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!