The ME Section

The drop-down box does not work here. Whatever I chose I get an arbitrary subset of the currently bookmarked lessons.

Me = Home

Channel = Lessons

Light,

OK, will look into it.

"Subscribed" shows the 2 newest UI lessons

"Bookmarked" shows 3 older Media lessons that I haven't completed yet (but which have entered my list once via the reguar "feed")

"All" brings up the the above 5 bookmarked lessons. "Studied" are not part of "all".

Is there a way to delete all of my currently bookmarked lessons and start from scratch?  Also, it seems that every new lesson that comes across on my feed is automatically bookmarked.  Is that true or am I missing something?  Finally, is there a way to create a hierarchy of bookmarked lessons so that something I book marked sometime ago can be moved to the top of the ME section if I choose to study that lesson again?

Good tutorial.

I do like these tutorials - it's something I had been wanting when I first joined to make sure I wasn't missing anything!  Now, it gives me a nice preview of some of the new premium content since I last used them a long time ago during my trial period (I'm currently just a basic member).  Overall, the guided hand in the form of these help videos plus the guided tour is a definite plus in this new release.

An unexpected favorite feature of mine is the "My Achive" side panel on the Me page.  It quickly gives me a summary of how many lessons I studied and shotcuts to them all.  One request: this help video should mention this feature and also something about the "Manage Achive" button - I still haven't figured out what I can do from that screen.

@rashphoto: you are correct - any podcast that's in your feed automatically gets bookmarked.  Also, there doesn't appear to be a way to batch remove or organize your bookmarks.  It would be a handy feature though.

Great tutorial John.  This is really helpful.

Like Boran, I also really like the My Archive panel.  I think it'd be perfect if it also included a "Total" column with the total number of lessons for each category.  It'd be nice to compare lessons that are "active" and "studied" versus "total" lessons.  Just a thought.

Also, I think the word "active" is a bit misleading.  At first I thought it meant all lessons that hadn't been studied (either bookmarked or not).  It makes it even more confusing because you bookmark a lesson to make it active.  I think it'd be less confusing if "bookmarked" was used instead of "active".

One more thought about the "My Archive" panel...

It'd be great if each lesson category (Newbie, Elementary, Qing Wen, etc.) had a direct link to its lesson archive (channel).

I know you can get there by going to the "Channels" tab in the "Lessons" section, but links in "My Archive" would require much less navigation.

The numbers I am still craving for: How many lessons per level are there total? Did we cross the 100-lesson-border in UI yet? Can we fill a 1-day-1-lesson-schedule for half a year with Intermediate lessons? How far from the magic 1000-lesson-border?

Or even more tricky: How many of the totally available lessons have I worked through? Add an "Available" column in that table...

Another feature request that I think this has been stated before: A comprehensive list with all lessons for each level would be great - lesson titles only, no descriptions, no pictures. 50-100 entries per page at least.

Hi. For what it's worth, I'd like to signal that I agree with Henning re: the value of the lesson counts for each level. Especially in the sense of being able to try and plan things. Another reason, personal to me, is getting a sense of what kind of archive I am buying into, when I am trying to decide whether to spring for a "Basic" subscription out of my (limited) budget.

Worth thinking about especially if CPOD's competitors for the "Basic" subscription budget -- eg., Frenchpod, a Praxis product -- have so few lessons. If I sign up for JPOD101, I know that I have several hundred lessons that I could tackle from the word "go".

Whereas with their sister site ArabicPod101, there aren't more than 20 archived lessons. I am still happy to sign up with ArabicPod101 and wait patiently for lessons to be broadcast, but that is because of my perception of the value delivered by APOD101, and it has nothing to do with the value -- to me -- of an archive that already covers nearly every topic imaginable. But the lesson count is a factor...

Henning,

Are you talking about the My Lessons tab (with the personalized lesson stream), or the Manage Archive page?

On the Manage Archive page, there's a "Show" drop-down menu which currently can only be used to display lessons tagged with a particular label, but soon will also let you view "Studied" lessons.

Not sure what you mean by "arbitrary subset"... Labels are subsets of your archive, yes, but not arbitrary.

Im starting to use the ME section to bookmark a few lessons that I want to study. Some of the older Upper-Intermediates are useful to me, like Opening a Meeting/Closing a Meeting, so I can bounce back and forth between the two lessons. Also it seems like response time has improved, i cant say for sure, but sometimes the web site has been slow.

Your web developers have done a good job.

One bug you may want to check out is the dialogue buttons on Opening a Meeting returns "no data"

About the "Vocabulary", I have noticed the pressing the "Save Select Vocabulary" will turn to "Saving Selected Vocabulary", save the vocab, but still stay "Saving Selected Vocabulary" even after the vocab has been saved.

Thanks for the reports, guys. Will look into those.

I  have a few grouses about the new site design;  (sorry)

1. Copy pasting lesson dialogs has become more painful.[ I like to annotate them and go over them with my local Chinese tutor.] Ever since the upgrade to 2.0 (last year)  the pdfs have pasted for me as tofu, but now the dailogs from the dialog tab have acquired a button that shows up in the pasted text.  I now have to go and delete on line of garbage for every line of dialog.  ( Is it ok if I send you the bill for carpel-tunnel treatments later? )

2. It took me a while to figure out how to access my studied lessons.

3. I still haven't figured out how to get a channel (or my studied lessons) to list in descending order.

I think the new design has 影响'd some of my daily activities. Otherwise, I like the new look.

Mark,

Have you tried copy/pasting the dialog from the text-version of the dialogs? The link to the text-version is in the footer of every PDF dialogue.

Boran, that would work, but I know some people prefer to have a transcript with Chinese characters only - it helps maintain "honesty" when studying.

I know for me I copy the expansion sentences into my own transcript, and with those sentences I've got the same problem - garbled code that I need to go through and delete. It's an additional annoying step that wasn't there before.

I wonder if there is a problem with the vocabulary section or if I'm doing something wrong?  I have tagged a number of words under labels that I made up.  When I try to run the flash cards or concentration game using only a certain label, it seems to use all the words in the vocab.  It doesn't filter out the other labels.

Can you add the "Archive" to the mobile site please? I find it much easier to search through lists of lessons on mobile, than to see large graphics and long-winded descriptions for each lesson.

For some reason the "Filter" button doesn't work on my Sidekick/Hiptop either. It works from home when I am on my desktop PC but not when I need it, when I am mobile.

Let me make a few clarifications...

There are two types of bookmarked lessons: "active" ones (the ones you haven't marked studied) and "studied" ones.

There are a number of ways for a lesson to become bookmarked:

   1. You manually bookmark it
   2. It shows up as a future lesson (as set in your personal feed)
   3. You add it as part of a lesson set
   4. Your personal teacher (Guided, Executive subscribers only) adds it for you

"All Lessons" should display both active studied lessons and studied lessons, but it's not at the moment. We will update this ASAP.

I hope that clears some of this up.