Suggestions and improvements for Chinesepod in 2015

Matt_T

January 07, 2015, 04:49 PM posted in General Discussion

Hello Fellow Poddies,

There has been a lot of discussions over the last few weeks about all the changes happening with Chinesepod. Many people have posted suggestions and improvements that they would like to see in the future, however they are scattered across chats in multiple lessons and other discussions.

I am creating this post to provide a spot in which we can unify our posts on potential improvements that we would like to see Chinesepod work on in 2015 and have a discussion with the Chinesepod team on what may be possible and what isn't.

We should also be aware that some changes can take some time and a lot of work to implement so we shouldn't expect everything to be implemented immediately, but perhaps this could be an area where we also track what has been implemented and what may still be pending.

Happy New Year and Happy Posting! I'm looking forward to hearing all your great ideas!

newtonvsleibnitz

January 07, 2015, 09:11 PM

Nice idea, but I wouldn't be expecting the current regime to pay this anything more than lip service.

Gwilym-ChinesePod

Hi Newton. What kind of features would you like to see added for 2015? We can only improve if the community has constructive comments.

猴子团队

January 07, 2015, 10:52 PM

Hi guys. What's the new green icon next to the play button on the dialogue section for? I noticed it sometime yesterday?

Gwilym-ChinesePod

Hi "Wade" :)

I got this feature added yesterday as a way for users to download the individual voice recordings for each sentence dialogue. Many people like to study on Anki or other apps, so by being able to download an example sentence it might make the cards more useful. It's still being tested, so we are working on improving the look of it, as well as adding the functionality to other parts of the website like "Expansion" "Grammar" and the Dictionary. Let me know how you would like to see it improved.

Matt_T

Wow, this is awesome! I wasn't expecting this feature until later in Q1. Going to be adding these to my Anki cards now, thanks Gwilym.

猴子团队

Thanks Gwilym. Yeah, if it could be added to the expansion sentences t0o that would be great since I like to add several of those to my Anki deck to really nail down my understanding of a character in different situations.

waterbear

Gwilym, this is an excellent feature and although I don't use Anki (I rely on Pleco for SRS and Skritter) this is still very useful for review.

Gwilym-ChinesePod

January 07, 2015, 11:01 PM

Matt_T

FYI, Image link is broken on PC. However when I right click the broken image and copy the link URL it loads the image correctly.

猴子团队

January 07, 2015, 11:06 PM

Another thougt. It would be really cool if you could save an entire sentence to a deck. So rather than just vocaulary items being stored, being able to save useful sentences, or "staring" them and being able to look them up somewhere on the site.

waterbear

I also want this feature, Pleco just added the ability to create flashcards out of example sentences and I've been using it as a substitute for the example sentences on this site which isn't as useful. Being able to add them to the deck for export to Pleco would be a great time saver.

Matt_T

January 07, 2015, 11:59 PM

So far I have two suggestions:

1) Make it easier to find some of the available content as it's not listed under the "Library" section and I only stumbled across it but managing my library feed settings from the main page.

http://chinesepod.com/dashboard/feedsettings

Some shows such as the video series, What's the Story, The Menu Stealer and Shanghainese is not listed under lessons or culture shows section of the library.

2) I have already made this suggestion in a previous post but want to add it here as well. With the new video content being created it would be nice to have a video link directly on the lesson page. Currently Gwilym is great and posting a URL that we can copy and paste in another tab but having an intergrated viewer or embedded video would be nice. This already exists for some of the old CPod videos. Ex: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/where-do-you-work

podster

January 08, 2015, 03:08 AM

Gwilym, I believe you did promise another user that you would ask the tech team about restoring the feature where the page automatically scrolls to the point in a discussion thread which is indicated by the link when a user clicks on the comment header. Any update on that?

Also there seems to be a loss in the functionality for searching for lessons, as alluded to by others. I think this is a technical problem, but also there seem to be some omissions in lesson tags / related lessons curation. Maybe the library was never properly catalogued or indexed to begin with, and its gotten quite large, so I can understand if it is hard to comb through everything after the fact.

Is there a simple list somewhere of all the lessons, by title and lesson number?

Thanks

Matt_T

Hey Podster, I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but try the following.

Click the "Library" link in the navigation bar at the top of the page, then click all and then list at the left of the page it comes to the link below.

http://chinesepod.com/library/list/

This appears to have all the lessons and some filtering options. Lessons are titled and have publication date. There are no lesson numbers listed but the publication date can give you an idea of the order of the lessons.

podster

Thanks, Matt. I found that immediately after my post, and it will probably be helpful, but I really wanted the lesson numbers. I have mp3s for many of the lessons without titles and no proper index. I also find iTunes to be a bit clunky.

waterbear

January 08, 2015, 05:11 AM

Make some competition within the community. Fiona has already done this with her tonge twister competition and I think it was a great idea (I was a little late in seeing it to participate) more of these types of things would really help to build discussion in the community.

My ideas for competitons:

a. More tonge twisters obviously.

b. KTV recording competition (I'm already cringing but this would be fun and funny)

c. Create a short story and record it.

d. Do a chain story within one post on the lesson page, everyone would reply to that post with a recording, they would be required to use the vocabulary used in that lesson and eventually expand upon it.

Exmaple

Write “If we have free time, we’ll go to the party” and explain that the students are going to make a story one by one using this pattern. The catch is that every student needs to use the second part of the phrase said by a previous student as the first part of his/hers.

Student 1 If we have free time, we’ll go to the party.Student 2 If we go to the party, we’ll have fun.Student 3 If we have fun, we’ll come home late.Student 4 If we come home late, we’ll miss our test tomorrow. etc.

james137

January 08, 2015, 11:20 AM

can we get a lesson on food, like actual cooking for the advanced users? I'm finding it so strange that I can talk about investing, stocks, economic downturn and marketing, but I cant say "boil" "sautee" "deep fry" "pan" "steam" "spatula" or any actually useful words for the process of cooking.

If you could fill this vocabulary gap it would be great.

As for the accent of mandaring changin to taiwanese, I hardly noticed any difference when i was there so not worried at all.

Matt_T

Hi James,

If you are looking for specific vocabulary on items in the kitchen you could try this lesson, I found it useful. It's only intermediate level but has useful vocab.

https://chinesepod.com/lessons/utensils-in-the-new-kitchen

There is also a qing wen on cooking:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/chinese-gets-cooking

podster

James, have you tried clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right and entering "cooking" in the search box? There is also a video somewhere of Jenny and John cooking a dish.

Matt_T

Hey Podster, here is the lesson you are referring to.

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/braised-pork-in-soy-sauce