Chinesepod vs Popup Chinese

[kelake]

I gave Popup Chinese a try recently and found the dialogs that I listened to quite entertaining - some even funny. It’s a nice addition to the playlist.

I’m driving upwards of 3 hrs a day these days and spend all that time listening to podcasts over and over ... I have no idea how much it is helping my conversational ability but it beats listening to the radio. I had forgotten about Chinese Learn Online, I think I’ll visit that site as well.

[DragonflyXingFu]

Annual Premium Subscription
CP = $250 PopupC = $100

Content
CP = Many lessons, pretty good, practical and useful, gets the job done. More features ( supplemental grammar points, structured tasks
[WINNER] PopupC = Also many lessons. Content seems more artistic and creative, unexpected and often really funny, perhaps a bit more philosophical.

Software Delivery
PUC = Acceptable but not great [Lacking sound software process, constantly buggy, no feedback, missing functionality] but in the end I can download the lectures and save pdfs of the dialogs.
[WINNER] CP = Excellent [excellent mobile apps for Android and IoS, professionally developed, well integrated ]

A big thing for me is to be able to manage 1000's of lessons and 1000's of vocab items which CP wins in this area with an obviously stronger software development staff. I think the mobile apps are excellent in that you can listen to a lesson and read the pinyin / hanzi --> expand the sentence into individual words to save into vocab lists and even hear a different recording of the same sentence. Each dialog based lesson has supplemental grammar lessons with the same structure --> example sentences with 'drilldown' feature. Well designed and very fecilitating.

As far as content, I could definitely see myself hanging out with the staff of Popup Chinese over CP.

Advice: considering the cost of tuition for a year buy a subscription to each, you will learn Chinese from these people. Both sites are active so support them so they can continue to grow!

[t.ukyo]

I have been using both for some time, although I only paid for one, which is ChinesePod. Actually, you don't need to shell out 250$ to get your money's worth at CP, I just took the basic package for 124$ a year, which allowed me to download MP3s and lesson PDFs. I personally don't need fancy apps to learn Chinese, I'm old-school. I listen to the MP3 and then sit my ass down and study the lesson at home.

My level was Upper-Intermediate/borderline Advanced, so that's what I studied. All in all I listened to maybe 500 of their lessons over the course of one year, and it was incredibly helpful to my listening comprehension. I think the lesson content is alright, certainly much better than your standard textbook fare.

Popup Chinese offers much less content for the advanced learner, and they lack an upper-intermediate level. I think the difference between the intermediate, where they still speak tons of English, and advanced, Chinese only, is too large.
The stuff they do offer at advanced levels is pretty good though, and the content is more colourful. As of right now, all I do is listen to their advanced stuff online every once in a while and that's it. I can't really comment on their paid advanced content though.

Overall, I would recommend CP over Popup, simply because they seem to have much more material, you simply get more for your money. If Popup manages to put more lessons out and maybe introduce an upper-intermediate level to make the jump to advanced easier, then I'd say they would be slightly better, simply because they are less "stuffy" and more fun to listen to.