission from Matt. To give us permission to use his wonderful resources simply for acknowledging his work and providing a link to his site, I would regard as a very generous act on his part.
I’ll let everyone know what’s happening when I get my next reply from Matt.
Whilst the service remains free, I do not mind Just please link back to each and every article and state who we are and what we are about. After all, we are a learning resource and so I don’t want to take action to impede on people’s learning. Please email me if you have any questions or issues with this.
Thanks very, very much Matt. I have now shared 22 lessons. I’ve added the link and statement to each lesson. Hopefully sharing these lessons will benefit your work as well as LingQ’s band of keen Chinese learners.
Just please link back to each and every article and state who we are and what we are about. After all, we are a learning resource and so I don’t want to take action to impede on people’s learning. Please email me if you have any questions or issues with this.