Since ChinesePod launched in 2005, we have received an enormous amount of product development ideas from the community. We have incorporated a large amount of this feedback into the current service. Today, we are introducing a new section called ‘Labs’ where we all can suggest, discuss and debate new features for ChinesePod.
You can find ChinesePod Labs at http://chinesepod.com/labs.
So, let us know want you want.
I think the online flashcards is one of the best features, already from previous versions of the site. However, it would be really nice to have a “random” function. I end up memorizing the order of the cards (in spite of myself) and getting correct answers even though I still find the characters difficult to recognise.
That’s exactly what I wanted to suggest!
*cough*cough*hanzi practice sheets*cough*with stroke-order*cough*
Auto refresh in the exercises would be great. At the moment having to click on the refresh button when switching between pinyin, hanzi and traditional is to me, an unecessary step and slows down the process.
Something I have been thinking about putting together is a Flash Lite version of the flashcards for my Nokia phone. I don’t always have access to the internet (ChinesePod.com is blocked at work, lots of travelling, etc. etc.) and so whilst the online version of the flashcards is great, I don’t have access at the times when I am most able to study.
Like I said, I’ve been thinking about putting it together, but finding the time to get to grips with programming flash is proving quite difficult these days. Just a thought. If this were a community project I’d be willing to help out as/when time permitted.
That’s a good idea to name this section ChinesePod Labs instead of ChinesePod-Sandbox (see Wikipedia).
When I hear Sandbox, I first think of Sandpit not locomotive Sandbox (improve efficiency).
I’ll second Christian that I’d really like to see some more functionality added to the flashcards, as well as the vocab ‘games’ section in general. I’m not sure WHAT, but I know the concentration game is useful and more things like that would be great.
I would love to see stroke order for writing Chinese characters. I know the rules, but sometimes the characters are just too complicated for me.
I agree with the random feature in the flashcards. I don’t know how difficult it would be, but being able to download flashcards onto my IPod would be great!! I also vote for the character writing with stroke order suggestion.
I wanted to suggest something simple for the Labs and now I have second request. (First)
Would it be possible when you have a suggestion that arises from using V3 that when you click on Labs you stay on the page where you would like to see some improvement or modification.
It would help to explain the idea better if you could see the page on which you have a suggestion.
Now my real request. Can you make it easy and have the whole Zhang and LiLi Saga as a Lesson Set? The story is great but more importantly the usefulness of the dialogue is very high. Its very full of lexical chunks. I know I could make my own bookmarks but to access the entire series easily would be nice.
Exploring V3 I like it more with each day. Nice Job. Enjoy the weekend
Thanks
I’ve been wishing and asking for more audio content. Though I’m a premium subscriber I get almost all my learning from the free podcasts. Nowadays, it seems that the podcasts are “rushed” to finish and are getting shorter. In the earlier days of Chinesepod, Ken was proposing a “different way” of learning Chinese. Do away with grammar and memorization of tones. With enough in-context listening (and hopefully speaking) things will “start sounding right”. I’m not a big fan of flashcards, memorizing words, drills, etc. So as I listen to the podcasts sufficient times, things indeed start to sound right. To recall a tone, I just have to remember a piece of dialog from one of the lessons. I feel the podcasts (at least at my level (Int/UpperInt) can be easily expanded with more usage examples of the new vocabulary, explaining the individual characters, etc.
There’s got to be a lot of customers like myself that would like to spend the time commuting, eating lunch, etc learning Chinese and would rather not spend the evening in front of the computer after a long day or work/kids/etc.
guillermo,
I totally unbderstand your perspective. I can tell you that Dave Lancashire has come up with something really interesting that might suit your needs. We need a little time to get it working, but I think you’ll like it.
Ken Carroll
My suggestions come from having sat and worked through some of my vocab using your ‘flashcard’ function for about a half-hour just now. A tiny bit frustrating, so I thought I’d share these ideas:
1. Make your “wrong” (X) and “correct” (checkmark) be a NEXT button, and eliminate the next button (too much clicking). This way, I would only have to click the one button (right or wrong, and I would move on to the next item). I often forget to ‘mark’ my answer right or wrong, and then the session % feedback is not so useful to me.
2. Give me some way to differentiate totally wrong, from a little wrong, from totally right. I know, this might just be the optimist in me, but I want to give myself “part-marks” if I know the definition, but forgot the pronounciation, or know the pinyin and the def. but got my tones wrong. Those partial ‘rights’ are way more positive than the big red X, but I don’t feel I deserve to give myself the checkmark if I got some aspect wrong, either. (Am I crazy? Does anyone else feel this way?)
3. The audio is still spotty, sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it’s just not.
Thanks so much for a good platform for language learning! Please don’t take my suggestions as criticism, I only hope to help make things even better.
Cheers! Gi.
I must say that although I know that stroke order isn’t the biggest thing, I know from learning Japanese that there was no better way for me to get learn characters than to write them down a good few times, and I wouldn’t want to practice writing them the wrong way. The whole writing process really gave me a feel for what the character looked like, especially outside of just one font or whatever, and I think learning to write the characters REALLY helped my recognition. Fortunately, I am not starting new with Chinese characters, since, as you probably know, Japanese borrowed its “Kanji” from the Chinese Hanzi, so stroke order isn’t new to me either. However, simplified characters are occasionally different, and there are some characters that didn’t make their way to Japan, and I would like to be able to know that I am getting the stroke order right. While I know that this would be a huge project (getting stroke order up for the characters on the site) I think it would be invaluable, and could be done slowly. I don’t know how I would have learned the Japanese that I do without learning the stroke order, and I imagine people new to Hanzi would find stroke order valuable as well. And it wouldn’t have to be done all at once either… a few every week could slowly build up a huge Hanzi stroke order database that would be much easier to use than the Ocrat mirror.
If you actually read all of this, thanks, and I love your site, and plan on joining as soon as my trial expires!
What about a “Full Guide to Chinese Grammar”?
That would be really helpful.
It seems to me that a grammar guide is under construction. If you look at the “Explore” tab under the title of each one there are three little sections… “Topic”, “Function”, and “Grammar”. The grammar ones are all blank right now, but I am assuming that they will eventually fill up with individual grammar points that are hit in each lesson. Then under the “Study” tab, you can see that there is a link called “Brush up on Grammar” which takes you to a page saying “This section is coming soon.” So yeah, although it isn’t really my place to say so… I think a guide to Chinese grammar is coming soon.
Another Vocabulary section suggestion:
1. Why is managing my vocab so unwieldy? I would like to be able to tag a group of words at once, instead of individually (this takes SOOOOooooo long).
2. When I add a word to my vocab list from the lessons, can you just put up the “update successful!” banner instead of having a whole new window pop up just to make me hit OK? It really interrupts the flow of my study.
3. Deleting words from my bank is incredibly frustrating. Right now, I’ve invested a considerable amount of time separating my vocab into ‘tags’ and when I try to delete a word that I’ve tagged, 1) a window asks me if I’m sure – I click ‘yes’; 2) it brings me back to page 1 of “Vocab – all”; 3) I click on my sub-set; 4) I click on whatever page of my sub-set I was trying to manage; 5) I delete another word. Here’s where I see another great use of the “update successful!” banner, and just let me keep working on the page I’m at. All of these 5 steps involve waiting as each page loads, and I’m not sure that I will continue to have such patience with this function.
4. It would be great to be able to delete a number of words at once, but the only way I’ve found to do this, is to delete a whole group of tagged vocab at once, but that would involve me tagging a whole bunch of words individually, to something like “trash” and then accessing my “trash” sub-set, then trashing it. Not exactly user-friendly. Did anyone discover a better way to delete things?? I’d love some suggestions. Maybe I’m just not using a function that already exists.
5. When working through Flashcards (I know, I already gave my suggestions about Flashcards, but I thought of another one
), what exactly does the little checkmark beside “Exclude this word in the future” do? Because I assumed it would exclude the word in the future. But when I try to “Refresh” to work through those words that I flubbed on, my “Total words” count is exactly the same. So why did I take the time for the extra click if it didn’t actually exclude those words?
6. I’d also like to add my voice to those calling for Hanzi support. I’d love to see stroke-order for my words, and to be able to download Hanzi practice sheets that I can print up and doodle on. A new word doesn’t tend to stick in my memory unless I’ve written it lots of times, and used it in a variety of contexts.
Sorry for taking up so much space. I’m really not a negative person
and I really do love the site and the podcasts. Is there a place I can check to see if you guys are already working on same/similar things?
Cheers, Gi.
Have been hopping around the site thi spast week, trying to find out what is the approrpiate forum to post my concern regarding export vocabulary. And then found Hans comments on April 25 stating what I am experiencing as well…an inability to export vocab to excel - even if I use an intermediate step of an XML file. Can you help? Or maybe just give an estimate on when this might be addressed. Thanks.
Otherwise, I’d have to second some of the other comments by super6i and also claim, that I am glad to support ChinesePod and it’s growing pains. Thanks.
Anna Yelena
Well, another potential post-Grammar-Guide feature
Even in danger of repeating myself: Now that you have the shiny logins - why not offer a personalized skin & a personalized starting page.
That could e.g. include options to select:
- the number & level of lessons shown on the starting page (e.g. the 3 last Upper Intermediate and the 5 last Advanced shows)
- the number of the most recent connect, blog, & forum & wiki posts to be shown on the starting page
- whether of not you want to have an input field for direct access to the (upcoming?) Glossary
- your calendar (small version) and/or the CPod calender with upcoming lessons
- a mini-flashcard-version….
- the positioning of all the elements above
- the main language of the site (Hanzi vs. English), just as in the Forums and
- color theme
And no, I would not call that “MyCPod”, maybe better “CPod on your terms”…
Hello Guys,
I want to suggest a Chinesepod mobile phone application. It is written in Java MIDP2.0 and can handle two things.
1. Flashcard application
I didn’t subscribe to the flashcard feature, so I don’t know how it actually looks like. But my idea is to transfer it to a mobile phone. There you can practice any time you like, like when you are waiting for a bus stop.
I once wrote such an application for the public domain, which can be found at http://www.jiphe.com/mobile/AskMe/index.html. It works nicely on PDA-Phones.
The vocabularies are text files (CSV), which are stored on a webserver, where you can download it.
I can imagine, that the personal flashcard of the user is generated by the chinesepod website. Additionally, the key-phrases of the newby lessons, and maybe the elementary can be donwloaded. Would chinesepod allow that a someone generates the key-phrases CSV file and publish it in the internet?
As I mentioned, a “Non-Chinesepod” Version of the software already exists. It supports unicode character set. On my chinese mobile phone (SE P800), it displays chinese characters. The pinyin tones I added manually.
2. A Chinesepod Application
I whish there would be a application which handles the chinesepod tasks for a mobile phone. I can imagine, it downloads the MP3 and the transcript automatically from the internet. The username and password is stored in the application, so there is no need to type it in.
Then it presents the lesson in a kind of Karaoke style. The MP3 file is played and synchronously, the text in simplified, traditional characters, as well as pinyin and english can be displayed. (One or two at a time).
Such an application could be made open source, but chinesepod has to provide an interface to download the lyrics in a text form (XML, for example) and maybe some time synchronization information. All these things could, with a delay, also be provided by a volunteer, if chinesepod allows.
Thanks guys for teaching me chinese.
I really have a hard time memorizing chengyus (成语) so I thought about a chengyu section. Shouldn’t be too difficult to collate chengyus across all lessons, bringing them into a vocab list with corresponding Expansion examples recordings.
This could be expanded to other common expressions (俗语), including more grammatical 三个字 such as 大不了、了不起、受不得、看起来,等等
I think that having what sk_buff featured would be great, but perhaps for the iPod instead. Maybe you can use the iQuiz game, newly avaliable? I am not 100% sure on different ways to apply this, but I know that one of the most valuable features (at least to me) from the JapanesePod101.com’s premium learning center is the iPod notes/quiz that can be downloaded. Doing this *should* be a little easier than other ideas, as from what I have seen, all that is necessary is a text editor and knowledge.
If such a plan was pulled off, I would prefer it to be audio-free, or at least scarce on the audio, as adding audio makes it more complex to install, AND I know from JPod that it fills up iPods with countless “filename tracks” with single words.
And carry any improvements that aren’t language-specific over to SpanishSense!
Anyways, those are my suggestions, sorry if they came off as commands, I didn’t mean to sound abrupt (again). I look forward to seeing what happens with Praxis in the future!
A lot of the suggestions here are related to leveraging the vocab that we build up. I agree entirely and one suggestion that I would make is a Google Gadget that shows a new word from one’s own vocab every hour (or day or whatever). All the better if it can be in the form of a quiz.
I’d be happy to build this out myself, but it would require a new feed from CP with a randomized (perhaps also tag-based) word every hour.
As a first step, simply the vocab feed would be nice - the headline could be the hanzi, and on clicking to see content the pinyin and translation would be visible. It would be like a background slow-mo flashcard test. A drip feed (gettit! HAHAHAHAHA!).
Ahem.
The Gadget would be a second step.
Shouldn’t be too difficult for CP engineers!
Personally I have no time for fancy skins and such, and would prefer efforts to be spent on quality matters and acuracy of learning data. I’m only interested in the content, not how it’s delivered. In fact, if the site used simple HTML2 I’d visit it ten times more often. It would be quick to use and cost less for network bandwidth. Aha, now if that could be implemented as a skin, then I’d support skins.
Sure - the quality of the prime ingredient has to be high. But for some (OK for me) the delivery is also crucial. I put in the hours on the lessons, but anything that can make the experience more ’surround’ for me, the better.
The existing feed is a prime example. It was probably relatively inexpensive in terms of effort, but it synchronizes my iTunes experience with my lesson schedule and Chinesepod experience. That kind of easy reinforcement of learning material is great. It focuses my efforts.
A similar synchronization of my Google homepage with my tagged vocabulary would be really great. I totally get it that not everyone would be into this, but at the same time it wouldn’t be very expensive to do so it wouldn’t take any any significant resources from the core tasks that you mentioned, AuntySue.
Vocab section: I couldn’t agree more to super6i.
My 26 pages of vocab are not navigatable to me. Quick fix: add buttons for “first page” / “last page” / “goto page __”.
Podcast description: include pinyin, not just hanzi english
Identical podcast description for the Dialogue-only mp3s.
I joined ChinesePod as a premium subscriber around the 20s of April, and since then I have made a few suggestions on your ‘labs’ page, and read quite a few suggestions from my fellow Cpoddies on almost every page. The ‘labs’ main page says “Current projects include: 1. Traditional Chinese Support” and this has not changed since I joined up. I’m sure you’re working on a ton of things! I’d love to know what they are – because I’d probably stop pestering you if you’re already working on something I’d like to see.
At the moment, I can’t help but get the feeling that nobody’s reading the suggestions made here. For one, no ChinesePod personnel has commented here since Ken on April 28th, and secondly, I haven’t seen any of the suggested improvements be implemented in the site. Now, I’m willing to be very patient if I know someone’s listening. Please (please!) update the main Labs page. Thanks! ~Gi.
super6i,
We’re definitely not ignoring you. I’ll let David Lancashire answer you in more detail.
Ken Carroll
Hi super6i,
The next labs project under development is a vocab-reinforcement and repetition tool. This may skip the labs completely and just become a standard audio product. We’re experimenting to see what works best pedagogically — right now we’re waiting for the new lesson development system to be put in place before we can actually launch it.
Issues such as the usability of the vocab lists or other main site features (ie. Cornelia’s suggestion) don’t really fall under the purview of the labs - it’s envisaged more as a sort of sandbox where we can test new tools without interferring with the main site - see what works, see what doesn’t. That being said, people are definitely listening to the suggestions that are being made. I know that the feedback we’ve gotten about the vocabulary lists have been acted upon. We’ve fixed issues people have had with deleting mass content, as well as slow load times. I don’t really control that part of the site and can’t speak personally for when/how changes are made, but I do know that they should have been addressed. Brendan’s idea is really interesting and I think is probably more on par with the sort of thing that will happen here.
Brendan, yes I suppose the delivery is crucial for me too, because if the delivery is too expensive for my computer and bandwidth resources, I don’t have access, end of story. You want very different things, no less valid because the more fun the more money they earn and the more resources we get back. And yes, I totally agree, such variations can usually be accommodated without undue effort and without drawing resources off other tasks, in fact we expect that to be a limiting factor. All it takes is a little forethought and input from people like us who are audacious enough to flash different angles at each other. If ever it were a huge ask, though, or something that detracted from other students’ usefulness, most of the time we’d reconsider our requests anyway.
Thanks so much, Ken & Dave, for your responses! It has helped me understand a bit more what “Labs” is meant for, and that my suggestions may have been posted in the wrong forum… I do apologize if I offended anyone; I know that you are all working very hard to produce fantastic content, and that’s really what matters most to me over all.
Is there a better place for me (and others) to make suggestions that, as you mention, don’t fall under the purview of the labs?
thanks! ~Gi.
Just a feature suggestion:
In addition to listening to the podcasts, what I do now is that I load the podcasts into Audacity and manually cut out some key Chinese words and English definitions. I have a small database of Chinese vocabulary mp3 files and English translation mp3 files on my computer. Yap, I do this by hand.
Then I wrote a small script that randomly assembles the English audio and the Chinese audio and inserts pauses in between. This creates custom mp3 files that I use to reinforce some of the key vocabulary words that I need to know.
My feature request is that I’d love to be able to select vocabulary words, place them into a queue, and have chinesepod.com automatically create a customized series of mp3 files touching only on the vocabulary that I need to learn.
James
Sorry if this isn’t quite labs - I think it’s a bit labs and a bit of a suggestion for improvement to Chinesepod proper.
Step one: some kind of standard vocab tagging in CP to support moving vocab from ‘current’ to ‘revise’ to ‘learned’, as suggested here.
Step 2: A pie-chart gadget (as in google gadget) that shows the percentage relationship between these tags, and when you click on the pie slices, brings you to the list for that tag (or perhaps the flashcards).
When can we expect the Grammar Section to become available?
I would like to see you guys use platforms like Tribal Shout to not only push your lesson podcasts to the mobile phone but also integrate the audio blogging piece as a way for students to post their recordings of speaking Mandarin as an episode in a feed that is open critique.
I would like to reccommend the idea of having iPod notes like they do on JP101. That would be interesting. It would be cool.
Dear Chinesepod,
I like the fact that you have added tags to the vocabulary, but adding modifications post insertion is a bit of a pain. Since you have the functionality to add in groups from a lesson, could you also not add in a tag input box, so that as we add a group, we can carry over tagged identifiers to all those inserted words? Seems like it would be quick and easy change to the lesson templates and add a lot of value to the tag function.
Mike Rogero
ps. - From a usability standpoint having the lab’s URL - “http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2007/04/25/chinesepod-labs/” include a date is a bit odd, don’t you think? wouldn’t it make more sense to remove the 2007/04/25….???