Around the office, everyone is preparing for the upcoming holidays and I’m sure you guys are too! But before we go our separate ways, I’d like to share some more ChinesePod news with you.
Downloading and streaming podcasts: Over the past couple of weeks, some of you have been unable to download /or stream our podcasts on the website and on iTunes. We have now remedied this unfortunate situation and so you should see an improvement in the download speeds and loading times over the next couple of days.
Flash Vocab Review Game: Finally, our new game is up in a playable form and just in time for the holidays, too! The game is basically a glorified vocabulary review, but it’s a lot of fun. In the current Beta version, the game will use a predefined vocabulary list, but the final version will pull from your personal vocabulary list.
The game is called “Memory Isle” and drills you on matching pinyin with characters. You have to quickly click on the characters which match the pinyin displayed. You lose HP for wrong answers, and gain HP for right answers. Your HP also slowly decreases with time, so you have to move fast!
There are a series of different levels. Between levels a story unfolds. You have to be pretty “quick on the click” to make it to the very end. For those that just want to practice vocabulary, there is also a choice of “practice mode.”
There are a few fun surprises in the game. Here are some new screenshots:
Play the game [Update: the game is no longer publicly available for testing]
Sorry, the final version of the new game is for premium subscribers only. We welcome any feedback to improve it before the release of the final version.
Picture lessons: Like you, we were all very excited to see our first visual lesson up on the website. We got tons of positive feedbacks (thanks for those) and due to its overall success, it was only fitting that we follow it up with another one. Expect to see the next visual lesson up by next week. John and the rest of the academic team are still gathering ideas though for future visual lessons and so if you’ve got any more suggestions to share with us, head on over to the official lessons thread on the ChinesePod forum right now.
Icons and remixes: As you can all probably tell, I have a soft spot for the people at the ChinesePod forums - maybe its because they continue to amaze me with the wonderful things they’ve created for and around ChinesePod! For those new to the forum and website in general, I’d like to introduce to you some of the earlier Chinesepod remixes created by our fellow CPodders. There are some in the Wiki page for you to download as well. Another fellow CPodder, Warneren, has also designed some ChinesePod mac icons for us. You can view and download them here and here.
Christmas promotions: Speaking of the holidays, its not too late to join our Red iPod contest or better yet, why not give your friend the gift of Chinese this holiday season? We will be more than happy to send them a ChinesePod e-card on Christmas day!
On behalf of everyone at ChinesePod.com, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas! 
Eileen
Ah, the game is fun! A couple little suggestions:
1) The black character text is hard to read. I have to lean really close to my screen to read it easily.
2) Keyboard shortcuts would rule. I’m playing on a laptop, and using my little touchpad to get to the correct characters is a little tough.
Keep up the good work!
Brilliant game, love it, managed to get to level 14, the last one I think but couldn’t complete it, I tried about 10 times then gave up.
The game is 酷！
just finished it, and i agree with John B, you need to be very skilled with a touchpad to complete the game because the timings are quite tight. I had to get out my mouse to finish the last level 哈哈。
I have to admit, as soon as i started playing it, i was addicted and had to complete it, but playing through the same storyline might get a bit repetitive. However, i think you guys have done an excellent job with this game, and i hope this is the first of many similar games. I think the only other thing i would ask for, would be for similar games like this, but with different and perhaps more complex storylines. If you can spend time on making a really interesting, engaging, fun storyline that captures our imagination - you’d have all of us hooked, so much so that we’d keep hacking away at those characters, rather than playing the game for the sake of revision…if u see what i mean?
I now see what Lantian (i think it was Lantian who mentioned it) meant before about making a serious game. It would make learning immensely enjoyable for a lot of people.
Anyway, well done guys! Keep it up! 我相信你们都一定会成功！加油！
Very fun game. But I have a few comments.
1. Pinyin moves very fast against textured background. This makes very hard to see the tones.
2. Balck 汉字 on dark brown background. Too hard to read.
3. HP starts to draw down even before pinyin is shown. That’s not quite fair.
Overall, great job.
BUGS - I haven’t had time to play yet, but is it kinda like this? shirt hurt! blog slog!
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/0.....a/20062212
Nice Christmas gift from the CPod staff.
One question: Did Colleen come up with that twisted storyline (angel/monster/angel/slug…)?
To further increase the learning effect you could blend in the translations of a word after hunting it down - it becomes more meaningful than. Maybe even play the voice recording you have for your vocab.
Up to the last level it is all rather easy, but last level suddenly jumps up in difficulty. A rather steady increase would be more fun.
Difficulty comes primarily from speed now. You could additionally rise the level by chosing tougher vocab or by selecting characters more easy to confuse. In this old forum entry you might find some inspiration to generate meaner levels: http://www.chinesepod.com/foru......php?t=302
Nice game with a lame Chinese feel to it (sorry just my opinion of those sort of QQ games). But I think this could be a very useful learning tool. I think it would be very helpful if the english word flashed up after you got it right, a lot of the time I knew the characters but not the word. Also rather than making time the main challenge, you could put in a few similar tone words to make it really hard! Overall very good, but I would like the story changed a bit - perhaps you are the young hero who has to save the beautiful princess Jenny from evil Aric’s castle? Something cross between Shrek and Chinesepod!
Great game, thanks! The birds and seaside theme make it nice and relaxing.
I couldn’t actually see the characters, but from viewing the instructions I knew they should appear on the brown signs, so I clicked on them randomly. (They all seemed to have faint black crosses on them like plus signs without centres.)
After I clicked on a brown sign, some large red legible characters sprung out, yes they were very clear, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what they said, or how to find out what they said.
The pinyin appears at the top of the screen within a frame. I was missing the top border of the frame and the white space which would have been underneath it. I could see all the pinyin though, it just looked like the framed area was a bit chopped off at the top border of the game.
Possible bug?? At one stage, after working through the instructions and then the practice section, I found myself at the brown aerial view, with three blue balls at the left, the last one having a flag on it. Nothing else telling me what to do. With the mouse over the flagged blue ball, the cursor changed indicating that I could click on it. I did, and nothing happened. Repeated the click, waited, looked for other clickable areas, nothing. I couldn’t find any way to get out of that screen or to make anything happen, so I had to reload the game.
FWIW, I’m doing this on a low powered MacOS-X box on a very slow ADSL link. It took forever to load up (thanks again for the percentage loaded markers), but after that finished the game was quick and responsive, no problems at all.
I couldn’t see the characters either. Is there some browser setting I need to change (text encoding, etc.)? I am using OS 10.4 and Safari.
祝大家Festivus 快乐！
“Festivus, for the rest of us”.
可 ACA’DENTALS - for the academic’ish parts of Cpod, I’m expecting that there’ll be lots of re-organization soon, along with the new stuff. Why? Cause I’m having a hard time finding stuff.
Here’s a USE CASE for you, as I did it today. I wanted to look for the various uses of ‘ke’ ‘可’( 可好了，可不这样子想) as I had heard the ‘ke’ used in a couple podcasts. I went to the:
1. Learning Center tab
2. Saw Pinyin Chart, Listening Test, Grammar Bank, Writing Sheets
3. Clicked on Grammar Bank but only got the old Grammar tutorials
Where were those grammar tags and explanations?
4. Clicked on Lesson Archive tab
5. Clicked on a random grammar tag
6. Clicked on the Grammar Tab
7. Looked for 可 but there was only pinyin, tried ke3
8. No explanation there…
Anyway, I’ll probably figure it out by the time you get that particular grammar point up there, but I thought…geez that’s a pretty important ‘particle, conjunction…
I have known for a long time that my use of bu shi 不过 is often Engl-nese, mostly a carryover from my English, but I couldn’t not say it as I was trying to say stuff. There was a definite lack of a reprotoire in Chinese on my part to convey a ‘change in agreement or thought.’
I guess my brain was previously occupied with too many other things to notice, but lately I have been noticing that the Chinese use ‘可’ a whole lot to do this. It seems much more flexible than just being used in a couple set phrases, it seems like a nebulous but oh so important 就。
Hey JohnP, how ’bout one of your x-ray laserlike insightful and revealing explanations of ‘可’.
The game runs fine here on Firefox 2.0 1280×1024 flat screen. readability is low though because the font size for the characters is way too small at this resolution. Overall nice effort. It will be very useful if you can link this to your own word bank
Marc in Belgium
Dude, what happened to Ranger John’s legs? They’re missing below mid-thigh!
STATS - Runs fine on Firefox 2.0.0.1 on Windows XP
1. Yah, like Helen said, unfair HP draws down when the box hasn’t even scrolled to pinyin! We’re not competitive are we?
2. In the last level I took a hit on the first word and that took my HP down to almost zero, not fair!
3. o3 as in third tone, impossible to see as it scrolls.
4. I hate all avian, fowl and ghost sounds now.
5. No top ten list, I’m not competitive, no, no. I finished the game!!!
6. The story line, as we used to say where I came from, must have been written with the aid of strong medicinals. j/k
7. After I guess correctly the pinyin scrolls and wastes many miniseconds of my ADD mind, which the game induces. How about all the other boxes flip and show the pinyin and English. I could pick up/ingrain new/more vocab that way.
8. How about phrases instead and slightly slower scrolling pinyin. Or how about complete the phrases, all Chinese, etc.
9. How bout a few more seconds when all the boxes flip up so I can read them, or is this part of the reflex-make my eyes go into seizures part of the fun?!
10. How bout a game for my iPod or cellphone?
11. No bonus round? There’s always a bonus round! Where I can score crazy points.
Thanks, everybody, for the feedback. There are definitely going to be some changes before the final release, mainly in terms of (1) linking the game to each user’s personal word bank, and (2) improving readability.
The game wasn’t really designed for players that don’t use a mouse; I doubt we’re going to be able to accommodate that touchpad user group in this game, but we can keep it in mind for future games.
The difficulty will definitely be tweaked for the next version as well.
The story was totally devised by our Flash guy. It was also his idea to put ChinesePod employees into the game. (It was my idea to add their real faces for comical effect.) He clearly has a strong desire to create an epic saga of a game. My job is to make sure the game we create stays useful for teaching Chinese.
To that end, I’m also going to make sure the final version has a stronger “practice” mode. In my view, games with too strong of a story only get played once. I want this game to be a decent way to review vocabulary.
Great game idea for reviewing characters/vocabulary. A couple of things:
1) ‘Mist Swap’ — Is this supposed to read ‘Mist Swamp’?
2) Often times, it is very easy to guess the correct answer. For example, the pinyin is one syllable. There is only one out of five options using one syllable. This applies to multi-syllable phrases/words as well.
3) Can often guess correct answer if one only knows one character in the phrase. There may be several 3 character answers w/no character overlap and/or only one w/any of the correct characters.
3) Readability as stated by others.
4) How about traditional character option?
Keep up the great work.
聖誕快樂
–林
I would like to be rewarded with the translation when I get it right.
Can that be added?
there was at least one typo in the pinyin and extra g.
Judy
思怡
林,
1) Oops! Yes, it should be “Mist Swamp.” Thanks for catching that.
2) You’re right, and I noticed this problem too, but I don’t see an easy solution for it.
3) Same as #2.
4) We’re working on a new glossary/rollover system that will allow greater flexibility with regards to simplified/traditional. This will take some time, however.
Siyi,
A translation “reward” could definitely be added. I could also add a translation for when you click on the wrong answer. I’ll work that into the new release.
Can you name any specific typos?
John, if you don’t see any easy solution for the problem of only one answer having the same number of syllables, please look again before giving up. If that can’t be solved, then the game isn’t doing what it was designed to do. It’s like some dork shouting the answer while you’re reading the question.
Another suggestion to throw in. It might be helpful for games and other features if there was a summary of any assumed knowledge, so that absolute beginners know whether/when they can tackle it. For example, if any part of the game’s environment has chinese characters (or pinyin without translation), then it would be helpful to be able to learn those characters first, or to have it explained that it’s purely decorative, or indeed to find out that there’s nothing they need to know and they can jump in and play during their first lesson. Providing this sort of information should not be thought of as too much to read, it’s optional reading, and it demonstrates respect for the people doing the learning, and that’s never superfluous.
Very nicely done. Glad to see you experimenting with different approaches.
I’m probably repeating much of the above, but here’s my feedback.
1: the pinyin was difficult to read on some levels, painful to read on others. Could the pinyin be kept still? with something else moving across the screen to indicate time instead? (BTW - the pinyin up the aisle was a nice touch)
2: the vocabulary didn’t get harder.
3: perhaps all options should be same length as answer.
4: slow to download (fine once cached).
It would be nice if a voice read out the pinyin instead of displaying it; but that might be too big a download!
That said, very nice, thanks for putting it together for us!
Hi, when the memory isle game will be available? I’ve tried to play with it again but I cannot download it. thanks.