My little wish-list for future podcasts –

(1) Brazilian Portuguese
(2) Dutch
(3) Irish Gaelic
(4) Punjabi
(5) Icelandic

Maybe one day, yeah?

ご無沙汰していました！(Sorry for the long silence.)

First thank you for all the feedback, both the positive and the critical. The positive helps drive us, especially when working and posting at 3am , and the critical helps keep us in check. We’re very lucky to have both from everyone.

Let me chime in and try to answer a few questions.

Regarding the type of Chinese:
We’ll be teaching Mandarin, with a Beijing accent.
Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect, so this was important for us.
Our team records in Beijing using professional voice actors for the dialogue.

Regarding the writing system:
We’ll focus on simplified, but include traditional.
You can usually find both in the same lesson notes.

Regarding advantages of knowing Japanese when studying Chinese:
As a student of both Japanese and Chinese, I would
say that knowing Japanese definitely comes in handy
more often than not.
I would agree there are confusing moments, but
overall I think it’s a definite plus for reading and understanding.
When I was studying in Japanese school, Chinese
students had quite an advantage in understanding
long written passages. *Interestingly enough, the large
amount of English loan words actually gives a native
English speaker an advantage when speaking on many topics
such as computers, once the level of Japanese
comprehension is high enough.

As for entering the Chinese market, there are
a lot of products out there. We feel we definitely
have a top notch product to offer.

In fact, it’s because the stars were aligned on this,
we were able to do this.

We’re lucky enough to be working with David from
Popup Chinese and Amber in NY….

Let’s just say we hit the jackpot!

Regarding unique aspects of ChineseClass101.com
Or what makes us special:

I would say that David at Popup Chinese had a lot of the
ingredients

1. Beijing Accent (this is really, really big)
2. Native Male Chinese host - one thing we try to always
incorporate here at JapanesePod101.com as we feel it’s
important for male speakers learning a language
learn to imitate native male speakers
3. Linear approach in which each lesson builds on the previous one
so you can progress in a step-by-step manner
4. Test preparation material (coming soon)

Regarding Other projects
Portuguese and Hungarian would be nice.

Final note, there is a good blog write up here by David here:
http://blogs.chineseclass101.com/

And lastly, thank you again everyone. I will reiterate once more.
We started 4 years ago with 1 desk in downtown Tokyo.
Thanks to the amazing support, praise, critiques, comments, e-mails and everything else our community has done for us, here were are at site number 11!
(Sean-san, 10.5 , but give us 6 more weeks.)

I really hope you know that we feel like we did this together.
So a big thank you from Tokyo, New York and Beijing!