From William
I have assembled some more points for my wish list regarding the next version of the ChinesePod website which I know you are working on, as well as one or two more general thoughts.
- I like to go over old lessons, but I find that navigating from one to another is laborious. Would it be possible to have “go to next”, “go to previous” and even “go to [date]” buttons?
- I would love to attend the get together you are having in Shanghai this month, but cannot be there. Any chance of holding get togethers in other cities where you have lots of subscribers? (e.g. Hong Kong where I live must have many, no doubt New York, Paris, London etc. too.)
- The buzzword podcast on Saturdays is a great idea. Why not include a transcript?
- Again the glossary section is good for focusing one’s practice on a particular subject. But I find the entries are a little sparse. For example the Restaurant category includes hardly any of the dishes mentioned in the Friends for Dinner lesson (15th November).
- On a similar note I find the pdf files very useful (for when one cannot be online but wants to revise - e.g. on an aeroplane) but they frequently do not include several of the words or phrases mentioned in the lesson. Incidentally can you embed audio clips in pdf files?
- It would be good to have audio clips for all the entries in one’s wordbank.
- I find that putting entries into my wordbank (which now has over 800) is getting slower and slower (I appreciate that my previous suggestion would compound this problem). Any way of speeding it up?
- It would help to have simple explanations of characters (e.g. that the right hand part of ji(1) - i.e. chicken - means “bird”). I find these useful learning “hooks”.
- Could you make the flashcard system more flexible? For example it would be nice to be able to practice the most recent entries or entries related to a particular subject (a la glossary), or ones using similar characters, or ones with similar sounds but different meanings etc., etc.
I have sent this to you direct rather than clutter up the blog with these meanderings: but would you in fact prefer me to send future such messages via the blog?
In any event I am really enjoying and feel I am benefitting from ChinesePod and count Jenny and Ken as good friends! To have people with distinct and attractive personalities (perhaps personality traits would make a good lesson or even series?) as one’s laushis is highly motivating. IT WORKS! Well done to you all!
We are busy working away on version 2 and will be releasing components piece by piece over the upcoming weeks. So let us know what else you want.
Regarding the meetings in other cities, you might want to tie in with meetup.com. The site handles local meetings for all sorts of topics, including the Chinese language. They do scheduling, RSVPs, and other organizational functions. I run the Cleveland Chinese Meetup and have recommended Chinesepod.com to the attendees there.
William,
We really appreciate your input. It’s smart and helpful and it wil lbring benefits to the rest of our users.
Feel free to post on the blog at any time. In many ways it is easier for us to deal with the blog - it’s pretty hectic around gere and sometimes emails get shuffled from one person to another. If it’s on the blog it’s ther for al lto see.
The amount of feedback we’re getting from users is growing exponentially. We’re working on a systematic way to channel al lthat information and ensure that it gets thge response it requires. We take on a new guy next week to do this full time. That should help keep things moving.
I’d like to see an auto slideshow option on the flashcard system, with a speed setting so you can just sit back and watch without having to click each time. The option to display english, pinyin and characters all together would be nice as well and if possible with audio.
I mentioned before that the wordbank could do with a sort and search facility.
Maybe there could be some general visual exercises with a scenery and arrows pointing to different objects with spaces to drop in the correct characters.
Also a monthly scored test or quiz would be useful to test your progress.
Would it be too much work to have an Chinese version of the chinesepod.com? I think that would be good practise for our reading skills.
I think it would be helpful to have audio clips on the transcripts of the earlier lessons as well, partilcularly for complete beginners.
two ideas:
1) ability to view characters which look very similar to the one selected. From my own experience, it is very easy to confuse characters if they look very similar so having a way to put them side by side can really help.
2) Ability to view words which are the same syllable but a different tone.
I’m lazy, but surely not the only one…
Would it be possible to download sets of the older lesson pdfs in one go (rather that one lesson at a time). It takes a while to navigate to each lesson individually, download the pdf, then move on to the next one, download etc…
I think this would be good for all us new subscribers who want to catch up on what we’ve missed.
One way you could do this would be to have zip files containing the individual pdfs.
Another could be merge the pdfs into larger pdfs e.g. lessons1-20.pdf etc… (no need for re-pagination, new lesson=new page is perfect)
Keep up the good work!