I'm very pleased to announce that I've taken a position as "course designer / script writer" at Yoyo Chinese. I've only been doing it for a little while so none of the lessons that I've written have been posted yet, but I'll probably refer to some of them in the future.It's been really great to work with Yangyang (the hostess and CEO) because, even though I'm the one writing the lessons, I'm still learning a lot. The process goes something like this:

1. Yangyang writes an outline of the language points she wants covered and gives a bunch of example sentences.

2. I write a first draft of the actual script for the lesson.

3. She edits / corrects the script.

4. I say, "Really!? Cool! I didn't know that!"

5. I rewrite / polish the lesson.

6. She films it.

It seems to me, now that I've written a few episodes, this is probably the ideal type of collaboration for teaching a foreign language: the native speaker (Yangyang) supervising and presenting the material with an experienced learner of the target language (me) designing the presentation and providing sympathy for the learners. It's been fascinating so far.Like many of the high quality podcast / video lessons out there, Yoyo Chinese is a paid service. But there are some sample videos you can see for free on the site including topics such as Chinese word order, an overview of pinyin, some learning tips.Also, I recommend looking at some of the free reference materials Yangyang has written including ten common mistakes we English speakers make when learning Chinese.As one final thought I just had to share this musical language lesson Yangyang posted on Youtube (I don't have anything to do with the youtube channel).