Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen lots of changes to the website in terms of design and usability, though not all of them are admittedly obvious at first glance. Every week starting today though, we will be updating you with the latest site features and enhancements (major and minor) as well as sharing some ideas with you about future site projects.
Tag directory: for our business professional users, you can now use the business tag to search the lesson archive for materials most relevant to you. There are about 27 lessons corresponding to that tag as of today and it ranges from newbie to upper intermediate lessons. John and the rest of the academic team promises to add more in the weeks to come.
Character Writing sheet and Lesson Sets: you can now start practicing your character strokes by downloading and printing out your very own ChinesePod character writing sheet (found under the Learning Center > Resources Tab) as many times as you want. You can also use this while listening and browsing through the PDF transcripts of the 4 new lesson sets we just added. Go take a look!
Lesson suggestions thread: do you have a brilliant suggestion about a future lesson you’re dying to share with us? Well, we have created an official lesson suggestions thread in the forums (that will be checked every week) for you to start posting your lesson ideas there or you always have the option of emailing us at chinesepod@gmail.com.
-Eileen
Hello,
I have just signed up for chinesepod and am finding the site useful, especially the Vocab section. However I have a few suggestions which i know would be a great advantage for me. So i thought i would share them with you!
1) Auto log in
I wanted to make chinesepod.com my homepage but i found it quite inconvenient to have to tell my account to sign in everytime. THe internet in china is not amazingly fast and so visiting as few pages as possible is better i find!
2) The vocab ”advanced search” should be on the home page
Right now, as i visit this website mainly to look up words, i have to load the page, log into my account, click on vocab, then click on glossary, then click on advanced search.
I would love to be able to go to homepage and have either a direct link to the advanced search, or actually have the advanced search on the front page (for logged in users only of course)
3) Refer a friend program
I know you have the section for business affiliates. But wouldn’t it be great to reward people who refer friends to this site in a quick and easy way? It is the best way to get more users, as when someone is impressed they will tell their friends to register, just as i have done. For example when they register, they could put in the Email account of the person who refered them. Then if they make a payment, 10% commision or so is taken off the referers next bill.
4)
When viewing an individual word in the vocab section ( to see its pronunciation etc), i then need to click back on my browser to be able to search for a new word. Is there not a quick way to do this? I think the advanced search should definitly always be visible when in the Vocab section.
5) Build up a huge list of important one sentence expressions and phrases, then be able to search for all of the expressions that contain a certain word. THis would be great for having learnt a new word and wanting some examples of it’s usage.
These are not complaints, just comments! great site, keep up the hard word
Regards
James J
I hope you can improve your flashcard and its database. Some entries can’t be found, and some even if they are found, couldn’t be added to database. There was at least two occasions when all of my characters were wiped off when I switched default list.
A tiny chink from Cpod’s armor perhaps? Please, it’s my beef for two weeks already (Hi Colleen).
Hopefully, the most common characters (bigram included) would all be present in Cpod’s flashcard, i.e., most common according to Jun Da.
多谢！
Hi Brokensword and James,
Thanks for both your suggestions.:D Actually, there’s been a lot of talk lately about how to better improve the various aspects of the ChinesePod website and i think these types of feedback really help a lot!
I also share both your sentiments when you point out that certain things can be done differently and made easier as well. ChinesePod’s not perfect yet and there a few glitches that need sorting out but we are making progress everyday, I can assure you that.
I have two gripes about the wonderful resource that is ChinesePod
1: login to the main site expires way too quickly. I don’t know what the expiration time is, but I know it’s too short.
2: why is it not integrated better? Users have to log in separately to the main site, the forum, and the wiki, and comments on the main site doesn’t leverage the login name (or being logged in at all). This seems counter to the spirit of Web2.0. It makes the CPod community seem more like a mashup of separate communities.
Both of these comments are basically pleas to leverage the login process more effectively.
If you do nothing at all, it’s still one of my favorite site.
I second Greg T-K (谭一格) suggestion re: login integration across lessons / blog / forum / wiki..
Yv
Now i’ve been the using the site for a few days i still find it a great resource. But the account logging out problem is very, very annoying!
If i have the laptop on the site with the search field for looking up words during a lesson or so, i type in the word i want to know quickly. I then need to log in, click on vocab, then glossary then advanced search all over again because it has logged itself out.
I found i’m actually going back to the book for quick lookups
Normally, one complains about what has been taken away from a site. Not the things that were added. In this case, I’m wondering why Character Writing Sheets have been added. By adding this feature, it is a tacit endorsement that learning “stroke order” is a good use of a learner’s time. My guess is that the sheets have been added in response to requests by subscribers.
The reason this hits a nerve with me is that I’ve wasted hundreds of hours of practicing “stroke order” and have nothing to show for it. Not too long ago there was a thread on this site asking people if they were to give advice to someone learning Chinese what would they say. The first thing that came to my mind was “UNLESS YOU HAVE NO CHOICE, DON’T SPEND ONE SECOND OF YOUR PRECIOUS TIME LEARNING TO HAND WRITE CHARACTERS! INSTEAD, LEARN TO TYPE.” A few months back Ken did an excellent interview with a professor who said essentially the same thing.
I hired a Chinese tutor not too long ago. The first thing he did was pull out a character book. My wife when she was interested in helping me learn Chinese purchased a couple of character books (the kind elementary students use). It’s like a natural reflex for teachers to pull out the character book. I politely refused to use the books, explaining that I believe there is zero correlation between learning “stroke order” and improving my spoken Chinese.
I suggest the creation of “Online Character” books. Perhaps, characters with a box underneath, which would allow someone to type the character (using Pinyin input). At the end of the day, 学打汉字 is the way to go, whereas 学写汉子 has very little do with the teaching philosophy of Chinesepod (communicative approach, focusing on every day use of the language, the understanding that the time listeners spend on learning Chinese is limited, precious, and must be used wisely).
M-Phil
I think it is a matter of how much you want to learn. I have been learning Mandarin for some time now and find it quite useful to hand-write the characters. It gives me more knowledge and understanding of the language and how it is constructed. I also find it enjoyable to write in Chinese. My opinion has always been that if I am going to learn a language, I am going to learn all major aspects: Reading, writing, speaking, and typing.
MJP
Like Greg T-K and Groulnik I’m annoyed by the short login expiration time and the lack of integration between the main site / the wiki and the forum.
Another thing I really really miss is a search feature. In six weeks I ‘ve listened to more than 50 lessons so far, and I loved each of them. Then yesterday I tried to find the audio for “Please say it again”. It took me hours to find it, in “初级5 Useful Sentences #2″. As a database programmer, I can’t understand why the glossary does not link to the podcasts using the word. If you at least would offer a full text search over the transcript’s content… I’m a bit afraid of how (unfindable) everything will be when I’m with Chinesepod for more than some weeks. Will I have to write my own tool?
The way it is, Chinesepod can only be an additional tool for my Mandarin studies. A great one, definitely, but not *the one*. Just because I can’t find the stuff I did some time ago…
I see that you’re improving your site every week. I really hope for the search feature! Keep up your great work!
All the best from Berlin,
Anne M.
As others have mentioned, the number one (and I assume fairly simple) way to improve the website would be to have the login time last for longer. I have to log back in several times during the day.
Thanks,
Craig
Hi all,
Thanks for the great feedback! It seems that the auto log-in problem might stem from the fact that people type in chinesepod.com instead of WWW.chinesepod.com One of our forum users also encountered this problem and Aunty Sue explained that this might be the case.
As for all your search function requests, I will definitely looked into it and see if we could better improve on that!
M-Phil, yes, the character writing sheet was actually released because many of the users requested for it. I think you made a valid point but I’m still a firm believer in writing / practicing the characters, much like MJP. I guess I’m more old school that way.