ChinesePod Version 3 takes a slightly different approach to the body of nearly 500 lessons we have been calling the “Lesson Archive.” The word “archive” alone seems to conjure images of a musty old library, a place where only crotchety professors “rummage through the stacks” and where so much human knowledge goes to die. But wait — V3 gives us hope!
A huge part of ChinesePod’s value is in the past lessons. We’ll continue to create new lessons teaching what you want to learn about, but we’ve already covered so many of those topics that you badly need. You have to be able to find them, especially if you’re a new user trying to discover what pedagogical magic ChinesePod’s got. If only there were a better way to explore those past lessons…
Enter V3’s new Explore section!
Explore Section
The Explore section is organized by difficulty level. It’s easy to browse your level, and you can also display the lessons according to ranking (the scores users give the lessons on a scale of 1-5 stars), popularity (the number of times a lesson has been added to a user’s personal schedule), and date of publication.
Don’t worry, you can still search for lessons too (more on that next week), and the tags will still be there as well.
Updates to Past Lessons
With V3 the publication date becomes a little less important. This is because we have begun re-recording or editing some of the older lessons that we have deemed “not quite perfect enough.” Which ones? We’re not telling… you’ll have to do some exploring to find them. We will keep updating the past lessons while simultaneously generating new content, so your explorations will be continuously rewarded.
Lesson Fixes
What else is new? I’m glad you asked. The Academic Team has been putting in overtime editing all 400+ past lessons, removing any pesky pinyin errors, questionable translations, or any other problems. Oh, and you know those expansion sentences on old lessons that don’t have English translations? All expansion sentences have translations in V3.
Contextual Rollovers
In addition, David Lancashire arrogantly declared our rollover definitions “not good enough,” and urged us to go back through all 400+ lessons and tailor each individual rollover to its specific context. After we got over our egos, we realized he was right. On V2 if you roll over the Chinese word “想,” you get “to wish / to suppose / to think / to believe / to miss / to want.” So which meaning applies? Well, you have to figure it out. But you’re so busy. You want Mandarin on your terms. Wouldn’t it be nicer if when roll over “想” you just get “to think” and it’s right? That’s what you’ll see in V3. [You’ll be hearing more about new vocab features from Dave soon.]
Redesigned PDFs
And what about the PDFs, you ask? They’re getting some V3 TLC as well. We have redesigned and reformatted all the PDFs to make more effective use of space and waste less paper for the “printer-outers” out there. Gone are the days of vocab lists in long thin vertical columns. The pinyin and English now sprawl across the page horizontally, exuding graceful efficiency. What’s that? Supplementary vocab in the PDFs as well? You asked for it, you got it. For every single lesson.
Re-indexing
Considering all the tweaking and jazzing up we’ve been doing with the past lessons, we decided it was time for a complete overhaul. That means some of the lessons are getting renamed to better reflect their content, the intros are all getting “enhanced” so that they all clearly describe the lesson content (but still retain their quirky charm), the advanced (media) lessons are all coming home to mommy, and all the MP3 ID3tags are getting the updates many of you have been asking for. In doing all this, we have re-indexed all past lessons. Filenames will change, but for the better. New filenames will be much shorter and include a level ID (letters A-F), followed by the new lesson ID (a 4-digit number). This means that if you sort the files alphabetically on your hard drive, they will be sorted by level. The data is also in the ID3tags, so it’s just as simple to sort them on your iPod as well.
The Academic Team has been extremely busy for the past few months making your requests a reality. We’re sure you’re going to love exploring ChinesePod Version 3.
-John
Next Post: Lesson Search & Scheduling
CPOD’ERIFIC - There is just so much right about all that. 你们好棒!
wow, impressed!
Will the html Title tags also reflect content (lesson name) as it does on this blog, rather than just “Learn Chinese”?
goulnik,
Yes, the HTML title tags will reflect lesson names (e.g. ‘Tai Chi - ChinesePod’), the meta description will contain the lesson description and the lesson URL will contain the lesson title. We debated many approaches to SEO and decided the best approach was to focus on producing high-quality lessons and making them as easy as possible to find.
perfexcellent
It sounds great, especially revisiting old lessons. I’d love to see more ‘refresher’ material.
What’s the ETA on CPv3?
I’m concerned about the Contextual Rollovers change. Yes, it’d be great to have the particular meaning shown for that context, but I also think it’s important to make a note of that fact. Otherwise, a listener might be tempted to believe that character/word has only one meaning. A link somehow to all the possible meanings would also be useful.
Will the ID3 tags contain the lesson type (Newbie, Eli, etc.)? That’s the one thing I retag when I download a lesson…changing the “Album” tag to the lesson type so my MP3 player can display the “Elementary” album and list only those lessons.
Another useful feature was including the lesson number before the title. Even though MP3 players lists the “Album” by track number, the list is so long it’s nice to have the number in the title as well.
Good luck with V3!
Also, something I just noticed after downloading all the Newbie lessons is that the “Album” tag in all of the Newbie lessons isn’t the same. The choices I have are:
ChinesePod | Learn Mandarin on your terms
Learn Mandarin Chinese
Newbie
www.chinesepod.com
Not a big deal but perhaps standardizing these would be a good idea? A suggestion: Newbie-www.chinesepod.com.
Brian,
V3 will make its debut in early April.
David Saunders,
I totally agree with you. David Lancashire is working on all kinds of improvements related to vocabulary, and I can assure you that your concerns will be addressed.
Mark T and David Saunders,
The new ID3tags will be completely uniform.
-John
Surely it would be a good idea to indicate which of the earlier lessons have received an overhaul/update to bring them up to the current standard. I for one, would not specifically seek to re-download all the material just in case it had been updated. Furthermore, does an update say mean that the presenter’s dialogues have also been updated (ie in the int lessons, the talk between John and Jenny)? As this would be worth revisiting.
My approach to “exploaration” is cycling through them all (Intermediate, UI, and Advanced). Whenever I am through I start another cycle, newest lessons first.
Regarding the exploaration: I agree with Roberto. It would be good to know where updates have been made. I keep all lessons the PDFs redundantly all on 2 harddrives in case some kind of nuclear winter strikes us…
The old versions would also make good inventory for the CPod Museum Page. There are some nice anecdotes, stories, and witty dialogues made in the old banter that might be erased during the re-recording.
By the way: I still wait for a picture Jenny’s walkman and (more important) Ken’s secret list on Guanxi-building-techniques.
Regarding the ID3tags: Neither my MP3-player nor my PDA display the names of the Advanced shows properly, because they cannot display Hanzi. So all ZU lessons appear to be named 口口口口 (mouth-mouth-mouth-mouth?).
海宁 / Henning
I think you can solve that problem only when all system parts are setup in Chinese. I always tell my chinese contacts not to use chinese filenames, they often get screwed up somewhere, even with our partly Chinese systems here.
I would suggest CPod just to use Pinyin in filenames.
Where’s the update to the teaching method?
Not exactly sure what ID3tags are but my Archos mp3 player displays zh lesson titles in Chinese with no problem as it does with files/folder names.
Sounds very promising - I am really excited!
I fully agree with David Saunders regarding contextual rollover: it would be great to see the meaning actually used, but at least a ‘warning’ like […] to indicate that the word has several other meanings, too.
If I have the time I use to look in MDBG dictionnary for the meaning of several-Hanzi-words also with their scissors-icon: that shows what the components are individually and in partial combinations. I don’t know whether such could be integrated in a more convenient manner directly in CPod. Or if other Poddies have the same wish.
Concerning ID3 tags: would it be possible to include the dialogue text (Hanzi pinyin) in the description so that I could see this on an iPod while listening? Just for the dialogue-only versions.
This is a feature that I appreciate from Chineselearnonline (but they have pinyin only).
Jemini,
I’m not sure we have A teaching method as such. Whatever it is, it’s in ‘permanent beta’. Every time we learn somethign new we try to embed it into what we do.
What did you have in mind? I’m open to suggestions.
Ken Carroll
@John — I can’t believe I’m getting nailed for arrogance because of a casual popup preference. You’re just bitter about getting locked in the recording studio until you agreed.
@David — As John mentioned the definition data for the various entries will still be accessible. The fun will come with the ability to create new sorts of quizzes and bilingual search features with the newly-tagged data.
My iPod Nano displays the zh hanzi with no problem.
I can’t however seem to get text files to display hanzi when saving to a folder on the Nano.
Yah Ken, where’s that guanxi list?
This is the most exciting news about V3 yet. I’m almost literally salivating here. Great job!
And John, I really like your writing style. I’d love to hear more from you on this site.
Yeah, the GuanXi list in a series of lessons…
Keep the old versions and rename the new ones V2. Also, can the rollover be improved to display the definition of the zi in a ci?
Hello, everybody, especially to the new ChinesePod!!!
Wow, it’s not Ken who did the explanation, it’s John!!!
Anyway, this makes me more excited!!! You know what, everytime there are new posts about the new website ChinesePod is offering, I can’t help myself but wait… and wait… and wait… and, oh yeah, wait even more!
I’m so excited but could you please hear our suggestions in previous posts as well… 
Anyway, another thing about downloading lessons in iTunes, I kinda noticed that when the lesson is in my iPod now and press the center button of the iPod—
(1st Press) you’ll be directed to the Scrubber (Where you can rewind in certain time period),
(2nd Press) another press on the center button, the enlarged version of the Album Artwork will conquer your iPod screen,
(3rd Press) another press, the description of the lesson will be displayed like a Note.
(4th Press) another press (In songs, it will be the RATINGS SCALE where you can rate a song from 1 star to 5) but in Podcast, you’ll return in the original screen.
Now, my problem is in the 3rd Press.
So, I was like, the dialogue is more important than the description note. So, what I’m doing almsot everyday 
, I copy-paste the whole dialogue and save it as a Note and put it in my iPod and I can view it under the NOTES menu in my iPod… I’m smelling inconvenience… 
In this anticipated V3, could you merge the description and the dialogue as one? So that I can view the dialogue in my iPod… 
Yeah, once I downloaded the lesson in iTunes, I can check out the “Lyrics” of that lesson (And it turned out that it’s the dialogue/conversation of the lesson!), But when I look at it in my iPod, it’ll become the description of the lesson!
All in all, more power to ChinesePod!!! I hope V3 is a success!!! Why don’t you advertise the new V3 in The Saturday Shows because some people might don’t know about this yet…
L.L. ChinesePod!!!
金平 Tsin_Ping,
I already noticed that you are a very happy, positive thinking person.
But grumpy old men like me are in danger of going blind when reading through too many happy-smilies in a row. Just imagine a vampire stepping into the daylight.
So for the health of the darker part of the CPod community I would recoomend if you leave it with one or two smilies. And save all the rest of your positive energy for “Happy China”.
Yeah, Henning, I’m just a happy person!
I really really love smilies… 
Grumpy old men like you? But why? Life is fun! Don’t be grumpy… hehe..
So, there’s a darker part of CPod community? Hehe.. Glad to be in the brighter side!
L.L. ChinesePod!!!
Henning is not grumpy at all. Nor for that matter is he old - he’s a lot younger than I am! Having interacted with him for many months I can tell you that he is one super-smart dude, but modest about it.
But there are tons of smart people around here. This is why I’m so upbeat on the notion of communities of practice.
Ken Carroll
Hi Tsin_Ping,
) But commuters on public transportation or just listeners away from an online device could really benefit from that.
your wish concerning the “3rd press” on your iPod is exactly what I was also asking.
A commuter driving his/her own car would better not make any use of it (our community would be threatenend by terrible losses
Sure the description is very entertainingly phrased - but this bit is not the most important part for mobility, so I’d suggest we enjoy this description when we are online.
To get this onto safer ground again:
dark side (incl. star-wars-connotation): 黑暗面 (hēiànmiàn)
(based on a google search)
there seems to be no direct translation for “grumpy”, the one of dict.cn splits it in 2 parts: strange and irritable
性情乖戾的,脾气暴躁的 xìngqing guāilì de, píqì bàozào de
I wonder if the new features of V3 will allow me to embed this kind of vocab better into the CPod environment…
Hi 金平 Tsin_Ping,
When you said “I copy-paste the whole dialogue and save it as a Note and put it in my iPod and I can view it under the NOTES menu in my iPod”
Can you describe in more detail how you do this. When I do this I’m unable to see hanzi. I use a Window’s machine, copy the Cpod dialogue or other Chinese text, paste into WordPad, save-and it asks if I want to have it in Unicode, I select yes. Then transfer over to the Notes folder for synching with the iPod. Only symbols appear in the iPod.
I’ve tried selecting language for my Ipod to simplified Chinese, but no go still on reading the note hanzi. Turning that
upside down 
Just a note on the Contextual Popups. It would be nice if the real meaning was first, but all the other meanings should stay. I guess for me it is helpful seeing all the contexts the word can be used in, it helps me remember the word better, and seconldy, those times where the word has 5 english meanings, but you realise the english meanings, while completely different words, all mean the same thing.. then it really sticks in my head.
Secondly, the text/lyrics don’t come up on my iRiver player (E10) will there be support for people who don’t want ipods? (As tempting as it is to go out and buy an identical but more expensive mp3 player to my current player just for the cpod text is tempting but well.. you know)
Now that I’ve seen a sample of this:
The new ID3tags will be completely uniform.
Song Title: Level - Lesson Title
Artist: ChinesePod.com
Album: Level
Track Number: Lesson ID#
-John
on SpanishSense, I think a Song Title of:
Elementary - I’ve Lost My Luggage
wastes a lot of screen real estate on my MP3 player. Imagine 100s of (assuming 20 character display):
Elementary - I’ve Lo
Elementary - Finding
Elementary - I See a
The lesson is in the Album tag, so in my player I already know all the lessons in the list are Elementary. I’d rather see the lesson number in the front, just because the list is so long it gives a visual indicator of where I am in the list:
1 I’ve Lost My Lugga
2 Finding a Bathroom
3 I See a Thief!
Or for those who don’t want to browse by album, maybe add a one or two letter code to the front, similar to the way it is currently:
初级1 I’ve Lost My L
初级2 Finding a Bath
初级3 I See a Thief!
or for those who are stuck with a non-Unicode player, maybe:
E1 I’ve Lost My Lugg
E2 Finding a Bathroo
E3 I See a Thief!
Sorry to harp on this, but it is easy for me to blanket re-tag the Album or Artist fields if I don’t like your choice, but individually editing each Song Title is a bit monotonous :^)
Mark T,
This is a good observation. Thx for that. I think our tech people will have somethign to say about this tomorrow morning!
Ken Carroll