There is another new site to learn the Mandarin language, along with Chinesepod (I wrote about it earlier). This one is China-8. I think online education business model is the way to go.

China-8 has gone all out and built a web OS for their service, it’s cool concept but is it necessary (I am still not ready for the web OS or web office apps). It’s obviously still in beta as it has issues when using Firefox but works fine on IE. I also had problems with character encoding but that’s could be on my end. Another picky thing is the Login was hard to find, never knew it was in the Start menu. I think they could offer more useful freebies, like lessons and vocab for those who aren’t ready or chose not to sign up. Even after signing up for the free service, I was left with a small number of options. I can’t discuss much further on this service unless I fork over the USD, which is very disappointing. They should allow people be able to test drive your site for a limited time, to see what they are getting themselves into, kind of like Chinesepod.

By far, Chinesepod does a better job with their service and it’s not perfect by any means. From my experience, learning any language requires interaction and immersion and currently, you cannot get that by fiddling with your mouse and keyboard or speaking to your monitor or listening to your iPod (unless you happen to live in that area in which case, the service is more useful). A very few will be able to pick up the language by using these online services, but I guarantee most won’t. It’s just an assistant that builds up the users’ recognition for the language and could help them if they choose to seriously learn the language.