The New Vocabulary Manager

Hmmm, that has always worked perfectly for me.

I am have been trying to save new vocabulary to my vocab manager, it says that it is saved but when I go to look at it, it isnt there

I second RJ Berki on the above comment. Sometimes I would like to go back and drill, for example, my old business vocabulary. However, because I've already studied most of those terms, I wind up with a total of two flash cards. That's easy even for me! How do I get terms to reappear without un-checking the whole list?

My preference would be to have new characters (i.e. not checked off) only appear on the "All Vocab" flash card test but, when drilling a specific topic (e.g. Aliens and Ghosts), have all the characters in that topic appear/reappear in the flash cards.

John,

your number 3:

3. Words that are selected to no longer appear in the flashcards should still appear in the vocab list.

is not the issue. The issue is how to make them re-appear in the flashcards. This removal should not be permanent and used to be changeable. How do you make them re-appear in flashcards?

-RJ

Any one else find that the "This Vocabulary Exists" function seems to block some words even if they're not already in one's Vocabulary Manager? Any way to disable, override or circumvent this feature? While it's probably cutting down on my duplicates, it's also oftentimes preventing me from adding words that I know are new to me.

Have the Edit pinyin and Edit English features been disabled?

The good news about the Sort feature is that it facilitates the cleaning up of one's Vocabulary Manager by finding duplicate words. The downside to that is that I received a reality check by sorting first by English, then by Pinyin and finally by Word/Character - my vocab list of what I thought was 3,300 in size was whittled down to 2,250, practically a whopping 1/3. That would be great if one was on the TV show Biggest Loser and losing weight at that rate, but shedding vocabulary isn't as attractive. Oh well, you can't lose what you never had, so I guess the 3,300 was inflated to being with and using word counts as a measuring stick of progress may be old-fashioned anyways.

@marchey there is a firefox extension called IE Tab that will render a page using the IE rendering engine without leaving firefox.

It may be worth trying

Bazza, I'm having the same trouble when I highlight.

hades86, you could use this program:

http://www.cchar.com/

I just discovered it recently and I really like it. It does cost $36 but I think it's worth it.

Is there anyway to stop characters from being adding whenever you highlight them in the dialogue?

Am I the only one to experience problems with this? I had given up on the previous vocab feature because of it being too unwieldy. Now, I was prepared to give it another try but I can not see a single word of the 670+ entries that are supposed to be there. Yes, I am using Firefox 2.0.0.11 and it seems to work ok in MSIE 7.0 (7.0.5730.11), but I can not use that browser on a permanent basis on this system.

Marc

Jenny,

I'm loving it too! You guys are making so many wonderful improvements, I can't wait to see what's next!

The improved vocab manager is really neat. Loving it!!

ChinesePod is the best thing that happened to me . The next best is the New Vocabulary Manager.

Well done to all!

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback. Here's what we're working on now:

1. Changing words per page and sorting should not be mutually exclusive (in other words, they should "stick")

2. Tag names should be directly editable (rename or delete)

3. Words that are selected to no longer appear in the flashcards should still appear in the vocab list.

4. Fix the confusion with spaces in labels and capitalization in labels

After this, we will be working on improving the flashcards and the import/export functionality.

wei1xiao4, I had the same issue and, yes, it appears you need to replace any blanks in previous names with underscores?

Does anyone know how to pull up words you've already checked off, but would like to review again?

So, if I am understanding this correctly, I need to go through my old label list and change all of my labels so they now have underscores between the words. Is that correct? I think that is a pretty important piece of info to get out to everyone. Anything else we should know?

Dubya, with the Import function not working, I now import words one-by-one with the Add function of the Vocabulary Manager, cutting and pasting from MDBG if necessary. http://www.xuezhongwen.net/chindict/chindict.php

It can be a bit tedious, but reinforces the vocab a bit by doing it the long way like that. While the Dictionary is now working but still slow, I've pretty much given up on that as a way of adding new words, as I added a whole bunch that way yesterday (or tried to, thought I did) yet they seem to be nowhere to be found within my Vocabulary Manager.

Nice stuff! Can you add the ability to edit the chinese characters as well so us Traditional users can replace the simplified characters with ones we're more familiar with?

wei1xiao4,

I would think if you changed your "food words" tags all to

"food_words" first, and then add the tag "food_words" to the new ones it should work. After all, the strength of this new system is the ability to edit tags in groups. Let me know how it works out.

Need some help because the help button on the vocabulary manager is not working for me. I'm not very good with computers so everything needs to be spelled out clearly for me. I already have a label called "food words". I tried to add that label to other words. But it would not let me use "food words" because now you are not allowed to have spaces. So I used food_words. But the words were not added to my previous list of "food words". It made a new category. How do I merge these lists? Will I need do do this with all my old lists which all have more than one word labels? And can I eliminate label categories where I have made mistakes? Will there eventually be a step by step tutorial on how to use the new vocabulary manager when you click on "help"? Thanks for your advice. Sorry to be so dense.

Hi,

I miss a feature to see the stroke order for the characters. Best would be a animation for every character but i guess it would be too much work.

Thanks!

Hades

Hi,

How can I delete "no label" from the label list?

Thanks

Jack

Going back to anayelena's question, could someone explain how we import words into ChinesePod from an external source? This used to be a feature of the old vocabulary manager, but hasn't been working for months.

Thanks

D

Great improvement. Nice to see a site being grown and improved.

A few small suggestions if I may:

1. don't automatically uncheck the selections at the end of a label operation (I may want to do another on the same selection)

2. shown the word being edited, on the "label" dialog. It's easy to forget which word you're working on.

3. provide a list of unique labels so the user can select and apply, rather than retype.

But, still, much better, especially the bulk tagging/labelling operations.

Thanks for the improvements. I especially appreciate the bulk labeling aspect and the ability to get many more words on a page. The constant improvements to this site really show your commitment to helping us learn Chinese!

How do I find the Dictionary that was mentioned above? I've been wishing I could check C-Pod for definition, usage in sentences, and pronunciation when I encounter words I don't know (or should know ;-) in my other study materials.

By the way, I like having the lesson number labels.

Phil,

youre right. It saves two separate tagged groups. One with the old name and one with the new. The only way to make it work is to remove the labels after select all and then bring up the no label group and add a tag using the edit function. (make sure the no label group is empty before you start). This should not work this way. I tried in both firefox and IE - both malfunction.

Is the New Vocabulary Manager fully-synced with the old or should we consider it only beta at this point? Because I added about 25 new words yesterday and all are visible at the top of the old vocabulary manager. Yet when I go into the New Vocabulary Manager, although the increased word count is still reflected on the side counter, only a select few of those new words are at the top. Nor do they show up when I sort by Add. Trying to find where if at all they are hidden within my list is difficult in New Vocabulary Manager, because as Calkins pointed out, if you sort alphabetically then the "display 100 words per page" function doesn't work. Makes hunting down a word whose English translation starts with the letter "t" tedious. Any plans for a "search" function within Vocabulary Manager?

A couple of observations on the definitely improved vocab manager:

I have been adding labels, all in lower case, but whilst most don't change (e.g. weather, clothing), some end up with the first letter capitalised (e.g. Education, Sport) and one ended up all capitalised (TIME).

The label panel on the left hand side includes the automatically created lesson number labels aswell as the user created labels. Is there a good reason to keep the lesson numbers in that panel? I can't imagine why I would ever click on a lesson number and they are cluttering up my own labels. There will also be an awful lot of them after a while.

Overall looks great, just more searchability would be nice.

Very good improvements. One thing I noticed is that when you open a word to see what other lessons you can find it in, I don't see a way to close it.

Awesome improvement. Love it.

I concur with the general opinion that the addition is overwhelmingly positive. The only minor item that bugged me a little was having to use the underscore character rather than a space; obviously, no big deal, but it did make some of my prior tags obsolete.

Along the lines of RJBerki's comment above, it would be nice to review old terms without having to search through the whole vocabulary list. For example, I like to rereview business terms in general. However, if I select terms tagged "business" it only displays unchecked terms. I don't know what the rest of the community thinks, but maybe one treatment with the general vocabulary manager (i.e. display only unchecked terms) and a different one when dealing with specific labels (i.e. display all terms with that label).

In the flashcard feature you can turn turn words in any given tag list "off" so they dont show again. To turn them back on you have to go to the vocab list and re-check the little boxes one by one. The s"elect all" will check them all but it doesnt stick for this application. Still have to do them one by one to get them back into the flashcard auto rotation. Would be nice if this could be done by batch but not a huge deal. Also when you set to 100 words per page and then change pages, there are still 100 words but the drop down at the top now says 20. A small thing but should say 100. Good addition over all.

Was just playing around with my vocab lists (absolutely love the flexibility that comes with the sort and bulk labelling function). Much easier to organize!

Question, to my own chagrin, a while back I had started a vocab list in Excel that I have never fully been able to integrate with CPod because I have never been able to figure out how to import such a list. Is there anyway to do this with the new version of vocab manager? Thanks. AY

Excellent addition John. Thanks CPod and Cpod community! AY

calkins,

Yes, you're right... we need to make those settings "more sticky."

Glad you noticed the Lesson page thing. I think everyone will appreciate it... :)

One other nice feature that I just noticed you changed:

When you save your vocab from within a lesson, it doesn't take you to the vocabulary page - it just automatically saves the vocab and you get to stay on the lesson page.

Nice!

Great improvement John and CPod! This will definitely make working with vocabulary easier.

One issue I noticed:

"Sort by" and "words per page" don't seem to work with each other. For example, If I want to sort alphabetically by Pinyin, then display 100 words per page, the vocab is no longer in alphabetical order. One function cancels out the other and forces it to go back to its default.

This is very good news. Given that I griped a couple of times about the slow dictionary earlier this week, only fair that I share my positive comments on the new Vocab manager.

1. Love being able to display 100 words on page. Makes for easier printing. Just last week I bit the bullet and printed out 150 pages X 20 words per page, and I had to print each page individually. Took well over an hour. If I had done it next week that would have been 30 pages only, big time-saver.

2. Love the multiple, reverse sort options. By pinyin, the first 25 words of my list of 3000 were off (went back and forth between some words starting with a and e for some reason at the beginning) but the rest fine. And by English, took about 75 words to really start (since any definition starting with a parentheses was placed before any letters of the alphabet) but then fine. So overall definitely good enough.

3. Probably won't use the the edit-in-place much, but good to have. Wasn't able to ADD pinyin to the handful of words in my list that had characters and English but for some reason were missing pinyin. But able to edit pinyin and English.

4. Loved the Add a Word feature makes me much less dependent now on the Dictionary feature - I get definitions elsewhere, such as MDGB, the main reason I used ChinesePod's Dictionary was to add words I had picked up from other sources.

5. I don't really use Labels, but I understand most people do.

The new vocab manager is looking good. I'm glad to see that lesson numbers have been kept as labels. Adding labels to multiple words is great. However, it would be nice to see a list of labels used before/used by others to help when choosing labels for words.

Tagging/labelling is everywhere these days, but the best implementation I have seen bar far is the one on http://del.icio.us/

Slightly separate issue, but nonetheless related: When adding vocab from lessons, it is good to have the split between lesson and extended vocab. However, there are two "add vocab" buttons and it isn't clear if they add all selected words or only the selected words in a given section.

Thanks guys. The site continues to get better :)

it looks like my previous post was off-topic, I was refering to the Dictionary rather than vocab manager. Issue still there however, as mentioned somewhere else (dictionary verrrry slow)

I don't know about nominations, but 'stable' links such as http://labs.chinesepod.com/dictionary/word/%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB no longer seem to work (time out).

John, the new vocabulary manager looks great! I'm especially happy about my personal pet peeve, bulk labelling, and you can sort the words alphabetically! I smell a nomination. :-)