How ARC Plus brings the newsletter to life
Learn more about how and why we create ARC Plus
Dear ARC Readers,
By now we hope you’re aware that we’ve launched ARC Plus, a weekly paid newsletter to help you turn ARC Newsletters from “something you look at” to “something you really understand.”
The decision of what to include in ARC Plus goes back quite a long time. Pete and I had many discussions about this. These are some of the themes we kept coming back to:
News stories can feel random; we want to help make the language stick and feel relevant to daily life
News stories are often written in more formal language, but we know that most learners want to continue to improve their everyday Chinese as well
While the topics we cover in ARC should be current, we want the language we cover to be mostly relevant for years to come
Reading is an important skill, but it doesn’t need to be completely divorced from listening (or speaking)
If you’ve seen ARC Plus, you likely know how we addressed these issues. But let me lay it out clearly:
The two dialogues in ARC Plus connect to one of the most interesting and/or practical “stories” from the week’s free newsletter. They’re often the ones that we know learners want to talk about, or maybe the ones they need to talk about.
The dialogues reinforce vocabulary from the week’s free ARC Newsletter, but are delivered in a colloquial style, similar to what you might overhear on the streets of China or perhaps what you yourself might want to say.
The dialogues approach the topic from slightly different angles, providing some linguistic repetition focused on the topic, but in ways that doesn’t feel like just the same thing over again.
The mini podcast provides discussion on a part of the ARC Newsletter that you might ordinarily not be able to hear. Whether it’s an analysis of an optical illusion or the connection of robot news to Skynet, this is the kind of thing that you might get from a cool Chinese teacher, but you typically don’t get from a textbook.
Of course, the team creating ARC Plus every week includes both me, John Pasden, and my partner Pete Braden, but also the staff of AllSet Learning in Shanghai to provide all necessary native speaker input and edits. It’s hard to believe that I’ve personally been creating dialogues for learning Chinese for almost 20 years, but it’s honestly more fun than ever.
We sincerely hope that you will join us in ARC Plus. We are creating something really special.