I have been listening to lessons 61-68 on CD during my commute. Last night I went through all of the online material for lesson 63. I am impressed. I like the pace and the level of repetition. It seems like a good learning approach.

I think this is perhaps a good starting point for me. I picked lesson 63 because of the dialog (61 and 62 seemed to be review). I liked the online review questions about the dialog. I need to also work in some flash card exercises so that I can get some focus on character recognition.

Kirin is great. Her voice is clear and she is easy to understand.

I stumbled upon this excellently programmed podcast back in Spring and I am ever so glad that I did, because I think it is one of the major reasons for my improved listening ability. One of the things I believe Stanford’s program doesn’t get right is the listening speed. We learnt grammar properly, vocabulary was good and we spoke about as fast as beginners at our level ought to, but we sucked at listening. This is because the teacher always spoke at a slower-than-normal speed which we could easily understand.