Improved my listening from beginner-to-intermediate after a month!
With a month of use so far, I've gone from listening to Advanced Beginner to Intermediate level ! The "goal progress" bar also does a good job persuading me to clock a full 30 minutes (sometimes I'm tempted to quit early after one 15 minute intermediate video, but the progress bar nudges me to finish my time (I choose Advanced Beginner and Lower Intermediate episodes). I do still listen to the "easier" levels. With "Advanced Beginner", I challenge myself to only watch the video and not follow the Chinese character script. This is a very good program of videos! The variety of speakers also helps against "fatigue" (not watching the same person talk for 30 minutes / day forever). I also study Japanese, but the material I use for Japanese is "scattershot" across YouTube making it more difficult to find. 1) I must search for the Japanese videos on YouTube 2) I must interpret what level the video probably is 3) and I must deal with YouTube ads. To close the review, I will say I was already "Advanced Beginner" level in Chinese, but that was primarily in reading Chinese with extremely poor listening comprehension. Xiaogua Chinese has enabled me to advance from needing Chinese subtitles even for raw beginner spoken Chinese to being able to follow Intermediate-level conversation by ear after about a month (of daily listening for 30 minutes / day).