The word "podcasting" is a combination of "iPod" and "broadcasting," and a podcast is just that — on demand audio/video broadcasting for a personal media device or computer. Imagine if you could subscribe to your favorite radio or television show, have the episodes delivered to you automatically, and choose the best time for you to listen to or view them! This revolutionary functionality combined with the relative ease of creating your own personal podcast is the reason that podcasting has taken the Internet by storm.

The ChineseClass101 podcast is completely free of charge to download and listen to. We also offer many other features to enhance your learning experience which are only available to our Basic and Premium subscribers. See our Subscription details for more details.

All you really need is an Internet connection, and a computer capable of playing MP3 files (which is just about every modern computer). However, to take full advantage of the on-demand functionality of podcasts, a personal media device capable of playing MP3s will allow you to listen to our lessons anywhere, anytime. The most well-known device is probably the iPod, although there are many other similar devices. Some of our listeners even use their PlayStation Portable!

Again, all you really need is an MP3 player, such as Windows Media Player, Winamp, or QuickTime. However, to truly take advantage of podcasting, you will want to software specifically designed to take advantage of the features of podcasting. Here are some of the best options, both free and available for both Mac OSX and Windows:

• iTunes — This is the obvious solution for iPod owners. iTunes will handle your podcast subscriptions and allow you to update your iPod automatically upon docking. The iTunes Music Store will also allow you to easily find a large selection of other podcasts.
• Juice — Juice is a premium open-source podcast receiver available for Linux/BSD as well as Mac OS X and Windows. Juice has tons of features including a built-in podcast directory.

For iTunes, please click here

For Juice, you will need to manually add the ChineseClass101 feed URL: www.chineseclass101.com/feed.xml.

With over 1,000 audio lessons to date, our iTunes RSS Feed was getting a bit out of hand. As a result, we recently had to cut it back to the most recent 3 weeks of lessons and a few introduction ones. The good news is that you can still access many more audio lessons for free using one of the methods presented in our How to Save Lessons page.

This is the most recent lesson. Next to it should be an arrow; if you click this the rest of the lessons will drop down below. You'll just need to click "get" to download them.

While our username field is not case sensitive, the iTunes username field is. For this reason you'll need to enter your username exactly as it is. For instance, "Example" or "example" will work in our login, however "Example" must be used in iTunes.

In order to hear the audio clips used in the above Premium features, you must have the appropriate Macromedia Flash Player installed for your operating system and browser. To download the free Flash Player from the Macromedia website, please use the link below:

Download Flash Macromedia Player

If you are on Max OS X and have a Flash Player installed, but still cannot hear any of the audio clips on Safari or Firefox, please follow this workaround:

1. Go to Applications\Utilities\Audio MIDI setup
2. Choose the Audio Devices tab at the top if it's not already there
3. In the drop down box next to "Properties For", choose "Built-In Output." If you have some other output, choose that.
4. Next to format, make sure it's set to "44100.0 Hz."
5. If you don't have surround sound speakers, make sure the box next to that is set to "2ch-16bit."
6. Close that window and everything should work now.

You may read more about this workaround here

In order to view our videos, which are in M4V format, you need to have QuickTime installed on your computer. You can download QuickTime for free here: https://www.apple.com/quicktime/download

If you are unable to get QuickTime to work, we strongly recommend that you try the VLC Media Player from VideoLan which can be downloaded for free here: https://www.videolan.org

Try updating your PDF reader (Adobe Reader, etc.) to the latest version,or downloading the appropriate language pack for your reader (your software should prompt you to do this when you try and open the PDF.