Discovering V3

News

April 13th, 2007

As we go through the day you’re welcome to post your ‘discovering V3′ observations.

1. My first insight for you: The Saturday Show can be found here: http://extra.chinesepod.com/

2. A question: “Im having bit of a problem finding my lessons from previous site. If I look at the lessons in the explore section, it shows individual lessons as bookmarked and scheduled. But when I click lessons and lesson list it says You currently have 0 lessons to study. Any ideas?”

Short answer: You have to schedule them first.

If you have questions or observations you want to share, please feel free to do so here.

Ken Carroll

Posted in Uncategorized

145 Responses to “Discovering V3”

AuntySue Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 7:15 pm

Will it be possible to see what lessons are coming up in the next week or so?
chinesepod Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 7:21 pm

Aunty,

This will be possible but perhaps not this weekend. On the case, though.

Ken
海宁 / Henning Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 7:36 pm

John said:
“Vocab and Glossary are all there… we’ll work on explaining it better in the “what is this” link.”

This might indeed be answered by another learner:
Anyone found the Glossary already?
LostInAsia Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

Not sure where to comment on this, but may as well be here: why have you chosen to cut the numbers out of the podcast names? I quite liked the old organization system of Newbie #59, Intermediate #34, etc. All my podcasts/ MP3s/ PDFs/ flash cards are organized using this. If I’m the only one who used those numbers much, I guess it’s not a big deal, but I suspect I’m not the only who’s going to be continue counting for their own filing systems. (I’ve never found the “total number”, at #484 and counting, that useful because I’ll usually delete the newbie from my iPod after one listen, and keep others around for review–organizing by level works much better for me.)

Having 菜鸟120 also makes reading the file name a lot easier–by the time my iPod displays “Upper Intermediate-”, there’s not much room left for the other text on the display.

Also, I’m happy to see the Advanced welcomed back, but I do have one suggestion: keep it Chinese-only, fine, but give us a teaser/ summary in English. The advanced is difficult for me now, but if I’ve got some easy-English motivation, maybe I’ll push myself and go through it. (I’ll duplicate this suggestion in the advanced section.)

Oh, and the positive part: it all looks great!
Cornelia Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 7:48 pm

Hi!
I have some questions concerning my wordbank:
1. Could I customize how many items I want to see one 1 page? I always prefer scrolling down instead of navigating onto a next page… so I would want to maximize that.
2. Is there a faster way to navigate within my wordbank? currently I find only that I can hop in 5 pages back or forth, which is pretty cumbersome with ca.50 pages…
3. Is there a way to assign tags to a selected bunch of vocab? Currently I found out only on a 1-per-1 basis… again cumbersome for a lazy person like me 4. With flashcards I did not manage to get any audio, clicking on the speaker icons just does not bring any reaction. ???

I always appreciate outlook-feedback even when it should be “might be tackled within a month from now”.
I also understand if I can just put an entry to next X-mas feature wishlist such would be: if I want to enter vocab to my wordbank and it is already there that you auto-assign an additional tag “really needed to learn” (as she even does not remember that this is already part of her wordbank….)
jim Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

Here is my only gripe with the new site so far… (sorry to focus on the negative right away - the rest looks fine though!)

One of the advantages of the former site’s blog-like structure was that it made it easy to see which lessons had been published in the last few days, *regardless of level*.

I currently listen to all the ChinesePod levels, but I also tend to go for a few days without listening to a single lesson, and then come back and listen to all the lessons I’ve missed, often four or five in a row. I know, I’m a freak - but hey, it’s “Mandarin on your terms”, right?
Anyway, I used to be able to just scroll down on the main page or the Lesson Archive page and continue until I found a lesson I had already listened to. I don’t think I can do the same thing on the new site (I may be wrong though). I would have to check each level one by one, which is a bit of a hassle. Not a huge deal, mind you, but definitely a step down from the previous site in terms of usability.

So, would it be possible to add an “All Levels” tab on the new “Explore Lessons” page (http://chinesepod.com/learnchinese) ? Having the lessons by level is nice, but it shouldn’t be the only available approach.

Thanks for listening!
P.S.: Obviously, the above also applies to the SpanishSense web site…
海宁 / Henning Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 8:37 pm

Can I search for users? I’d like to add some to the watchlist who, err, did probably work today instead of exploring V3.
AuntySue Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 8:55 pm

Henning, can you feel my little finger linking around yours? Now close your eyes and make a wish. I was asking exactly the same question. Can I look up a mate who should be here by now? Or would doing that leave us too open to spam list gatherers?

Oh yeah, later on could we have a link added to the page where we read private messages? “Report inappropriate message” Simply click it and it sends a copy of the message to you guys so you can evict the naughty person. Nya-ha-ha-haaa….
Tom Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 9:02 pm

Hello.

I first want to say, this site is an improvement. I was just looking into software that would help me organize my learning…and you just added that great Calendar feature. Great!

I have a few comments:

1) I really liked the numbering scheme for the Newbie section before. It was very easy for me to know what came next, and it provided me a clear linear path for my learning. I feel this is critical for the Newbies, because at my level, I need to be able to build, at least for the first 20 lessons. Would it be possible to number the first 20 as an experiment?

2) Is there a view that shows a summary of the lessons I have been working on, like the My Courses view (I think that was what it was called). This is not critical though.

Overall, the site is a lot snappier on my slow internet connection. I’m going to be playing with it this weekend.
Thanks,
Tom
TapioT Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 9:59 pm

I think the best feature of V3 is that it encourages studying the lessons by themes instead of following a chronological order - I have listened to the Newbie and Elementary lessons in order, but the Intermediate ones take me so much effort that I have decided now to choose a topic and just follow lessons on that.

Since I have listened to a few episodes on “relationships”, I thought it would be fun to follow what is happening between Lili and Zhang Liang. This series teaches, among other things, useful sentences such as “you are my best vitamin” and “the best time of the day is when I am with you” - I even practiced writing the previous one.

However, the latest Intermediate lessons is called “The Breakup.” Will the series now be over? Will CPod ever again come up with another fruitful topic like that - I imagined I even would be able to follow Chinese soap operas after a while.

So today when I opened Chinesepod I had both a pleasant surprise and a huge disappointment… Please bring Lili and Zhang Liand back together!
海宁 / Henning Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

The link between the vocab and the lessons is a really cool feature - especially since it covers all levels. It works unexpectedly smooth and efficient and really is a lot of fun.
Marc Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 10:48 pm

There is a lot wrong with the ‘lesson list’ ’scheduling’ system. I have already submitted a bug report, but there is more. I just discovered that in the lesson list only the lessons that are scheduled for today show up! I relied a lot on the old feature to be able to pick lessons and ad them to a list for later study, then I could go back to that list of favourites and choose a lesson at random or not, whatever I felt like. Now I have to schedule the lessons first, which is impossible because my list is too long and the thing won’t scroll, then there is no labelling, no way to access the list apparently, and loads of other stuff. This has been a very frustrating day for me sofar.
Dan 冬阳 Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

I wanted to agree with a couple of the comments above - I much, much prefer having the lessons numbered by level. I do them in chronological order and now it is a lot more time consuming to get to the lessons I want (i.e. about halfway through the Intermediate lessons). I also liked having so many lessons listed at a time on the archives page - with my slow internet connection it takes longer to look through the many pages of older lessons trying to find the next one I want to download, especially as they are not numbered. Also, I liked having a welcome page that listed the last several new lessons, rather than just one. However, the “connect” feature looks interesting, and I like that the file names are now organized by level when saved.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

This is all useful. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to point this stuff out. We’ll try not to let you down.

Ken
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 11:09 pm

Okay … finally found the blog. The link could be a bit more prominent.

Ken … bundling CPOD and SpanishSense into a Praxis level was a brilliant business decision. I was on the line, but the discount pushed me over.
Cornelia Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 11:27 pm

Has somebody found out yet how to subscribe to dialogue-only within iTunes?
I just hope there is something more convenient than right-click on the dialogue-only mp3 on the webpage, save it somewhere on my disk and add it manually to iTunes later (which will be “music” then i.o. “podcast”)…
I am also a fan of seeing the numbers per level as prefix of the title in my iPod.
If possible I would opt for subscribing per level, dialogue-only full lesson together. Separate would not be an issue.
All levels thrown in together would be one for me, especially when the level takes all the title-space before real distinguishing content/lesson no. would be visible.
Auntie Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

Bad! BAD!! I guess I’m probably just tired — it’s been a long day –. but V3 is driving me nuts because I can’t seem to be able to find the lesson of the day (Advanced). How do I find that? Where is the lesson archive? Not having lesson numbers is very disappointing because it makes it difficult for me to organize my PDFs/ MP3s. I gave up giving feedback when the various new features were being introduced on the CPOD blog, because it seemed as if none of my concerns were actually addressed, so I guess I only have MYSELF to blame…

Still, thank you everybody for CPOD.
Auntie Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 11:47 pm

I am really too tired and frazzled, will try again tomorrow. At this moment, I am really missing being able to call up the list of lessons for each level. Being able to skim through such a list — provided the lesson titles are well-written, as they always were before — helps me to PRIORITIZE my language learning.

It’s like being able to consult a menu. Some topics are interesting to me, some aren’t. And what is not interesting today, may be interesting tomorrow (depending on how much time I have). I know that V3 encourages us to dial in what topics are interesting to us, but I also know that a helluva lot of learning took place because a lesson topic caught my eye, and I decided to dive even though it hadn’t been on my list of priorities. And have never regretted that. When I’m busy (like now), I just don’t like the feeling of floating aimlessly around in a arbitrarily selected level until… until what?

Sorry for my grumpy mood!
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:07 am

On the issue of numbering, it would be nice if CPod could provide the lesson numbering correspondance between v2 and v3. Meanwhile, here’s an OpenOffice list I’m building for myself (work-in-progress, about 1/3 done so far).
LostInAsia Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:24 am

Trying to imagine a first-timer… (sorry, this is long, but it just kept growing!):

So I sign in (incidentally, is it my system or yours that makes relogin needed painfully often?). Since I want to study, I go to… Study. Ok, very nice, there’s a bunch of stuff, and a Newbie lesson, but I’m not a Newbie, so I’ll look at other lessons. So I’ll go to…

… lesson list. Oops, I’ve got to pay for this. Let’s try…
… Continue lessons. Oh, that just takes me to the same screen. Ok…
… Lessons, at the bottom. That looks promising. Oh, paid content only.
… Latest Conversations? Those sound like Chinese practice. That gets me to… “Tagging vocabulary”?! What the heck is that, wonders the new guy to the site.
… Continue Lessons, in the bottom menu? Oh, same place again.

Ok, I’ll try the Newbie lesson anyway. Ah, here we go, that looks clear enough. But weird, thinks the new guy on site. (If he’s lasted this long.) Is only one lesson easy to find? Do I have to SEARCH to find the other ones?! What a weird system! How do I even know what to search for?!

I, having been around for a while, knew there had to be that list of podcasts SOMEWHERE and eventually found it under “Explore.” I really think that’s too arcane: for a while I thought there was some bug hiding the lesson archive. I did go through those above steps, and I KNEW what I was looking for; imagine someone new to the site, who would probably wander off and wonder how a site could have developed such a good reputation with only one lesson easy to access.

By tomorrow I’ll be used to using “Explore” to find the lessons without any difficulty; I’ll renew my subscription within the next day or two and the other Lesson menu items will work for me. What worries me however is the Newbie to the site. It seems to me “Lessons” should lead to lesson lists, and “Explore” should be for miscellaneous extra stuff.

A possible solution: in the “Study/ Continue Lessons” page, there’s a gorgeous blank space below “Today’s lesson.” How about using that to list 3-4 “Recent Lessons”, and a link to “Complete Lesson Archive”, which would go to the same place as the “Explore” tab above? If you’re really seeking the minimalist look, just add “The past week’s lessons” and “Complete Lesson Archive.” I think SOMETHING like this is necessary: right now, a first impression of the site suggests ONLY the most recent lesson is available as free content.

Oh, and all the “Paid content only” sections: perhaps you should explain a little more clearly what that content IS, instead of just barring the door. Sure people will get this with the initial free time, but if they’re not lured a little, they may not get that far.

The paid content only sections come across as a little unfriendly, especially for those with slower internet connections. People don’t mind being promptly told “No”, but they get awfully annoyed at waiting and waiting to hear “No.” Might it be better to, on the lesson page itself, indicate what’s free, and what requires basic and premium subscriptions? I realize this will add clutter, but I think you did this pretty well before. It looks like you’re trying to color-code the two MP3 downloads, although blue vs green certainly isn’t intuitive for me. (Actually, I still don’t get it.)

While I’m at it, on the dialog page, when you’ve got the picture and the play button below it: somehow make the “Listen to Dialog” button more prominent. I suspect lots of first timers would arrive at the page, promptly click the dialog tab, discover it’s paid content, and then go away, thinking that for free they could only find out the topic of the dialog.

Blimey. I hope this is at least somewhat useful to you and doesn’t just come across as disaffected rambling.

Good luck with what promises to be a very very busy weekend for you all, and thanks for all the hard work you’re putting in!
tessajp Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:36 am

LostInAsia, THANK YOU!! You have perfectly encapsulated the problem I have been having ALL MORNING. Why is it so hard to find the lesson archives? It is not at all intuitive or clear. Clearly, V3 is geared toward the premium content subscribers, and I certainly understand the business decision behind that. But new people are never going to get sucked in the way they did with the old version. I have spent my morning very very aggravated, and I have been lurking around ChinesePod for a year. If I was just checking it out, I would have walked away by now assuming it is a pay-for-content only site that doesn’t make it easy to get started!

I also wish you would bring back WoS to the main page–I find it very annoying to have to click through to get most of the content now. Again, its not clear where WoS or the Saturday Show is–I only found it in the blog.

And finally, I miss the “Most Recent Comments” box–it was useful to see the conversations that were still ongoing about old lessons.

I enjoy Chinesepod a lot, and the product is great. I know your team put in a huge amount of work on this, and there is promise here, you just need to make it more intuitive.

Tessa
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:12 am

GRIPE 9999 - I’m going to start this off. Anyone else feel free to join in, when we get to zero, no more griping.

9999. New photos. I really hate the new photos that accompany the lessons. I can get stock images from stockimages.com. I liked the old hanzi, I liked the red, the tie-in to Chinese culture. It aggravates me looking at the screaming guy for the Breakup episode.

9999b. You even took away the old lesson images. That bites. The Feng Shui lesson image has some candles…that blows.

9998. I’m in China. I figured that’s a good way to learn Chinese. But I only get 5 kbs download speeds for Chinesepod V3. You try waiting 20 min to 1 hour to download a podcast. It hurts. It’s not fair. Please more cheese for my whine.

9998b. Listening Test. I stopped and clicked away at 3%. I doubt I’ll ever get to use it as long as I stay in China and don’t go to Shanghai or Beijing. I’m not going, even though they have Starbucks and Hagan-Daaz. Did you know HD is American and it’s not even a German word?!

9997. Recent Comments. Did this go away? Is it in Connect? What will I do now all day?

9996. Lost. It takes a lot of ‘exploring’ to figure out V3.

9995. Comments Gone. 中国的股票市 The old comments went poof.

9994. Bookmark Button is like so CRT, Win 3.x-like ugly.

9993. Get a Grip. It’s kinda late, I really should just go to sleep and stop griping. 做好梦晚安.
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:23 am

9998 China download speeds. I just want to attest that my download of today’s podcast is at 55%. See this post timestamp to see how long it’s taking. I pay for the highest, best broadband speed available here. There’s no taiwan earthquake for me to blame now. Can I blame the Olympics?
pharmine Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:43 am

LostInAsia,

In my system too, relogin is needed ‘painfully often’. I think this requires a little adjustment.

Regarding your proposal that ‘Lessons’ should lead to lesson lists and ‘Explore’ should be for miscellaneous extra stuff, I can’t agree more. In this respect, I have the impression that V2 was more user-friendly than the current V3. (For instance: the number of clicks you need to get a PDF transcript of a recent lesson seems to have increased in V3, i.e. Home - Sign in - “Sign in” button - Explore - Intermediate - The Breakup - Dialogue - Dialogue PDF Download)

The problem is that the top page (http://www.chinesepod.com/) gives no practical information as to how the whole site is organized. It stands as an obstacle to a labyrinth of ChinesePod Archive.
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:50 am

9992. Where’s the Wacky Wiki? I’ve clicked a lot, click click click.

9998. 86%
Mike B Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:48 am

General feeling of discomfort and angst. Everything was working awesome before, is it too late to go back to V2?

Like everyone else I hope you keep the old lesson numbers. I often go back to the old lessons, and I have files with notes on them, based on the lesson number. When I need to refer to the premium materials I go to the web page and look in the archives, so I need to be able to look the lesson up by number.

Another thing, try looking at the community page, the one with the community photos dropping onto the page with some sort of animation. Cool eh? Now try to read the text on the page. Can you read it? I try, but then 1/2 second later another photo comes whooshing down. What was I reading? Oh yeah the text up in the right hand corner. Whoosh, another picture of Jenny. Um what was I doing again.
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:04 am

iTunes isn’t updating for me. I’ve heard someone else say it was working for them. I dunno.
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:29 am

My remarks:
1) iTunes doesn’t download the new lesson
2) No trad. char. PDF, no trad. flashcards, only exercises may be switched to trad. chars. Worse than before.
3) The Google CP RSS feed shows : “For you, and you, and you” (old), “Didn’t Hear Clearly” (old), and “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” (today): why this order?
4) Tedious loading of lessons to the “lesson list”: first to bookmark, then to schedule.
5) The numbering scheme is gone - so I have to reorganize all my files…
6) Old links to lessons (from blogs etc) don’t work. It schould be possible to supply redirects from the old URLs to the new. The old embedded player objects don’t work either.
7) Vocab export to iFlash doesn’t work.
I expected a better start…
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:32 am

What sort of bothers me about the navigation is that even when I find things, it’s like I’m only finding them by resorting to techniques the designers didn’t intend on me using — like I’m find sneaky ways to bypass procedure. Example … I want to browse through Elementary lessons to see if anything catches my eye. Can’t find any discernible link, so I enter gibberish in the Search engine to get to a page that has actual categories and such. But I can’t just browse there either — I have to enter something into a new search field — the letter “e” in my case — to bring up a hefty selection in some order I can’t fathom.

Why are we making things so tough and counterintuitive?

I’m GUESSING that the idea is to break people of the notion that lessons have a chronological significance.
Bob Mrotek Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:48 am

Well, here is a comment that probably won’t win me any friends. Perhaps I am just marching to a different drummer or maybe I’m just being honest but I think that this new version is a disaster
Eric Grimm Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:55 am

Wow, the look and feel of this place really changed. Is this really “Chinese” pod? Where is the Chinese? I miss the lesson banners, the logo and the site header. There are other things I miss also, but this is the most noticeable.

I know you guys have your hands full getting the kinks out of the new site, but I would really like to know what you were thinking in terms of abolishing the Chinese feel of the site. Did you do some market analysis, use focus groups? Did you survey current and potential users about their preferences?

There must have been some people inside chinesepod who resisted these changes. Didn’t Aric or Jenny or John stand up and speak eloquently about how Chinese language and Chinese culture are interwoven and that the site should reflect that? How did you all resolve the competing possibilities? Was it all a decision from the top? Did you take votes? Did you hire an outside firm to do the makeover? I not am trying to fine someone to blame … I am really interested knowing more about the process
Paul Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 6:55 am

In my opinion, Version 3 is not really a disaster…its just that the format is different and the site navigation is not as user friendly as the previous version. I can still find the Lessons and the other features, but the V2 design was better in terms of both cosmetics and functionality.

Judging by many of the responses, a lot of poddies are not too thrilled. Maybe it just natural tendency to resist change. Once the bugs are worked out, maybe people will accept it more.

I don’t understand why the Chinesepod team had to make this kind of wholesale re-design of the website. If i were the big boss, i would have kept V2 as is and simply added the improved learning features.

Maybe CPOD should do a review of website design and determine what constitutes “best practices”. Waiting patiently for Version 4…:)
Steve@ChinesePod Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 9:56 am

Lantian,
We’ve actually designed the site to be much quicker to load and open files. We’ve upgraded the servers too. Not sure why things are slower for you…must be the Olympics. As for the Wiki, it’s in the community link in the footer.

Mike B and Fu Dawei,
Persevere - I think once the initial disorientation wears off you will find that the new site is much easier to navigate. Finding known lessons is a cinch with the new lesson search. Archive browsing is also still a click from the homepage, in Explore, but we’ve improved the layout and added some filters. You can still find lessons through the tags too.

Bob and Paul,
We had to do a fundamental redesign to support some of the powerful new features on the site (for example the new ability in your vocabulary list to access every lesson in which each word appears). Our main goals in the redesign were simplicity, usability, and download speeds. We feel the minimal design aesthetic is in keeping with this. We took a lot of design inspiration from Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’, and if you’re familiar with the book you’ll see that we’ve implemented many of his usability recommendations.

Still, we’re not saying it’s perfect, and as ever all feedback is welcome.
敦禮 Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 10:13 am

Will we be able to use Chinese characters for our user names?
LostInAsia Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 10:20 am

I like Eric’s point above: there isn’t much Chinese anymore, is there?! None of the characters that at first seem magical and then start to take on meaning, until you’ll never look at Chinese tattoos the same way again. I won’t get Taiwanese people in Starbucks looking over my shoulder and laughing in recognition anymore. There goes that source of input…

But a question: how have the lessons been reorganized? Your total number of podcasts for each level varies from mine. I noticed The Monkey King (formerly old 高级16, back when advanced had English) has re-appeared in Upper Intermediate; the other levels all have fewer podcasts than I do. I suppose this may be another reason that the numbers have been scrapped–oh, I should look and see if the infamous Calligraphy lesson has been moved up a level or three!–but I still think the lack of numbering is going to make filing a nightmare for lots of us.

(I think a lot of these issues revolve around whether we base our learning ONLINE WITH CHINESEPOD, or if we download stuff from ChinesePod and use the material on our own computer. If you’re doing everything through the site, the new features are great; if you visit the site every few days to collect new things, then leave, it’s more annoying. I’m one who so far has done everything through my own computer, mainly because I use traditional characters and also because of internet connection speeds. I guess an analogy would be how GMail abandoned mailboxes; some people like that system, but it gives me a headache.)

Back to the usability: certainly the site will quickly become easier to navigate as we all gain familiarity with it. What worries me, however, is the newbie who will be confused and won’t stick around long enough to figure things out.

And I do like the more community-based aspect, where lots more is done through your login ID, but I’m rapidly getting tired of re-entering my password every 20-30 minutes! (I still haven’t figured out if that’s something I should be changing on my system. Checking off “remember my ID and password” certainly does no good.)
Ken Carroll Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 10:36 am

Bob,
Your qualify as a kind of ‘feedback VIP’. You’ve been offering constant and valuable feedback for months and sow we most definitely listen to you. My hope is that in a week, you’ll get over the shock of the new and see the benefits of the V3 approach.

Eric,
There won’t be any structural changes to the site for some time, but we can use more Chinese-like visuals in the graphics in future.

Ken
likealocal Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

Some of the comments refer to the newbie user - hey that’s me! I never really got started on Chinese Pod before. I’ve been listening to the podcasts since 4 weeks ago, but I never used the old site - i just download in itunes and organise my own way. I decided to get involved with the website today and to my surprise it has changed. So, i’m a NEWBIE! (BUT some of you know me - Ken - we met briefly before at the CPOD party at xintiandi in january, and I wanna say hi to jenny, colleen and aric. Aric -when are u gonna help me make a likealocal video - did you see my last effort for crayfish.)

Ok, my comments about the site:
1) At the top where it says: “Study | Explore | Connect | Help” I think you should change ‘explore’ to ‘find lessons’.
2) When I go to the study schedule and see the calender, I have a long list of bookmarked lessons (which I didn’t bookmark). This list has about 30-40 lessons - they are not organised numerically, nor alphabetically - how do i find what i want?
3) Following on from (2), How do I un-bookmark a lesson?
4) Agree with what everyone said about the lesson numbers - please resurrect them if for no other reason then it makes me feel closer to you guys because I can see how much more professional you get in the studio as the numbers get higher and you’re more experienced.
likealocal Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:34 pm

Ahhhh…. I just wrote a long comment and then something went wrong when I had to type in a code - there was no code picture…..That is SOooooooooooo annoying.

Do I write it all out again….ok, in brief, i’m a kind of newbie, ken, jenny, collen, aric, bob, you all know me - hi. Love CPOD but never used the site until today - and today you changed the site - ahh.

I have some gripes. Please change “Explore” to “Find Lessons”. When i go to ‘explore’ and click my level i want to see all the lessons - i prefer to scroll down and down and down like alice falling in the rabit hole - i don’t mind how far down i have to go - it’s much nicer than going page after page after page. Also, my list of bookmarked lessons is weirdly about 30-40 long already - when i go to the calender to schedule them i can’t find what i’m looking for. How do i un-bookmark lessons, and why aren’t they listed alpabetically, or in some order i can clearly navigate.

ok that’s it. This time i’m gonna copy and paste this text before i hit the submit button. Fingers crossed that won’t be necessary this time.
Eric Grimm Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

Hi Ken,

Thanks for the reassurance, but I am more interested in how a change like this evolved. What was the management strategy? How successful do you feel this change has been? What are the learnings? What sort of testing did you do before the site was launched? Did you do any usability studies? Did you ask any of your key users, such as Bob, Henning, Frank or Lantian to take it out for a test drive before locking into the plan? If not … why not?

I am sure we will all love the site once you have worked out all the kinks, but the real story is in how it happened, not what happened.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:28 pm

Eric,

Yes, we ran some tests and we gave access to some users in aedvance. The fact is, however, that the whole thing was essentially customer driven. We gathered huge levels of feedback over 15 months, so we tried to mold that into an overall approach. The tests we did in the closing weeks were more about tweaking than structural change, or the process would have gone on indefinitely.

A tad too busy to go into the management process right now, but maybe in a week or two!

Ken
Brian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

I second the comments regarding ‘exploring’ old lesson content. And I’d also like to see a list of my bookmarked lessons somewhere besides that calendar. I know the calendar is supposed to be a nifty way to keep yourself on task, but in the past I’ve always been a “when the mood strikes me” sort of ‘poddie’. Some days I do 3 lessons, other weeks I do one. The ‘list’ format of the old site worked well for this, and I’d like to see something similar… and get the feeling its probably around V3 somewhere and I’m just not finding it. So I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that for a bit longer.

Another gripe - I’d like to be able to manipulate more words in my vocabulary section. For example, deleting words - I’d like to be able to select a whole mess of them to delete at once, as opposed to clicking that little garbage can over and over… I’ve decided that I’m going to go back through some of the older lessons and start my studies from scratch - that is, review the dialogue only MP3’s and be a bit more selective with what words I add to my word bank. Before I just added willy-nilly and its resulted in me having a large and cumbersome list half filled with words I could care less about for the time being. The thought of deleting those few hundred odd words one by one isn’t very appealing.
敦禮 Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

藍天，你真是有幽默感的人．

9991
Seems like a lot of the concerns shared in blogs before the launch of v3 were not considered.

9990
“Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’” said Steve@chinesepod

How are we ever going to learn Mandarin if we don’t think?

Why have the Chinese used rote repetition for thousands of years when it comes to reading and writing Chinese?

Watch an elementary child in China doing their nightly homework. That is part of what it takes to learn Mandarin. This learning Mandarin by osmosis theory is really out there and rather misleading. There are connections learning romance languages with this theory, did Steve Krug’s work include consideration of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese? Is he a sinologist?

9989
The absence of Chinese characters in this new version just makes the goal of learning Mandarin all the further away.

10017(by LostInAsia)
I further LostInAsia’s grip about the discarding of the lesson numbering system.

9988
I am having to work to find out how to download the pdfs. I have yet to find out how.

9987
Still no traditional characters. (This grip came out earlier, but I restate it here to accelerate the grip count down)

9986
Why can’t Cpod just download Mandarin into my brain? But wait, then I wouldn’t have to think. Ya, I put my foot in my mouth with that question:) (see 9990)

9985
The downloads do seem a lot faster here in America. Opps, that’s not a grip, thats a compliment.

9985
We sacrificed a lot of our Chinesepod identity when v3 and SpanishSense are seemingly the same user format. Loss of identity is loss of connection in my book.

9984
This “you’ll get used to it” response to our concerns about v3. Ex. If a soldier’s leg is blow off by a suicide bomber, just tell him or her that they will just have to get use to it. Yes, a bit of a too serious of an example to be used in comparison with this discussion, but it does get the point across. I would change it but I am using up too much study time writing this blog.

加油中文播客
敦禮 Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

9983
A lot of the advanced lesson discussions are missing.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

@ 敦禮

The ‘don’t make me think’ admonition refers to site usability, not to the process of learning Chinese. It is an attempt to make the thing as intutive as possible without the user having to second guess what to do. His thinkign shoudl be reserved for the input and the language learning. Agreed that no-one learns anything without thinking - a mantra of ours around here since we began.

I believe the identity will come across more strongly through the users/community in the coming weeks and months. Information, comments, and collaboration are all flowing much more freely than before.

This is the first time we’ve been compared to suicide bombers. Let me think about that one for a moment.

Ken
敦禮 Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

No, no, no,
Please don’t take it that way Ken. The point is that just getting use to something being changed doesn’t necessarily make the original change better. By no means is there any relation between suicide bombers and Cpod.
imron Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

You sure make people looking for a browsable list of recent podcasts think for quite a while to find what they’re looking for.

Perhaps on the main page putting the link on the word “browse” rather than “levels” would make this more obvious (or even better, stick in a nice big “browse” button). I missed this link the first time, instead going the equally unintuitive path of “learn-more”, and then hunting around that page before seeing “explore” (again not really in a prominent position).

Though it seems you’re trying to position the website more as a tool for language learners rather than just for casual listeners of podcasts, a question you might want to consider is how many of your subscribers started out just as casual listeners of the podcasts? (I’m guessing all of them). The old version just seemed more open and friendly, towards the casual listener.

Other thoughts and suggestions: It seems with the “level-test” you can only achieve a score of upper-intermediate, so what about us advanced learners? Perhaps you could also have a language option so that advanced learners could put the interface completely in Chinese. I miss zh.chinesepod.com already.
敦禮 Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

As to site usability, the Cpod site in itself could help it’s users learn how to navigate Chinese websites.
海宁 / Henning Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

I think some users here are overreacting.

Most of the criticism addresses navigational issues. Yes, a lot of those points have indeed been brought up before V3-launch. But on the other hands we are not talking about serious problems. No need to “go back to V2″.

“Explore” not clear?
A mere switch of strings.

Blog and Wiki not easy to find?
Add links on the bottom of the page or make them better visible.

Just one lesson on the start page?
Well CPod might just add some more links.

Overview of posts on lessons and the blog gone?
Isn’t that esentially a small little servlet collecting a handful of links together? A problem that has been solved before.

Picture on the community page comes with annoying slideshow-animation?
Well, there should be a really straightforward solution to that.

Each of the above mentioned points obviously requires just small one-time changes on the survice.

Now look at the *benefits*.

- Stable and strong server environment (well, unfortunately obviously not that big of a benefit for those in the Chinese outback).

- Interlinked vocab-lessons (!!).

- Tagging of vocab

- Dialogue-only versions.

- The reworked listening test.

- Different quality levels for the podcasts.

- New awareness/community features.

Those changes result from large-scale rework under the hood. The engine of this car is new. Now there might be some smaller revarnishing-works on the exterior to be done, but put that into perspective!

Besides the benefits we see here, think of what the above mentioned redesign enables CPod for the future (next to increased efficiency –> more lessons).
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

I also found the total number of lessons different from mine, but I’ve found a few lessons missing (across levels) which I reported to CPod.
imron Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:16 pm

:“Explore” not clear?
:A mere switch of strings.

And where exactly does the word explore appear on the main page? I’m not talking about the page that loads up for existing users, I’m talking about new users coming to the Chinesepod site for the first time, or casual listeners to the podcasts who never signed up for an account before.

It’s extremely unobvious, compared to the previous website, which used to display all the current podcasts as the first thing you’d see.
imron Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

ps, there seems to be a problem with captcha plugin you use on this blog, as it’s not showing the pictures for me (mac osx, firefox 2.0.0.2), and gives me no option to refresh the picture.
chinesepod Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 4:00 pm

goulnik,

A few lessons were not displaying due to bugs, but there are also lessons that we decided to remove because they were substandard or incompatible with the site in a variety of ways.

-John
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 4:20 pm

9982. Saturday Show lost. It’s Saturday here, yup it is. I’m not using iTunes (too big a memory hog on my aging equipment). It’s been about 8 clicks so far. Then I did a search for “saturday show” and got some newbie lesson. I know it’s out there, I’ll find it. I’m not sure how somebody who doesn’t know about it would find it.

9981. I’m with Bob. Rollback plan. But I’m pretty sure the new chatting and community stuff will be fun. Hey, there’s always V8!
Brian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

I’m having many of the same navigational issues most others are, but will save my judgment on those for another week or two, after I’ve had time to figure my way around.

One big gripe, however, is the inability to manipulate large amounts of vocabulary or bookmarked lessons at once. Before I could select many words or lessons to be deleted, moved, etc all once, which was nice if I knew I really didn’t want 20 words in my list anymore (GASP). Or if I changed my mind about some lessons that initially looked appealing. Or for when I occasionally clean out all of my material and start from scratch, which I like to do from time to time as I find both my vocab and lesson sets tend to get cluttered. The new tagging system should fix this, but at the moment I have a ton of lessons in my list that I’ve previously gone through (and don’t want to again), along with a lot of ‘useless’ (!) words in my word bank… thus my desire for an easy way to manipulate more than one at a time…
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

The “Add to iTunes” on http://chinesepod.com/feed/public does not give me the newest downloads. Why?
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

I have a lot of CP-related data (MP3, Texts, Vocab data) on my harddisk, structured by category (Newbie, Elem., …) and lesson number. With CP v3 I have to restucture/rename my whole files… I thought working with the new CP would be easier, but I realize now: it gonna be hard…
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:07 pm

@ Henning
“I think some users here are overreacting.”

The point is: some feature are not working (iTunes download), or hard to find (navigation), or simply not there (trad. char.), or are unusable (bookmarking, scheduling)…

CP should have done more and better testing and should have postponed the release.
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:23 pm

9980 gripe. Where’s the hanzi?
Where’s my toggle switch/option setting to turn on All Chinese for the site? I learned the word ‘blog’ from the zh.chinesepod site just from clicking those hanzi all the time.
Ningkun Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:28 pm

Thanks to Ken, I also read Steve Krug’s “Don’t Let Me think”, which I ordered through Amazon.
I can see how Krug’s instructions have been followed on the home page :
good tagline, clear hierarchy, it tells you where to start, etc.
Problem begins on the page which appears after user logins, where too many options are offered.
And where a user has to think to much. For example, he has to guess the difference between : “study” and “continue lessons”; “connect” and “connect with others”, “explore” and “find a lesson”. There should be less options offered IMHO.
Ningkun (formely known as Nicolas)
海宁 / Henning Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 5:37 pm

@ hanyu_xuesheng,
obviously we are still right in the middle of the transition process. This is not a small step given the amount of content affected. So I would suggest to give CPod a few weeks. When the dust has settled, we will see which features really work and which don’t. Then the time will come for a more serious and critical in-depth evaluation.

Besides: I prefer the current bug-hunting a lot over further weeks of uncertainty with an instable V2. Lots of issues have already been dealt with within the last 24 hours. Actually given that, the bug-hunting is fun.

Lantian,
I agree with 9980. CPod should think about a localizable interface mid-term (after the complete tranistion). It is feasible and it has been done before. Bazza did it for the Forum.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 6:11 pm

Hanyu Xuesheng,

It’s true that ‘die banane reift beim kunden’. That’s because ‘die banane war beim kunden geboren’. This project is a collaboration between us and you. You tell us what you want and we try to give it to you. So it was in the beginning and so shall it continue. The trade-off is clear: you give us feedback, we give you a response.

I have no idea if you will need to outsource your work to India or China, nor do I see the relevance in this case. This is not about competence, or a lack of it. The fact of the matter is that we try to make users as invovled as possible. We’re still trying to give them more of what they want because that’ what we always do. Both the iTunes issue and the traditional characters issue will be resolved.

Ken
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 8:16 pm

thx John, I guess the switch from elementary to newbie for some lessons is intentional too (27-You’re Late Again! -> A0134 and 23-Drive Faster! -> A0121)
Yv
Foleadu Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 8:39 pm

I’ve been a long time lurker. This is this first comment I’ve left on Chinesepod. It’s been amazing to watch you grow and develop over the past several months.

Seeing the switch to V3 today, I felt a lot of excitement as I browsed through the new features. While I agree with other comments about various bugs and aspects to improve, I’m inspired by all the effort and care put into such a major redesign.

I completely disagree with a previous comment that V3 is a disaster. Ken and the community of Chinesepod are clearly passionately dedicated to putting out a high-quality and effective product. With such a major facelift, growing pains are bound to occur. All things will be fixed in due time.

Chinesepod is a source of motivation for me not only in learning Chinese, but also in teaching. I’ve worked as an English teacher in China for three years. The schools I worked at were nowhere near as committed to improving their educational system as Chinesepod. I have applied a lot of your teaching methodology and insights about learning to my own classes with great success.

I’m not yet a Premium subscriber, but the change to V3 has convinced me that it is about time to sign up. It only promises to get better.

To close, thanks Ken, John, Jenny, and the rest for all the hard work, and for continuing to challenge me!

Andy
Ken Carroll Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

Phew! Thx, Andy. We alll appreciate the positive feedback. There’s still lots of wrok to be done here, so we’re grateful for all feedback - even when it’s a bit negative - but this kind of support is defintely a boost.

I actually think we’re jsut getting started. the platform will be fully funbctional in a few days. Then the real work and the real learning begins. I beleive we’re going to do radically new things. I’d be happy to hear more from you.

(I taught English myself for many years.)

Ken carroll
Foleadu Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 10:10 pm

Such a quick reply! Hope you get a break tomorrow!

About the English teaching, I’ve been teaching in Suzhou for quite a while. About a half year ago I started looking to change jobs (I’d been teaching at a language training center) and was also thinking about changing cities. I did some research on schools in Shanghai, knowing that I wanted to be at a professional school that really cared about teacher development and giving the best quality education to the students. I ran across the website for Kai En and was greatly impressed by the professionalism. Then I looked at the background of the company and saw the name Ken Carroll… put two and two together - the one and the same. In the end, I decided to stay in Suzhou. Anyway, really good to see that high quality education runs through all your projects.

Also, I’ve used the on-demand english a few times in class. Hope to see more of that, especially for non-business (general english) classes. Seems like there should be an enormous market for it here in China. Everyone has an MP3 player.

Andy
Luhmann_br Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Would it be technically possible to make V2 still available as an option?
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 11:09 pm

The iTunes issue has been solved - entering http://chinesepod.com/learnchinese/feed/ manually in iTunes worked fine.
And the Pinyin guide which I didn’t see yesterday, looks really great. I am confident that you will solve all the other problems and requests in the near future.
All the best for you and 謝謝!
Luhmann_br Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 11:24 pm

Oh, there’s lots of cool stuff, I took the listening test a few times, and I’ve got a different level every time, but I think it’s a great way of gauging your level. Though I don’t think I should be using the new features much, because I can’t study in front of my computer. I’m just waiting for the traditional script be available to get another free week.

Keep up the good work!
Cheers!
Lantian Says:
April 14th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

9979 Gripe: Scrolling thru the lessons by banner. I used to have a pretty strong association between the banner image for a lesson and the lesson topic. Originally in Cpod 1.0 one could scroll thru all the lessons that way, then it became just the most recent week, now …

I’m a visual person, it’s all text now.

9978 Gripe: Clicking in circles. All the clicking I’ve been doing on V3 reminds me of …umm a lot of Chinese’esque sites.

>9998 Gripe: Slow China speeds. Steve replied “Lantian,
We’ve actually designed the site to be much quicker to load and open files. We’ve upgraded the servers too. Not sure why things are slower for you…must be the Olympics.”

It’s slower because I AM IN CHINA. Obviously Amazon’s servers are over there and not here. You have a bigger pipe in Shanghai, so you don’t notice anything. I have a littttle-itty bitty straw.

The only apparent solution is if Cpod decides to take care of us in the homeland and post the podcasts on a China-based server. It’s a business and level-of-effort decision, certainly not technical.

Either that or I could move to Beijing…cause all trouble and solutions stem from the Olympics.

>9992. Where’s the Wacky Wiki?
Steve said “As for the Wiki, it’s in the community link in the footer.”
I clicked on the Support-Community link and only see Blog Discussion, Forum News and Community Photos. Hmm, maybe it’s a BUG and not a gripe, wacky.

Back to my gripe list and new gripes,

9977 Gripe. You guys KNEW. If you all had known that the Grammar Book wasn’t going to be there on launch day, nor Memory Isle, nor etc., etc., why didn’t you say so somewhere. And did I miss some announcement of the ACTUAL cutover day? I knew it was gonna be in April but you all kept us guessing. This some kind of local ‘flexible’ approach? It was kinda like the no electricity in my apt this morning…China keeps me on my toes!

9976 Gripe. I wish I was in Shanghai, cause you all are cool. I’m sure we’ll all grow to love V4. ;p Nite.
敦禮 Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 1:20 am

9975
Just tried another lesson out. Intermediate-Going to the Dentist. The vocab section seemed good, expansion was good, I liked the option to do the exercise in simplified or tradition but then all 3 of the exercises had user problems. First exercise didnt show the wrong answers, second exercise didnt even work, the third exercise make you learn by trail/error if the word go in the blank spot or the grey box.

9974
After finishing these learning options, nothing seems to happen. V2 had you go back to Your Studies and you could rate the lesson. Checks would should that you worked through the exercises. Now I could move on to another lesson. With v3, frankly, I dont know whats next.

9975
This idea of have an interface that doesnt require thinking just……My experience with v3-I have done more searching around, trail and error, running into frustrations, etc, etc, than I ever did with v2.

9974
Just this experience of working we a rather raw/young/unpolished interface leads me to think we traded in our 2004 Mercedes for a 2007 Hyundai.

9973
Now after we work through this period for a couple of weeks, are we going to have v2 with more bells and whistles, or we just going to have our new Hyundai with upgraded upholstery?
xiaosiobhan Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 7:04 am

I like the level evaluation feature but it gave me a lower level than I think I am at because a lot of the sentences had a word or two that I haven’t learned yet (or forgot), but I otherwise understood what the sentence was saying. They were also too short for me to figure out what it was based on context. Is there some way that the test could be expanded to include a division between complete lack of understanding and partial understanding?

Is the practice plan the replacement for the Eight Week Program?
Frank Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 8:10 am

Allow me first to say that I love the look of the site. Also, once you get onto a lesson page, I really like the way it’s organized. I especially appreciate having Connie’s supplementary vocabulary as something you can add to your word bank. There’s a few problems with the exercises, though. On the first quiz, for example, it will tell you how many you got right, but it won’t tell you which ones you got wrong. The word match game doesn’t work for me at all.

That being said… I would have much appreciated it if the new calendar set-up and the ability to schedule lesson was a new ADDITION to the site, instead of REPLACING the old system entirely.

I do not *want* to schedule my lessons. I want them all in a big long messy list so I can go back to them over and over and over again whenever I want. THAT’S Mandarin on MY terms.

Is there any way to have all of my “bookmarked” lessons show up on a single page where I can click them at will?
Frank Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 8:15 am

Quick amendment… the word match exercise DOES work. You just have to physically *drag* the line to the answer. Ick. Double ick. And where’s the audio? That was such a great feature on V2!
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 8:45 am

>9974
About “Just this experience of working we a rather raw/young/unpolished interface leads me to think we traded in our 2004 Mercedes for a 2007 Hyundai.”

I think it’s our lovable new Santana in orange with the plastic still covering the seats.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:02 am

9972

Um, 中文播客在那儿的呀？！
Where’s the Chinese blog? I’ve started my V3-clicking, no link in blogroll, nada in Advanced tab, zh.chinesepod redirects to Cpod… oh oh.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:18 am

9971

Bookmarks, why?
I guess to try to stay ‘on thread’, I’m trying to discover why, how the new bookmarks work. I bookmarked a few podcasts. Then what?

I went to the Study link. …there’s no bookmarked section, am I supposed to now go schedule it? I don’t need to schedule, I’m not that diligent. I think we’re gonna need some heavy duty V3 “V3 101 How To Lessons” for those of us who ah…aren’t getting it. Does this mean I’m old?
敦禮 Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:23 am

藍天,您的意思是博客或播客呢?

Sinosplice 有中文博客,可是中文播客好像沒有.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:32 am

9970

Gripe: Levels my foot!

Okay, I think this one will qualify as a true gripe. I occasionally let this personal opinion slip, but I think the fragmentation of the student levels is very much an arbitrary construct. I think what is different about each type of podcast ‘level’ is it’s format, not any sort of difficulty. An elementary podcast with say only TWO words that I personally don’t know becomes very darn advanced and ‘difficult’ for me. The advanced shows sometimes have variations of spoken phrases that are darn EASY for me to remember.

I bring this up because in V3 it seems now much harder to explore all the levels in one view. I HAVE to click thru each tab. I think many of us are looking for a nice simple page that lists all the podcasts in the order they were published.

But I continue to V3-click click away. I will persevere, I will learn to love this blue cheese. BTW, anyone new to Cpod, I may be griping a lot, but it’s only cause I’m old, been with Cpod a long time and so I’m very resistant to change.

YOU on the other hand, can just go with the flow.
Cpod is the best online resource for learning Chinese out there, and you know what…the people there are nice too.

9969
RSS Reader built in?

I guess I’m really gonna look not with it with this one. It seems V3 requires me to really work with some RSS reader. What does the staff at Cpod use? I’ve tried a couple, but they never seemed to hold my interest. Is there someway to integrate my RSS reading into when I’m within the Cpod site?
Auntie Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:33 am

Hello everybody. I have a question for Ken and the team: When you were collecting data for the purposes of designing V3, what picture did you get of how your users move between levels?

IMHO, the hundreds of comments on V3 are beginning to show a specific pattern. Namely, the customers who are happiest with V3 seem to fall into two broad categories:

(1) Those who identify themselves with one specific level (usually, the lower levels, which is to be expected as they don’t have the language skills to dip into the higher levels); and

(2) Premium subscribers, who are delighted with the very significant improvements to the additional features which they were already willing to pay for in upgrading from “Basic”.

The very unhappy customers seem (generally, speaking) to be people like me, who tend to learn languages best by “dipping” (ie., self-directed, not confined by any “level”). If the water looks good, even if it is deeper than we are used to, we will dip. We like to skim headlines in newspapers, even in sections that we don’t normally read, and if something sounds good, we will read it.

Just a thought I would like to ask you to consider: Anybody who has more than one child, or who likes to dip into materials which are “too advanced” occasionally, will probably know the very real benefits of being “pulled along”.

Such people — once they have built up the requisite language skills — also tend to dip “downwards” too. I can tell from the names of the posters who have been commenting all along on your lessons that quite a few of your more advanced users still dip into your Elementary/ Intermediate as well. Because ChinesePod is so good at designing lessons, you make it worth our while to dip into lessons from lower levels. Very honestly, I think that the most successful language learners are people who don’t have a narrow, “linear” approach to language learning, in the sense of just going forward (whatever that means), they are people who go all over the place.

The point which I want to make — as strongly as possible — is that V2 catered very well to such people, V3 does NOT. I can’t express to you how uncomfortable I feel being “confined” to a specific level. You are not blocking any pages from me, I admit, but the intuitive “flow” of V3 is incredibly counter-intuitive to “skimming”, “dipping”, and the kind of “self-directed” language learning which I have just mentioned before.

It would make a HUGE difference to me if there could be a page — easily accessed, intuitively — listing all the most current lessons, regardless of level, with quick access to the “Basic” features, ie., the lesson MP3 and the PDF. Like I mentioned in a much earlier post, which was ignored (but that is your right), I don’t think enough attention has been paid to HOW users actually use ChinesePod through the different levels. I wonder how many users are like me, who depended more on the PDFs for lower-level lessons (for skimming, to see if there was anything interesting, even if we didn’t have the time to listen to the entire MP3), but would tackle more advanced lessons by listening to the audio first and THEN ONLY use the PDFs to consolidate.

If nothing else, being able to skim this kind of page easily is a great way for a casual or first-time or hesitating or time-pressed visitor to get a grip very quickly on the full scope of what ChinesePod offers, and the quality throughout the levels. It is a better way of self-assessing the right “level” than that very limited “listening test” which I wasted my time on. At least that is how I got hooked on ChinesePod. Eg., you are going to lose out if a relatively advanced “walk-in” visitor checks out your site on a Newb lesson day. How many layers of pages do you expect your future customer to click through in order to get a grip on your product?

ChinesePod, I hope you will not be hurt or offended by anything I have written, my “criticism” is offered with a lot of respect.

Thanks!
Sharon
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:38 am

FRANK: I do not *want* to schedule my lessons. I want them all in a big long messy list so I can go back to them over and over and over again whenever I want. THAT’S Mandarin on MY terms.

Just thought it deserved repeating.

I thought I was the only one who felt that way.
Auntie Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 9:51 am

And now a word on episode numbers, if I may: It really does mess up my personal archiving on iTunes. With a new lesson each day, and not a hint of the level in the episode title, my iTunes playlist/podcast list is constantly shuffling. I wish (how I wish!) that you had taken the minutes to consider whether any of your users might be genuinely self-directly, ie., “download/archive first, then do the lessons a bunch at time when I’m in the mood, and in the order that suits my then-mood/ available time”.

Do you seriously think that your users do each lesson as it is podcast? In my case, I jump, I skip, and on some days I make up a “backlog” (very satisfying!), sometimes I revisit old lessons even though I have new ones piling up. Am I a freak? This doesn’t seem neat and tidy, but this may be the true meaning of “self-directed”.

Sitting at the computer and thinking up random search terms to enter into the V3 interface is not “self-directed”, it is “directionless”, and I have the feeling that the more veteran language learners on your books will be really dissatisfied.

I would really miss being able to just zero in on the episodes with the highest numbers (viz, most recent) when I am short of time or just bloody in the mood for that.

Thank you!

Warm regards,
Sharon
Foleadu Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:23 am

I’ve been trying the exercises and expansion for the latest episode (the breakup). They are quite helpful for learning the words, but I have a simple suggestion how to improve it. The sentences used in the exercises are nearly identical to the ones in the ‘expansion’. This means that if you’ve already read the expansion, testing yourself in the exercises is just a matter of recalling those particular sentences.

I’d rather have sentences for the exercises that I hadn’t seen before where you really have to think about what the best answer is. This is especially for the ‘vocabulary’ exercise part (the third part).

I’ve got lots of other ideas for this; I’ll try to put them on here when I have time.

What is the best place to add suggestions about exercises?
敦禮 Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:50 am

Auntie,

你說的非常好而且妳說的很清楚. 我只希望也能用語言交流像妳這麼好.
Auntie Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 11:02 am

[blush]
Eek!
[/blush]

I only hope that I don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. I don’t only feel great respect for the ChinesePod team, but affection. Hope that came out the right way (ie., un-creepy)!

Regards,
Auntie
敦禮 Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 11:28 am

9968

“Comments Policy
Allowed comments do not necessarily represent the views of SpanishSense.com. We also reserve the right to reject personal attacks, false/unsubstantiated allegations, and comments that include vulgar language or libelous statements.”

This was found at the bottom of a V3 discussion page by Rash.

In my opinion, v2 was a Chinese and a Chinese learning website. v3 is a business move. V3 to me, feels more like a web business selling language for money. Where v2 was for profit, yet the drive for Chinese acquisition was seeping out of every page.
———————————————————————
Originally, I started to contribute to Lantian’s gripe countdown as a tongue and cheek gesture, but now for the last 24 hrs, I find myself truly dissatisfied. I had but all praise for v2.

I am committed to learning Chinese. I will be here for the long haul. As Ken once said, the gems of Cpod are the podcasts. I am sure thankful the podcasts haven’t changed.
敦禮 Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 11:46 am

Ａｕｎｔｉｅ，

Ｉ　ｔｈｉｎｋ　ｍｏｓｔ　ｏｆ　ｕｓ　ｗｈｏ　ｓｐｅｎｄ　ｔｈｅ　ｔｉｍｅ　ｔｏ　ｃｏｍｍｅｎｔ　ｄｏ．

Ｙｏｕ　ｈａｖｅ　ｓｈｏｗｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｃｏｕｒａｇｅ　ｔｏ　ｓｈａｒｅ　ｉｔ．　Ｗｅｌｌ　ｄｏｎｅ．
FuDaWei Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

The numbering thing still astounds me.

If you were actively looking for a way to annoy a great number of regulars, I’m not sure you could come up with anything better.

And what’s the trade-off? What’s the logic behind it? Why is it better NOT to number them? Were people complaining about numbers? Is there an actual problem being solve by omitting them?

It strikes me as capricious change for the sake of change.

In my office, we’re constantly having computer problems. It’s a puzzle. We have a talented tech staff … why so much trouble? Well, the problem is that the tech staff doesn’t actually USE the machines they service. They never put themselves in the place of the people who actually have to sit down and USE the system. They are out of touch. I fear this is what’s happening at CPOD. You don’t actually have to download stuff and manipulate ID tags and iTune “smartlists” and whatever else in order to organize the material to your taste.

And has Cingular’s lawyers contacted you about stealing their logo?
John Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

A few words on the new numbering system…

The numbers are not gone, but they were all redone. This is because: (1) we removed a substantial number of lessons from the archive for reasons of academic consistency and educational philosophy, (2) the ZH lessons were merged with the rest, but had until that point been on a separate numbering system, and (3) we were using a three-digit ID number, but we had already crossed the 500 point. We were running out of digits!

We also saw this as a good time to remedy some of the problems with the old numbering system. The filenames were done in such a way that you could not sort by level on your hard drive. Furthermore, on a site where the lessons are not linear, having a separate count for each level didn’t really make sense. If you want to know the relative order they came out, you still have that with the overall lesson number.

Now you can sort filenames by level, because the level indicator comes before the lesson ID number. (A is Newbie, B is Elementary, C is Intermediate, D is Upper Intermediate, E is Advanced, F is Advanced Media.)

Naturally, we have to make our podcasts iPod friendly, which is why we used the album field of the MP3 ID3 tags for the difficulty level. We also included the difficulty level in the title of every lesson, so you should instantly know what level each lesson is. (This was done for all three quality types of MP3, as well as the standalone dialogue MP3s.) Did you notice the lyrics in Chinese, pinyin, and English are all viewable on your iPod with the new MP3s?

I know what you’re thinking… “this may be true for the new MP3s, but I already have hundreds of old MP3s, and none of this changes their ID3 tags or titles.” Yes, this is true. To take advantage of all the new features, you really have to download the new MP3s with the new ID3 tags. We apologize for that inconvenience, but it really is better for the long run, and we couldn’t see any way around eventually making this switch.

Again, we’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

As AuntySue, I’m really missing being able to browse across levels. All it would take really is an extra [All ((485))] tab under Explore Lessons, the functionality may already be there and I haven’t found it.
Along the same lines, I’m missing the latest that happened on the site, a prominent latest lessons and latest comments across all lessons.
Cornelia Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

I support a lot of comments and views from Auntie, Fu Da Wei, Frank, Lantian.
I would suggest the following quick-fixes (even if some may appear to you as watering down a beautiful concept):
1. (Re-) introduce lesson numbers
2. Show all lessons together regardless of level in chronological order. You could do so with one additional tab in “Explore” (called *all lessons chronologically*) plus on the start page using blank space underneath “Today’s lesson” (to attract first site-visitors).

I need to repeat a 3. for my own usability needs: No way I can just jump by 5 pages, neither in vocab nor in lesson lists. Please introduce a field where I can actually enter my guessed page to do fine-navigation from there. And put “First”/”Last” buttons. It is of marginal use to have “previous”/”next” when you also have enlisted page numbers explicitely…

With such quick-fixes I am sure the time to get used to V3 will be much smarter.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 2:09 pm

Hi 敦禮,

Don’t let it get ‘ya down.

I’m sure Cpod will take a look at all the comments and things will get really way better as they’ve put in place a lot of the underlying infrastructure to make things more flexible, and hence they’ll be able to adapt to our needs.

About ‘blog’, I constantly mix up the two hanzi…I mean the ‘blog’ for the previous zh.cpod site. I think it went ‘poof’. It’s a bit frustrating as in the original original advanced site there were blog entries there too that I used to use for reference and revisit, it went ‘poof’. Now this one has gone poof, one poof I can take, but two…three, that’s makes for a bad hair day. What happens by the time we get to V5, I’ll be too poofed to get jiggy w’d it.

I think it’s a loss not to have the old site stuff out there, I still miss the content from the jp. chinesepod staff, they had some of the best banter and dialogues Cpod’s made.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 2:15 pm

BOOTED LESSONS - John mentioned that some older podcasts were removed for various reasons. I’m kinda curious, which ones? I know I’ve criticized plenty of them but I don’t think I’d get rid of any….

maybe I’ll just start relistening to all of ‘em.
FuDaWei Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

John …

I appreciate the lucid explanation.

Truth be told, in my particular situation it doesn’t matter all that much to me. I have plenty of the old stuff archived; if I can’t jump to the intermediary level on the stuff I already have, then I never will.

Still, the question was bothering me since so many people had cited it as an irritant. Maybe there is a bit of confusion. Part of the problem may be that I have not yet been able to examine any new casts yet — because they are not downloading in iTunes.

Even that doesn’t bother me (yet). I’ve simply retreated to older lessons until the bug-hunt subsides.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 3:20 pm

D0001 DISCOVERY: In the Study page, I click on Continue Lessons…it’s a link..nothing happens. What am I supposed to do?
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 3:44 pm

D0002 DISCOVERY: In the Study page, I took the Listening Test. It says I’m an Intermediate (low). Did the written version go ‘poof’?

It took me 18″ minutes to download the test. I subscribe to the fastest broadband DSL connection available here where I live in China at Y200/month. Anybody besides Cpod and I would’ve clicked away.
Lantian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 3:52 pm

D0003 DISCOVERY: There’s a whole lot a reading going on at the Pinyin Chart. Question, what’s the nifty 1,2, 3,4, etc., chart on the right hand side, does it relate to where you tongue is or something? Why are the boxes different sizes?
goulnik (郭力毅) Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

Lantian, I listed all lessons with old/new names and numbers. If you scroll down the bottom you’ll find lessons that seem to have no V3 equivalent. I’m also restarting a whole batch of downloads
Ifung Lu Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 4:48 pm

Overall, there are lots of positives with the new V3 site. The transition to a database-backed site will offer users new features and capabilities in the future that we haven’t even thought of, and that is most definitely a positive thing.

Also, I’ve gone through a couple of small website launches myself (although I’m not a web guru by any means), and I do know how gargantuan a task a relaunch can be. So kudos to you all for your overall success with that.

That said, I do want to echo a lot of the same feelings that other users have had about the user interface. It seems like things that were easy to do previously with V2, such as browse through your bookmarked lessons, change status from bookmarked to archived, explore old lessons without flipping through a gazillion pages, are much harder to do, or take many more clicks in V3.

The new work flow introduced in V3 may or may not be simpler if we try it, but the fact is that my old work flow that I used in V2 simply does not work in V3.

Previously, I used to do two lessons a day - whatever the new lesson was on the V2 front page, and then the oldest elementary lesson that I haven’t done yet from my bookmarked list. Since the relaunch, I haven’t done any lessons at all, because I simply can’t find the lessons that I want to do.

Everyone has their own personalized way of doing things, and I believe that V2 was more flexible in allowing you to do things your way. V3 seems to want you to do things a certain way.

For example, I’m sure for some people, scheduling lessons on the calendar is great, but for me, I just want to be able to pick and choose a lesson from a list. Dragging to a calendar seems to me to be an unnecessary, extra step. Unfortunately in V3, it seems that to be able to see my lessons list, I *have* to drag them to the calendar, and that for me exemplifies why the UI fails me.

A good user interface is simple and does suggest a particular way to do things, but it is also flexible enough to accommodate different levels of users and different work styles. I think this is at the heart of most people’s concern about V3.

That said, I don’t think it is too hard to fix. One of the main advantages of your new tech infrastructure is that it should be easily extensible, and I have the utmost confidence that you will resolve most of the issues we all have raised.

Just like with family and close friends, we’re most critical of the ones we love most, and ChinesePod is the best. Thanks for the wonderful website and for all the hard work.

Cheers,
Ifung (Ethan) Lu
Gregasaurus Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

Oh Chinesepod, why have you forsaken me?

I’ve been working through some of the good points about the upgrade. I’m trying to see the good bits I really am. I’m all for change. I’ve been reading the comments made. I’ve spent a good deal of time this weekend being unfortunately frustrated. I’m big advocate of Chinesepod. I sing its praises. I’m a longtime lurker, longtime user, longtime fan, longtime advocate, but the recent transition has removed me from the experience I’m compelled to write about but I’ve already spent too much time at the moment. And will need to come back to write a proper entry.

Ken, Chinesepod is something that you guys created that has been an integral part of peoples routine. It has become quite a personal thing for your users, and hence they are passionate about it. I’m sure you will work through it. You can do it.
Brian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

“FRANK: I do not *want* to schedule my lessons. I want them all in a big long messy list so I can go back to them over and over and over again whenever I want. THAT’S Mandarin on MY terms.”

I second that.
Brian Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 6:44 pm

And to follow that up with something positive - the ability to see where vocabulary has been used in archived lessons is AMAZING, and should make seeking out related/worthwhile lessons so much easier than the random browsing of days past (at least on my part).
LostInAsia Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

Thanks Brian, I hadn’t noticed that part yet! That is cool. (Press the ” ” beside the vocab item to see the use in other lessons.) But, uh, the glossary… have I just not managed to find that yet? I’m not sure if the hidden Easter Egg layout is really the best way to let users find new features…

Sorry, I’ve got to gripe about the numbers again. I’ve just been downloading some of the conversation-only podcasts - thank you, that’s a brilliant feature! - BUT a few of them don’t have a linked mp3 yet. Also fine; of course I don’t expect everything thoroughly done yet! BUT, now, I’ll be stuck with figuring out WHICH ONES TO CHECK LATER. And how the heck can I do that?! Before, it’d have been easy: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, oh, ok, look for #5. But now… there’s no way to search for an unknown. If one day I’ve downloaded ALL the conversation-only podcasts (and oh how I dream about one day working with the Media level stuff!), I guess I could look through 431, 432, 434… but then I’d have to somehow find out what the heck #433 is, which would mean… uh… looking through all the PDFs? At least ChinesePod can continue to show the number, whether on the old or the new system, on the list of podcasts.

More on numbers: I use paper! I’ve got thick wads of dialogs vocab example sentences, all on print-outs, with anal highlighting and scrawled usage notes. These are what I study, not the computer files. 5-6 come with me in my bag every morning. I study these because I can scribble on them, and pull them out of my bag on the train, on the bus, in a coffee shop. Finding “The Come-On” by search is easy enough on a computer, sure, but impossible when leafing through paper. Finding 中84, however, is pretty darn easy.

Please, bring back the numbers somehow. For now I guess I’m just going to continue counting and adding it to all the file names, because I really don’t see another way I can organize all this wonderful material you provide.

Oh, yay, the “text version” link is working for me now! Thanks for getting that part working. Now I can use my traditional characters again.
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 8:19 pm

It took me just 45 seconds to bookmark a lesson. The lesson dialog is shorter than this amount of time. And now I have to schedule…

Please, please make lesson selection and deselection faster and easier.
Jesse Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:17 pm

OK here are my comments:
I like the look of the new site, nice!

Things to improve:
- I do not like to download every PDF seperately. Can you publish a big zipfile with all the PDF’s, e.g. for every level one zip file?

- For me, scheduling is awkward, especially if I have to schedule my old lessons first. Would prefer not to use this function.

- When I add words in a lesson to the vocab, the browser redirects to the vocab site. Would prefer to stay on the lesson site and to continue the lesson

- When looking at the expancion sentences and hovering over the characters, the pinyin is ofter displayed far from the character itself.

- Finally, premium accounts are 20 dollars, when I want to extend my subscription, the website still talks about 30…

Good luck, keep up the good work! I am in Shanghai for 1 month now and my Chinese is improving every day thanks to you!
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

Man, I’m just not understanding this. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of iPod users at CPOD; what else explains the seeming blindness you guys (and I luv ya!) have toward the very tech you’re trying to exploit??? Let me give you a concrete example:

I just tried out the “Your Feed” option. I compose a custom feed and pass it to iTunes to fetch. It grabs the latest program. I open it up … so where are all the ID3 tags?

I was ASSUMING a scenario where one might (for example) subscribe to:

Future Newbie
Future Elementary
Future Saturday Show
Future Word on the Street

… and then sort them into 3 or 4 separate folders based on ID3 info. There’s NOTHING to sort on. Thus, they ALL go into one big mixed bag.

Am I missing something simple, or is that really what you intended?

I suppose I can rectify it by tagging them myself, but you guys aren’t making my life much easier.
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:48 pm

Fu-Da-Wei says: “Thus, they ALL go into one big mixed bag”.

That’s the way it is. In iTunes: One feed in one directory. You have to seperate them manually.

I hate this fiddeling around with files: mp3’s (full and dialog-only), pdf’s, vocab data - before you must bookmark and schedule the lessons - argggh!

I’d like to concentrate on my learning!
That would be CP on “my” terms.

Do not misunderstand me: I like you guys!
Fu Da-Wei Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

hanyu … you miss my point. If they added (let’s say) a “grouping” tag of “CPOD Newbie” or had the keyword “Newbie” most anywhere — then you can create a “Smart Playlist” in iTunes that will filter them into correct folders.

But there has to be something to sort on.
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 15th, 2007 at 11:45 pm

Fu-Da-Wei: Sorry about my misunderstanding. I just checked my mp3’s from my personal rss feed. You are right: No “Newbie” etc. in the ID3 Info. So you are not able to create a smart iTunes playlist of Newbie mp3’s. The file names also don’t have a “Newbie” in their name.

This has to be corrected!
pharmine Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 1:43 am

I tried posting a comment on the newest elementary lesson “The Clogged Toilet”. Although I pushed the “Add Comment” button, my comment was not added to the list. I tried this twice in vain. Is this a known problem?
pharmine Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 2:32 am

Wow, two people have successfully commented, which means this is my own problem. Let me see…
emnik Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 5:43 am

One thing I really dislike: When you come to the website for the first time there’s this useless title page with a big button that says “Get Started” (which seems the natural way into the website). Click on this button and you get sent to a registration page. If I were coming here for the first and saw a registration page I wouldn’t bother with the website. If you’re going to offer content without registering, why not make that clear on the front page. As it is the front page looks like the front page of a pay site. It’s very off-putting.

That isn’t my biggest peeve about the new website, just the one no one else has mentioned.
Joe Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 6:45 am

“Do you understand the words that are comin’ out of my mouth?”

All good things must end….
I knew that when the original CPod intro music/collage disappeared that things were changing at CPod. Today when I came across the intro title page my heart sank. When I finally made it past and into the site and came across these cheesy pictures I cried. Who took over my Chinesepod and ruined it so? I have been using CPod since the start without an account. Today when I finally signed up I am started on a first lesson with some photo of some dude in no shirt grinning in bed…These stock images are awful! Where is the style? So, when will the Saturday show be cancelled? When will Ken and Jen be replaced by animatronic robot speech? You guys were really onto something special and now it is becoming just as common and typical as anything else.
When will I need to start paying Blockbuster video for access to the site?
Siyi Judy Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 8:48 am

Emnik said: … Click on this button and you get sent to a registration page. If I were coming here for the first and saw a registration page I wouldn’t bother with the website. If you’re going to offer content without registering, why not make that clear on the front page. As it is the front page looks like the front page of a pay site. It’s very off-putting.”

I was wondering if it was just me and how I get to CP this weekend. Given the registration page and prior experience with the podcasts, I signed up, thinking it was the only way to get into the site now and I was automatically given my trial period. I had been saving that for when I had a chunk of time to explore it. But this month is a TERRIBLE time for me to have the premium trial. As it is, finding my way around the new site would have been more than enough.. I have blown much of my work time this weekend doing that and looking at the premium services, since I now am stuck with this as my trial period. I feel tricked. Web site users do not like to be tricked.
I am unhappy that I cannot do this when I will have time to really use it for study and get to know if it is something I will pay for.
Chinese on my terms means I choose when i can explore the site more deeply. My work is cyclical and my chinese study has to fit my life.

Reflecting on this, I think it is an interesting problem. CP wants and needs for us to register and pay for the study content. I think maybe a lot more people will get to see the paid content, taste the waters and jump on or feel they must because they can’t figure out how to use the site without doing so.

siyi (the artist also known as Judy)
Ming Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 11:08 am

I have to say that I agree with Joe’s comments above, and truly Miss the customized collage picture for each lesson, which gave Chinesepod it’s Chinese feel. I feel Chinesepod is losing it’s brand, and I wonder if this has something with Praxis Languages taking over? Chinesepod was something special, and its now falling to the realm of “just another ok website”.
Lantian Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 12:24 pm

CONNECT with comment - In the new V3 Connect section, I get a listing of all the podcast threads where people have commented from my Watchlist or All Comments.

Is there a way to toggle it to show the actual comments?

I’m actually not that interested in knowing which thread has comments, but instead what people are saying. It’s too much a chore to click on a thread, read the comment, then click back to the listening, ad infinitum.

I’ve tried since the V3 upgrade to use MyYahoo as my RSS reader and now GoogleReader, but I’m not to spiffy on them yet. Would rather just have it all within Cpod, like the old recent comments lists.
敦禮 Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

9968
When I save vocab, I automatically get sent to my vocab list. I do not want to be sent to my vocab list when I do not want to go there.

9967
I am wanting to see the Chinese translations to all the lesson names, website operation buttons, etc, etc,. The repetition of daily seeing these characters greatly enhances learning. The English is necessary, but the absence of HanZi is not.
敦禮 Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 1:25 pm

Will the flashcards have the option of Traditional characters in the future?

Sure be nice to run through them once in traditional then once in simplified.
Fox Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 8:46 pm

I agree with Joe and Ming. I miss the Chinese look and feel of V2.
Now the whole thing is an ergonomical disaster and may be 1:1 switched to offer Spanish, French or Kisuaheli …
My thinking is that Chinese is not enough for Praxis Language (funny Germ-lish name and they build a standard language service website… It’s a pity.
richyfrost Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

I have just found the transcriptions in notes on my iPod during a lesson, this is great, have wanted this for so long
Is it planned to include Pinyin in these notes on iPod transcripts aswell?
hanyu_xuesheng Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 2:40 am

@ richyfrost
Yes, this is great and is free, but:
You have to pay for rest: Trad. chars and Pinyin
敦禮 Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 9:53 am

9966
No trash can on the study schedule page.
敦禮 Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 10:23 am

9965
Each day, the site just gets more frustrating to me.
pharmine Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 10:44 am

Looks like accessibility to PDF transcripts was improved: their links are now placed next to mp3 links. You don’t have to click the Dialogue tab each time anymore. Thanks the ChinesePod team for this quick adjustment.
Auntie Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 11:24 am

Yes, thank you for that, CPOD. It’s much appreciated.

Sharon
Ryan Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

V3 makes it really difficult to easily find lessons in each category. I really liked the numbered-by-level system in use before. Where can I get a quick list of, for example, all the elementary podcasts? I’m finding myself very disoriented on the new site.
Jeff L. Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 3:16 pm

It looks like people are summing up the problems with V3 nicely. I’ll emphasize a few of the problems i have with it:

- I agree that it’s almost lost all its “chineseness.” I personally liked the old lesson pictures. They were unique and had a chinesepod flavor. The ones right now are faceless, boring garbage.

- It seems you have taken the “Don’t make me think” philosophy too far. Now it’s “All our users are newbies who have never been to our website before, we’d better make a good impression.” I was blown away by how many clicks it takes to do anything now. You say “You’ll get used to it over time,” but clicks are clicks. Even if i know where to click i still have to wade through a lot to get anywhere.

- I liked being able to view the most recent 7 podcasts. There are two reasons for this:
a.) Sure it’d be nice to say that i load up chinesepod everyday. Unfortunately I can’t always do this. So if i miss a day or two i have to search to see what i missed.
b.) I listen to more than one level. Sure I can understand most of the advanced podcasts, but i also find the intermediate podcasts useful and entertaining. Now if i want to see what podcasts i might want to listen to were recently published i have to click “browse”, then click on 4 different level tabs. It was much better to at most open the base and advanced websites.

I’m sure that if i log in and keep myself logged in i can configure this, but i would hope that a “keep me logged in” feature is included.

- There’s no way to directly access the community page from the opening page. Before when i’d open up chinesepod I would do two things. 1.) Check the latest lessons, see what i haven’t listened to. 2.) Open up another browser to the community section and see what blog posts are up.
I think that the community section is one of the unique features of chinesepod. I think it should have a link on the front page.

- The logo as everyone knows doesn’t serve its purpose at all. I understand that you want to unify the praxis language services, but there must be something better than a sharper cingular guy.
Lantian Says:
April 17th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

D004 Using the Watchlist in Real Life Good, not so much…

I like the concept, but this list is not really doing it for me:

Watchlist Conversations Feed Comments
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:43:02 Post The Clogged Toilet 60
2007-04-17 14:37:46 Post The Breakup 31
guillermo-2 Says:
April 19th, 2007 at 2:48 am

Hi!, the first impression of the V3 is that everything is hard to find. I agree with Jeff L.
“I liked being able to view the most recent 7 podcasts”, because I like to choose if the topic is interesting for me, if I will have time today to study, etc. I like to see what other levels are offering. For instance I consider myself a newbie in pronunciation, an elemental in grammar and an intermediate in reading/writing: we all don’t learn in the same way. I suppose also that the new V3 considers this, but laziness impeedes me to discover it.

However, after some minutes, I see that everyt