Apologies for doing this as you may have to unsubscribe, then re-subscribe to ChinesePod in iTunes to straighten everything out, but we have discovered a need to separate out 2 levels of intermediate podcasts.
The 4 new levels will be:
菜鸟 - ‘cai4 niao3′ or literally vegetable bird. This will represent the lowest level. The previous beginner levels will be changed to this. I guess the meaning comes from trying to pick at or sample something.
初级 - ‘chu1 ji2′ or beginner, will be the new level to be added. The vocabulary will be more advanced that the newbie level, but Jenny will use mostly English to explain the terms.
中级 - ‘zhong1 ji2′ or intermediate, will continue to be the same as the previous intermediate where Jenny primarily uses Chinese to explain.
高级 - ‘gao1 ji2′ or advanced
Other labels will include:
专家 - ‘zhuan1 jia1′ or expert
新闻 - ‘xin1 wen2′ for news
流行 - ‘liu2 xing2′ for Shanghai Daily Buzzwords
Apologies for any inconvenience.
I’m really glad to see that you guys are dividing the levels up into more specific categories.
Excellent. It maybe helpful to add those characters to the difficulty level list as well for easy reference and to avoid confusion.
Great idea! I created smart play lists in my iTunes to sort out the lessons. Just create a smart list with “Name” and use the characters as the search items and the lessons then appear neatly organized by category.
I hate to bring up this sort of thing because it is due to me having a deficient computing device, but if you ever consider removing the Chinese characters from the lesson titles I won’t complain. I listen to the podcasts on my Palm Tungsten T3 and while it handles Chinese in some ways it doesn’t do well with Chinese in the titles. I’m working around this by editing the titles in iTunes before moving the mp3s to the Palm so it isn’t a big deal, but I wanted to at least mention this as a minor issue.
I figured out how to fix the problem with the characters in the file names. CJKOS has a file that converts Unicode to GB in file names. I downloaded it to the T3, stopped and restarted CJKOS, and now the podcast names work fine, in botht the Chinese and English parts.