Suggestion for relatively simple new feature

Romontana

October 28, 2013, 02:32 PM posted in General Discussion

Hello CPod team and users, not sure where to post this sort of thing so I thought I'd try here first.  I have an idea I think can improve the usefulness of the site without detracting anything from the experience. 

For the Expansion and Grammar sections, as we know the default is that when you click on the tab, the Chinese sentences are showing, while the English translations need to be clicked to be revealed.  I was thinking it would be more useful if both lines were hidden by default.  Two reasons:

1)  This would be helpful for people (like me, but I don't think I'm alone) who use these sections for listening practice.  I first click on the red "play" button so I can test my ability to comprehend the audio playback of the sentence, after which I have a look at the written Chinese to see how much of it I succesfully picked up.  When doing this, it can be hard to avoid seeing any of the Chinese characters, and obviously catching a climpse defeats the purpose of using these sections for listening comprehension.

2)  This would also be helpful for those of us who use these sections to practice our English-to-Chinese translation by reading the English and then attempting to say it in Chinese.  Doing this is pretty impractical as of now, since you have to somehow cover the Chinese sentences as you move through them.  It would be much easier if the Chinese were hidden by default and one could reveal the English first rather than the Chinese.  (I realize one could just use the audio review for this sort of practice, but sometimes I don't want to download the audio review file, or I would prefer to read the English rather than hear it, etc).

Anyway, I think having both lines hidden by default makes a lot of sense in allowing users to choose which line they would like to see, or even if they would prefer to see neither, and thereby greatly increasing the different ways users can adapt these sections for different learning goals.  And I can't think of any reason that doing this would take anything away from anyone's experience.  Thoughts?