Lessons to be REMOVED (batch 1)

John
February 29, 2008, 05:20 AM posted in General Discussion

As I've mentioned in another post, we have begun a project to clean up the archive and raise the standard across all lessons. This means that some of the earliest lessons will be removed from the site soon. Visit them and download them now if you want them. Lesson content will be preserved in the form of new lessons, which may or may not closely resemble the old lessons.

We're going to do the lesson removal in batches. The first batch is these lessons: 0007-0026. (Just do a search of the 4-digit ID number to find the lessons.)

They should be disappearing sometime next week. 

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Julesong
February 29, 2008, 08:41 AM

John - how quickly/often will you be removing and replacing the lessons? One batch a week, a month? Thanks!

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nicolas
March 05, 2008, 03:41 AM

no pb, I followed every single Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate and Higher Intermediate lesson + all the extras. Nice to revisit them partly when I search the dictionary though.

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RJ
February 29, 2008, 10:25 AM

Good approach. Thanks John. And we can watch for these to re-appear as new lessons soon?

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artkho
February 29, 2008, 10:33 AM

Instead of removing these lessons, classify them as Chinesepod Classic. Otherwise, I'll download them, keep them for a few years, and sell these classic lessons on Ebay to the highest bidder. Or, maybe in the future, there will be Cpoddie Convention (cooler than the Trekkie Convention) where Cpoddies will trade the classic "episodes" with one another.

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tsunst
February 29, 2008, 04:07 PM

yeah, with their inferior audio, they'll be called the telephone box sessions!

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Julesong
February 29, 2008, 06:25 PM

Will the new lessons use the same filenaming system?

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rsmith91
February 29, 2008, 06:37 PM

Are you going to re-do the lessons and release them as brand new lessons, so with ID numbers 0800 onwards, or are you going to keep them as 0007-0026? If you are making them as brand new lessons, does that mean there won't be anything completely new on ChinesePod for a while? I don't mind either way, because I never listened to the old lessons anyway.

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baillies
February 29, 2008, 11:15 PM

Hi John 1. Are they getting deleted or will they still be available if you have booked marked them? 2. Will the lessons not removed be getting the fix in the future? Artkho classic! chinesepod classic ... maybe they could put all of the previously removed lessons in as well. Have you already got all of the old zh lessons to sell? I think I have some but i am no where near advanced enough to tackle them. Anyway i think it is a good idea to clear up all lessons that don't fit with the current quality/grading.

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AuntySue
March 01, 2008, 12:24 AM

If we've ticked "future newbie lessons", will these remakes come through on our mp3 feed or do they quietly nestle back into history?

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John
March 01, 2008, 06:47 AM

RJ, The "redone" lessons will begin appearing in March, as new Newbie lessons. That means they will continue sequentially with their ID numbers (08xx). Julesong, RSMith91, and AuntySue, They will show up in your feed as new lessons, using the same filenaming convention. They won't be identified in the podcast as a re-recording, but you can bring it up in the comments if you like. I guess you could say some of them are not "completely new," but honestly, they'll be very close to it. baillies, We will have to delete the old lessons, which means they will be deleted from your bookmarks as well. We have plans for adding the Fix to all lessons, yes. Deciding which lessons we remove helps us to identify which lessons really need the Fix (the ones not being removed).

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John
February 29, 2008, 09:56 AM

julesong, I'm thinking maybe one batch every 2 weeks or so. There shouldn't be that many batches, though. Probably three or four.

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John
March 01, 2008, 09:31 AM

julesong, We'll preserve the supplemental vocabulary, but the lessons in the first batch are all way before Connie's time (and mine too!). I don't think those will come into play until sometime after lesson #0100, but we'll keep on eye out for it.

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ewong
March 01, 2008, 02:39 PM

are the old lessons included in the dvd? is the dvd for sale? i signed up for premium last january so i couldn't get the promo

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lostinasia
March 01, 2008, 03:42 PM

So long ago the lesson "Ken Can't Dance" was renamed to the Ken-less title "I can sing, but I can't dance"... and now it's being thrown in the remainder bin. Ah, the indignity of it all. Good to see the attention to quality here. I loved those old lessons at the time, and thought they were an amazing advance over other learning material available... but ChinesePod has gotten so much better since then!

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John
March 03, 2008, 09:02 AM

ewong, The old lessons are still on the DVD, and yes, we do have plans to eventually offer the DVD for sale.

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wei1xiao4
March 03, 2008, 10:44 AM

John, I have been having a tough time downloading these lessons that are going to be removed. Can you give step by step advice on how to download these lessons into i-Tunes for posterity before you remove them. I've been using the feed and don't know how to download individual lessons.

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ewong
March 03, 2008, 10:51 AM

hi john, that's indeed great news. there are so many lessons but I haven't really downloaded them, it takes a long time to download one by one so i only get to study the recent lessons

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phil
March 03, 2008, 12:21 PM

hi wei1xiao4 firstly it would be helpful if you could choose to display your public profile (can be selected in "your profile" from the links at the foot of this page). Whilst you have chosen not display your profile I can't enter your conversations, an error 404 - not found occurs. Here is how I have downloaded and added lessons to iTunes: You will need to go to each lesson individually and download each lesson, dialogue, fix etc. I assume that you are able to download OK? Depending on what software you are using you will either be asked to select a directory for the download or it will default to your My Downloads directory or any other directory that you may have set up. Any way you need to know where the files will end up. Once you have downloaded everything you want, the next question is to decide whether to leave the files where they are or move them to your iTunes music folder (I move them). This is up to you but if you move them to your iTunes music folder they will then be with the rest of the music, podcasts etc that you may already have. To move them you need to know where your iTunes music folder is. If you are not sure you can find this in the iTunes menu under Edit>Preferences>Advanced>General>iTunes music folder location. You can then use My Computer to navigate to that folder and add a new folder named e.g. CpodOld or whatever. You can then move the files to that directory. Next step is to add those downloaded files to the iTunes library so that they will appear in iTunes and synchronise with your iPod. To do this go to iTunes then select File>Add folder to library. A browse window will then open and you just navigate to the folder where you saved your downloaded files. Once you have selected the folder click OK and they will all be added. It is a little complicated but if you have any problem or questions feel free to send a message or continue here

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wei1xiao4
March 05, 2008, 03:24 AM

OK, my son came home from boarding school, got his hopeless mom all downloaded. Thanks everyone for your help. I'm ready to send lessons 0007-0026 to Hainan Island for a rest. By the way, is there a lesson 0016?

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Julesong
March 01, 2008, 07:22 AM

Will the supplementary vocab that Connie provided in the comments in the lessons that are going to be removed be copied over to the new lessons?