You can sign up for a free one week trial of the paid subscription service. It gives you access to the PDF transcripts. Now if you are a really xiao3qi4 you can use a program like HiDownload (http://www.streamingstar.com/) which lets you generate URL’s based on a number sequence. If you observe the pdf transcript download URL’s carefully you will see they follow a pattern.
Anyway, I should highly recommend you pay for the premium service as they have lots of additional content and they work very hard to provide top quality chinese study material.
You can sign up for a free one week trial of the paid subscription service. It gives you access to the PDF transcripts. Now if you are a really xiao3qi4 you can use a program like HiDownload (http://www.streamingstar.com/) which lets you generate URL’s based on a number sequence. If you observe the pdf transcript download URL’s carefully you will see they follow a pattern.
Anyway, I should highly recommend you pay for the premium service as they have lots of additional content and they work very hard to provide top quality Chinese study material.
Cheers,
TiM[/quote]Thanks for posting this, Tim. Your post led me to try out Chinesepod at last. I like it. I’m going to work through the intermediate level first. I understand the gist of the dialogues but in each one there are a couple of vocabulary items that are new to me. It’s good for building my feeling for grammatical structures too.
Chinesepod.com has so many free things available, it’s more a public service announcement than an ad.
However, I’m pretty sure that the service is sponsored by the CCP, so that’s a Chinese public service ad.
All the same, the website does provide clear audio lessons for free to everyone who wants to download them. You can also get one free week, during which time you can download all of the existing pages. I don’t think that you’re supposed to download all the pages during your free week, but you can.
[quote=“twocs”]Chinesepod.com has so many free things available, it’s more a public service announcement than an ad.
[/quote]
One of the free things they have available (in the first week) is PDF transcripts of the lessons, however they are in Simplified Chinese. I love the site, but the subscribing wouldn’t be wise because of this problem. Aren’t there similar sites with traditional script?
[quote=“AAF”][quote=“twocs”]Chinesepod.com has so many free things available, it’s more a public service announcement than an ad.
[/quote]
One of the free things they have available (in the first week) is PDF transcripts of the lessons, however they are in Simplified Chinese. I love the site, but the subscribing wouldn’t be wise because of this problem. Aren’t there similar sites with traditional script?[/quote]
You can change the setting for the transcripts to be traditional Chinese.
[quote=“merge”][quote=“AAF”][quote=“twocs”]Chinesepod.com has so many free things available, it’s more a public service announcement than an ad.
[/quote]
One of the free things they have available (in the first week) is PDF transcripts of the lessons, however they are in Simplified Chinese. I love the site, but the subscribing wouldn’t be wise because of this problem. Aren’t there similar sites with traditional script?[/quote]
You can change the setting for the transcripts to be traditional Chinese.[/quote]
[quote=“Muzha Man”][quote=“merge”][quote=“AAF”][quote=“twocs”]Chinesepod.com has so many free things available, it’s more a public service announcement than an ad.
[/quote]
One of the free things they have available (in the first week) is PDF transcripts of the lessons, however they are in Simplified Chinese. I love the site, but the subscribing wouldn’t be wise because of this problem. Aren’t there similar sites with traditional script?[/quote]
You can change the setting for the transcripts to be traditional Chinese.[/quote]
Really? How?[/quote]
Once you’re logged in, click on the tab that says “Your Feed”. scroll Down to “Step 3” and click on the " PDF Transcript (Traditional)" checkbox. Be sure to click on the “Save” button. Then copy and paste the feed url into your podcast aggregator. You can then download both the transcript and the podcast.
I see that the website has changed a bit since the last post. I’m not sure if the feed information will be activated if you’re a free member, though. I’ve let my membership lapse since April, but I was able to get the pdf files in traditional characters before.
You may need to pay for a membership or keep digging around on the site. :s
The “My Feed” options are at the very bottom left of the page next to the orange RSS icon. You have to register/log-in to see it.
They DO have an option there for receiving traditional PDFs instead of simplified, but it wasn’t working as of last month. Even if you selected it, iTunes would only download simplified & the RSS feed option wouldn’t stay checked. Haven’t bothered again recently, so although they are aware of the problem, I don’t know if it’s fixed.
The other option, although slightly time consuming, is to spend your 10-day free trial period and go through each lesson on the site itself, manually changing the PDF URL. You get traditional versions by adding either “trad” before the “.pdf” (I think - maybe it’s “-trad”) or by viewing the text-only traditional version.
After figuring out the fastest way to cut & paste the appropriate URL changes, it took me about 2 hours to collect nearly all intermediate lessons, plus some other scattered ones that sounded interesting. Downside is that trad PDFs aren’t available for every lesson … for others, the text-only versions aren’t. I ended up w/about 70% PDFs & 30% HTML files (which is fine - less file space & they print on less paper). Kind of a pain, but not too bad to organize.
[quote=“Muzha Man”]Am I missing something? Where is the trad text-only links? I have a subscription but don’t see anything about trad transcripts.[/quote] At the bottom of each PDF page there’s a hyperlink back to the lesson on the site, and a smaller one in parentheses to “text version.”
Click the lesson link from the downloaded PDF. It should bring up that lesson on the Chinesepod site.
From the website, open the PDF (if you have their Firefox traditional/simplified plugin, it might bring up traditional automatically). If it opens the simplified PDF, you then need to manually add “trad” to the end of the URL before the file extension in your browser address.
Once the traditional PDF is open, click the “text version” link for traditional text. This page will be a “.html” page. You can, at that point, just go lesson by lesson, pasting “trad” or “trad.html” in the URL to bring up the appropriate page.
Would be nice if they’d finally fix the RSS problem - I got a response from them almost 2 months ago that they were working on it.
[quote=“sjhuz01”]The “My Feed” options are at the very bottom left of the page next to the orange RSS icon. You have to register/log-in to see it.
They DO have an option there for receiving traditional PDFs instead of simplified, but it wasn’t working as of last month. Even if you selected it, iTunes would only download simplified & the RSS feed option wouldn’t stay checked. Haven’t bothered again recently, so although they are aware of the problem, I don’t know if it’s fixed.
The other option, although slightly time consuming, is to spend your 10-day free trial period and go through each lesson on the site itself, manually changing the PDF URL. You get traditional versions by adding either “trad” before the “.pdf” (I think - maybe it’s “-trad”) or by viewing the text-only traditional version.
After figuring out the fastest way to cut & paste the appropriate URL changes, it took me about 2 hours to collect nearly all intermediate lessons, plus some other scattered ones that sounded interesting. Downside is that trad PDFs aren’t available for every lesson … for others, the text-only versions aren’t. I ended up w/about 70% PDFs & 30% HTML files (which is fine - less file space & they print on less paper). Kind of a pain, but not too bad to organize.[/quote]
The trad thing worked for me. Thanks for your advice!
This is a great find. What are some other podcasts that people like? I listen to the Serge Melnyk podcast. I am new to learning Mandarin. I started about 2 months ago and it is slow going!
I will unashamedly promote our own: popupchinese.com/voucher and entering the number 2008AOYUN. Full traditional support and no messing around with plugins.
Is there some way that somebody can take care of all the technical stuff and provide a link so that idiots can use chinesepod easily and for free like before? That is what I want to know. Thanks.
