Hi everyone, Dave here…. A lot of users have asked for better traditional support so I’m happy to announce the beta release of a browser plugin that:
- works with Mozilla Firefox (versions 1.5 - 2.x)
- replaces simplified characters with traditional ones on the dialogue/expansion/vocabulary pages
- adds traditional character support to vocabulary lists/games/etc.
- replaces the link to the simplified PDF with the link to the traditional PDF
Things it won’t do:
- work with other browsers (without tweaking - see below)
- alter content you already have in your vocabulary list
- change Chinese text posted in comments, introductions, titles, ID3 tags, etc.
If you’re a Firefox user (downloadable here), you can grab the plugin by visiting this page. Installation is pretty easy. You need to (1) add Chinesepod to your list of plugin sources, (2) click on the link provided to install the plugin, and (3) restart your browser. The process identical to that for any other browser plugin.
Using another browser? This plugin is compiled from this Greasemonkey script. There are reasonably complete ports of Greasemonkey available for Opera and Safari. Feel free to let us know if you get the script working on unsupported browsers or come up with any cool variants or hacks.
On a closing note, it’s worth mentioning that traditional support is still in beta. This means that there may be errors here and there with word conversions, especially in the older PDF files. The academic team is making corrections of this sort on an ongoing basis. If you find any other errors in your explorations please drop a line.
It’s works well for what it does, but (alas) it’s an either/or proposition. There is no way to toggle between the two formats.
Not necessarily a problem, but people should probably be aware of that caveat.
Hope AuntySue will be able to make use of it, but not sure it’s conducive to her system.
Wow! Works great. Thank you very much for this plugin.
Dave
Simple to install. Thanks. Is there a reason it doesn’t work with the “Text Version” of the Dialogue? This of course would be nice for those of us that “Cut and Paste.
Mike
We’re linking to the simplified text file as there isn’t currently a traditional version being generated. When we add the traditional version we can regenerate the PDF files to fix the link. Hopefully by then we’ll have a way to access the text file without downloading the PDF as well.
FuDaWei
Yup… the browser plugin is an either/or choice. Greasemonkey can be toggled on/off so it is an option for anyone who wants to switch display options fairly often. Everyone seems pretty tech savvy, but the thinking here is that we should aim to keep the default installation as simple as possible.
It wouldn’t install for me yet, maybe I need to unblock some more stuff, but I want to say I’m feeling very skeptical.
What about nali and all the other li characters, how’s it gonna work them out? And what about all the characters that don’t seem to exist according to the computer, but look rather like the traditional character, like the wei4 and sui4 that have slightly different strokes on their tops in most conversion outputs? Can it get all that right?
I see two needs to be met.
When you’re learning to write the characters, you absolutely do not want to ever learn the wrong one with confidence. There is no room for forgiveness of errors, and wrong traditional characters aren’t as likely to be detected very often. So I want to be really sure it’s reliable before basing my learning on it, or, always check with a dictionary which is not much different from just having the pinyin after all.
Second, I have a purpose for the traditional characters which technically requires them to be reasonably correct. I convert all texts into Big5 format because that’s what my PDA understands. If there is one character in the file that is wrong, imperfect, or a simplified character snuck in, then the conversion fails. No hints as to why, it just fails. It could be one character, or fifty characters that’s making it bomb out, no way to tell.
Then what can I, as an ignorant learner, do to find and correct the character(s) responsible for this conversion failure? Nothing, because I don’t know the characters yet, indeed they are being collected because I don’t know them. Sometimes I can type in the dialogue myself and look for differences, but I won’t always spot them, and, well, it hasn’t helped me at all if I’m still typing everything myself has it
So, before I install it and give it a go, I’m letting you see how my final-product error tolerance is going to be pretty low, and yes I do know how very hard it is push something up beyond 95% of perfection. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if you can pull it off.
Install time. Watch this space…
Good work Dave.
I would appreciate to hear how people will use V3 with simplified and traditional. What is the best way to study both forms together?
Second, Auntie referred to having the traditional script on her PDA. Would someone care to share how to get the pdfs visually on a MP3, and what needs to be done to have it in simplified and/or traditional? This is the first upswing that I have experienced with the changing to v3.
Thanks Dave.
AuntySue,
Part of the editing process includes a review of the traditional forms. This is one of the invisible changes that has taken place behind the scenes with V3 and is the reason for the expanded traditional presence in places like the review exercises and pdfs.
I looked at the problem before and seem to remember there being around 100 characters in the GB2312 character set with ambiguous fanti. Most ambiguities involve a very common character and a relatively obscure one. Software programs generally deal with the ambiguity either by making intelligent guesses based on word segmentation (Adso), or prodding the user for direction each time they encounter the character (Wenlin). There is the potential for human error in both cases and I don’t think either approach is ideal pedagogically. I’m biased towards the former out of the belief that pushing intelligence into software saves time and produces better results in the long-run.
Traditional support is beta and you will have to be the judge of whether it is useful given your study plans. I hope it ends up so, and feedback is always welcome even if not.
敦禮,
>> I would appreciate to hear how people will use V3 with
>> simplified and traditional. What is the best way to study
>> both forms together?
I’m not sure about the best way to study both forms in general, but one hack could be editing the Greasemonkey script to change only the popup text to traditional.
If the plugin is installed as a Greasemonkey extension this can be accomplished by deleting the following line:
result.snapshotItem(i).innerHTML = traditional;
–dave
Dave … Just out of curiosity, I assume you can control the font color attributes with your script. Would it maybe be advantageous to set any Traditional characters to (say) “maroon” or “dark blue”? That way, you could tell at a glance which mode you are in or which characters are being altered.
To display PDFs on a Palm PDA, and to do everything else you can think of for study on a PDA, look at some of the discussions on forum.chinesepod.com. Either do a search there for PDA, or find the longest of the PDA conversations by looking in the Forum Statistics page, it’s one of the most looked at topics ever. You will need to buy a piece of software to make the Chinese characters display though.
Greasemonkey can definitely change CSS styling.
We’ll be focusing more intently on mobile once the V3 transition settles down. We’re making progress but there’s still lots to do…. Figuring out how to make the PDFs or texts more easily accessible on PDAs is going to have to be part of that. And having access to all of the collected wisdom (!) in the forums is awesome - we’ll do what we can.
This is a great hands-on reference guide for learning how to use Greasemonkey:
http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/toc/
User scripting has bright future - it makes so much sense I can’t imagine future browsers not standardizing on supporting it. I really like the idea of changing the color of character where the traditional is different from the simplified.
@ AuntySue I can´t praise my beloved ChinesePera-kun enough ( the link: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/3349 ). It doesn´t care about simplified or not is gives you the words and the meanings, so if there´s something wrong in the PDF you could check it with that little proggy (also it might take a while to go through the complete text that way) and you can toggle it on and off. The hook is that you have to do it with firefox.
hope you give it a try
excuter
What about tying the script to a button on the webpage? It would allow to switch back and forth between simplified and traditional without needing firefox plugin or greasemonkey script. The tooltip could contain both forms side by side (it would be great if it was a user option to choose to display simplified, traditional or both in the tooltip).
Peter, I’m with you. Having a conversion on the user end instead of traditional provided on the server end doesn’t seem like the real thing to me. Nor would it to them, I imagine, so there must be some very good reasons why they want to still provide only simplified and have us convert it from our end. Let’s go along with it for now and see how it pans out, because they seem to be implementing a lot of new and experimental stuff and some of it might work out well for us. We can always invoke the scream-of-experience later on.
Just checking: has anyone managed this with Safari yet? I had a look at the links above and it seemed… scary and way out of my depth.
And IS this the traditional support that’s coming, or is it a stop-gap measure? Ditto for the html version of the now non-copiable PDFs: is that just the way it’s going to be, or will the PDFs be cut and pastable again one day?
(I ask because I went through and scheduled lots of lessons today to get the traditional PDF delivered to my iTunes feed, and I suddenly felt really stupid when I realized I’ll want to do that all again should the PDF formatting be changed - as I hope it will be!)
With regards to the html transcript link (off-topic, but what the hey): it’d be nice if it’d be available straight from the lesson page; and I also wish it were tidied up a bit. The little formatting things: which lines are A:, which lines are B:, start sentences with a Capital Letter in the pinyin.
Would it be possible to get the Simplified/Tranditional pdfs back? Having to reboot to get either or, and having two transcripts floating around is rather frustrating.
V2 PDF headers and footers facilitated easy organization also.
I second 敦禮’s requests, if it does any good. Ever since PDF’s went to JUST simplified, apparently the encoding was changed. Now I can’t view them on my Nokia N70’s Acrobat Reader like I could the V2’s PDFs. Now when I view them on the phone it shows the ChinesePod logo and “Learn Chinese on your terms” but the rest of the 3-4 pages are blank. Why? And why the change if the PDFs before could hold both simplified and traditional?
I also really really liked having the traditional at the end so that after studying, after getting the dialog down and reading your English translation, I would use it as a test to see if I could translate it back in to English, both testing my memory as well as getting me familiar with traditional characters. Was there a big problem with having them both?
Apparently my phone’s PDF reader only can display unicode, and I haven’t found a way to add character sets to it like you can the Windows version. Please keep this in mind if there is any chance of going back to the old way… it was worth it and it made your paying customers happy.
-Rich
LostinAsia,
Expanded support for traditional can e found in the lesson exercises, as well as through plugins like this which switch display options and add traditional support to the flashcards, games, etc. The plugin is all we have on the display front now: user-side scripting is necessary to avoid placing a heavy load on the server and slowing the entire site down. Traditional character data is being distributed in the HTML source, so there is room for people to experiment with user-side scripting if they want to change the way any particular plugin works.
We’re getting a lot of positive feedback about the HTML files, so I’m expecting that we’ll simply keep them available as the preferred option for everyone who wants to copy and paste. We’re working on improving and streamlining the backend system which helps automate the production of all of this content, and improvements on what we have now are being put into that system. It makes more sense to focus on the next version of the production system and get it up sooner rather than spending a lot of time tweaking the existing system and delaying the shift.
I’m expecting that as the number of documents we distribute grows (additional files, audio materials, etc.) we’ll need to rethink how to make all of the materials more readily accessible.
敦禮,
The removal of simplified content from the previous PDF files was made to simplify the PDF and get rid of materials people were finding distracting. If you know the filename of the simplified PDF, you should be able to work out the filename of the traditional PDF. Editing the URL in your browser should be enough to get either version, regardless of whether you are using the plugin.
Rich,
Will keep your thoughts in mind, as well as all of the other feedback on this thread.
trevelyan,
我不懂:(
敦禮,
If the simplified pdf is chinesepod_XYYYY.pdf, the traditional pdf is chinesepod_XYYYYtrad.pdf. Both files are stored in the same directory. The same convention applies for the HTML files:
chinesepod_XYYYY.html
chinesepod_XYYYYtrad.html
X refers to the level (A-E) while Y is the four digit lesson number (0-0540 to date). We really need an easier way to make all of these files accessible.
travelyan,
why not simply add 3 more links on the lesson page?
Lesson text HTML (simpl.)
Lesson text HTML (trad.)
Lesson PDF Download (simpl.)
Lesson PDF Download (trad.)
There is plenty of space left on the left hand side and these materials are certainly more important than
Add to your blog/site
Digg
Del.icio.us
(whatever those are about).
Besides when the IE-bug-disclaimer will be gone, the empty white area will be even bigger…
awesome…
I’m so glad now, there’s traditional version..
luphya Cpod
=x
I am using a trial subscription to ChinesePod and deciding whether or not to buy a real subscription.
I am currently living in Taiwan where I am studying Chinese and naturally using traditional characters, so I was interested to see this enhancement to let me use the traditional characters. I am afraid however that AuntySue’s concerns are valid.
I have only looked through two lessons in detail and, although I am far from sure that I will have spotted everything, there was certainly one wrong character in the first lesson I looked at and four in the second.
Perhaps the quality control process that Dave writes about really does exist, but as AuntySue says it is very difficult to raise accuracy of these things beyond about 95%. Unfortunately this is not good enough to be useful to a new learner.
So far as I can see, the only way to do it properly is to type the text in traditional characters in the first place and then create a simplified version from that.
I would also like to support the others who have said that it would be good to be able to toggle between the two character types.
@henning,
I’d love to have a separate downloads section. i don’t think we’ll see the traditional texts publicly viewable/downloadable until either traditional support comes out of beta or there is a downloads sections where we can put up the files without implying they are not beta.
@alanwatson,
if you come to the mainland you might be surprised how few mainlanders understand fanti and wenyan. traditional support will stay in beta until we’re confident we’ve eliminated potential problems like misconversions. in the meantime, errors that are reported will be fixed for any relevant lessons as well as in our backend lesson production system.
travelyan,
sorry.
Didn’t know it was still in beta.
I have been to the mainland a few times and found a surprising amount of fan ti zi - for example in shop names.
Many people I spoke to said that they could understand them, but just could not write them. That said, I appreciate that they are only a minority interest.
Here in Taiwan, most people I have met genuinely can’t understand jian ti zi, except for a few shared simplifications.
Incidentally, I have already reported some problems by e-mail and in the podcast discussions and they have not been fixed.
For example 曆史 instead of 歷史 (history) 歷 means past but 曆 means calendar. (These in the June 13th podcast on Olympic swimming.)
Also in the second podcast I read, June 16th on global warming: 囉唆`, 兇猛`, 準能, 連 were all wrong
I am just on my third detailed read (May 25th stock market) and have come across inconsistent 還, some simplified and some traditional, and wrong 看準, 嚮往.
Some of these, like 嚮往, I had not previously come across and would not have known it was wrong if I had not looked up every unfamiliar phrase.
In the same podcast 憑藉 is also wrong.
You have the traditional 憑 but the simplified 藉, 借, which is a traditional character but means to borrow, not to rely upon.
In the latest podcast (transferring a call, Jun 20, 2007) you have the wrong zhun bei. (Sorry technical problems mean I’m using a PC I can’t type chinese on.) Every time I have seen a zhun it has been the wrong one - the traditional character which is the same as the simplified version of the commonly used zhun
O…K… the plugin is working on the expansion pages, but how do I get the vocabulary and games etc to operate in traditional characters mode? I tried resorting to using Tong Wen Tang, but it only made the page look like Japanese or Klingon or something
AuntySue,
Just some clarification on the plugin: the vocab list you already accumulated from the past will not change from simplified to traditional. It will actually stay simplified so if you want that word in trad, you’ll have to add it again.
I am still trying to get Traditional Characters without any success. I have to type them myself with the aid of a dictionary. I think Henning made an excellent suggestion. Beta seems to beａproblem. To a ’technically challenged’ person like myself Ｉhave no idea what it means except that it is a computer term.
I find the traditional option in the exercises works very well. If this option could be extended to the full lesson and flash cards this would be a great improvement.
Jane
I have the same results as Jane. It looks like the plugin doesn’t work with the vocubulary manager, as well as the vocabularly tabs from the lessons. Even if I add a new entry from the dictionary it comes up in simplified. Really looking forward to be able to use this feature so keep up the good work!
Nick
It would be a big step forward if the WHOLE ChinesePod site offers full support for BOTH trad./simp. writings, and give the user the possibility to set his preference. Then this plugin would be no longer needed… (For me it is unusable)
The plugin isn’t working for me either. Firefox tries to install it, but gets the following error message:
The page at http://facebook.praxislanguage.com says:
An error occured: -210
I agree with a number of users above…full support of traditional characters would be a huge benefit on ChinesePod. I always download the traditional PDF’s, but it doesn’t make sense viewing the PDF in traditional while viewing the vocabulary, expansion, etc. in simplified.
That error message is particularly unhelpful. The most common cause is installing the plugin, rebooting the browser, visiting the same page and then cancelling the second install popup.
The plugin should still be installed and should still work.
my mistake… it ISN’T working for me either. Will take a look later today!
Is traditional character support so complicated?
Or is traditional character support politically incorrect for a company based in the PRC?
It’s so easy:
(1) user not logged in: display simplified chars/pdf/html…
(2) user logged in and did not specify his/her char. display preference: display simplified chars/pdf/html…
(3) user logged in and specified his/her char. display preference: display preferenced chars/pdf/html…
The same with the RSS feed.
Is this so difficult to implement? Why is the user forced to use a plugin with all the associated problems?
Comments from CP system developers are very much appreciated.
@hanyu_xuesheng,
Asking users to specify a preference isn’t the problem. The problem is managing the complexity of the system. This is both a tech issue (where is data stored, how are preferences mapped to display, how filtering/conversion occurs) as well as a content issue (cannot automate simplified->traditional conversion on a character level at required levels of accuracy, so manual review of traditional content is required).
Right now the issue is with the client site. Changing display changes everything from how popups must be handled to how the vocabulary/flashcard/games system works. We are moving towards fuller support, but doing this requires iterative change to the backend system.
@trevelyan
Thank you for your comment and explanations. Thank you for your efforts to support both writings. I understand that it is quite tedious to convert every content without mistakes from simplified to traditional.
No problem. The major changes to the content production system were made with the transition to V3. We *are* working on improving the client site, and tend to make the necessary changes for future traditional support whenever we overhaul a part of the code base.
In addition to many comments my Firefox gives Traditional Characters everywhere except the Vocabulary and Vocabulary Manager. Flash cards and the Concentration Game are all in Simplified Characters.
One other point, recently with the new Vocabulary manager there was a facility to change the pinyin into the Chinese Phonetics system. I found this so useful but now it seems to have disappeared! Can this facility be restored please?
Thank you for all your work
Brighid McCarthy
Anyone else notice that “what” is displayed a bit odd with the plug-in?
I only see 甚麼 instead of 什麽.
Is the character used for shen actually correct in the plugin? I’ve never seen it before in this case.
> I only see 甚麼 instead of 什麽.
That’s the traditional traditional form.
loved it… looking forward to a 3x version…?
thanks again!
Yes, a new version for Firefox 3.X would be nice…
The traditional characters stopped working with Version 3.0.2 until I installed the chinesepod 1.5 plug in, but then that stopped working when Mozilla went to V 3.0.3