How do you search for a lesson?

At the top, to the right of "Resources" you type it in there and then hit search. It will search not only phrases but also related lessons as well. It searchs everything...

A search pulls up all the vocabulary, but also on the bottom left corner there's a list of the "Related Lessons". In that box, you can see "Traditional Chinese Medicine".

Unfortunately, that's the ONLY related lesson it suggests - the tagging needs a lot of work in these lessons. Can users generate tags? That'd seem the best way forward.

Another example: I tried searching for "Macao", and the glossary told me there's no entry for the term, but there's one sentence, and one related lesson: State-Owned and Privately-Owned Enterprises. This, I would say, is a problem since one whole Advanced lesson is ABOUT Macao.

One thing I just figured out: you CAN search by the lesson ID, but you need to type four digits: 0797, not 797. Then, the glossary will tell you there are no results, but in the "Related Lessons" box it'll give you lesson 0797 (Behind the Scenes at the Beauty Pageant).

I suppose this all could be in the instructions / help me files somewhere (I haven't looked). But the current structure does seem odd.

I worry about how well ChinesePod sometimes seems to hide the truly magnificent number of lessons here. Casually browsing through a list of them is nowhere near as easy as it should be.

I agree with you.  I don't understand how you can have such an excellent, rich set of lesson content but make it so difficult to find it.  After the creation of the actual lesson content, an effective search feature should always be the next top priority in my opinion.  The Lesson Search in the old version wasn't very good either  - a persistent pet peeve of mine.

I assume this is something they are still working on (cleaning up, organizing lesson tags and such) and that we will have a proper Advanced Lesson Search page someday soon where we can search on topic, difficulty level, grammar points etc.

By the way, you can type in the lesson ID in the search box and it will return the lesson for you in the results.  This comes in handy in locating old lessons that you batch downloaded via the new BitTorrent feature.

I agree. It took me a while to realise just how big this place is if you just dig a little! I think that somewhere on this site one should be able to reach a no frills list that has nothing but the clickable names on the lessons. No pretty pictures, no beautiful tables, just the clickable list.

Perhaps it already exists, CPod has an attic of working pages which are hard to find, and not linked to any more!

Maybe the advanced and media lessons should come with translations of the titles in the list. It could be that someone on intermediate level would find an advanced  lesson of particular interest which he/she would have missed else.

Yeh the tags need a lot of work. In the meantime, what you can do is put in the name of the lesson, the topic (and cross fingers).. also what I did with that medicine example was first type in medicine.. then find the chinese character for medicine (药) in that list of characters, copy&paste it into the search and then go again.. got more matches. When I pasted the 药 character, the search box immediately gave me other choices to choose from as well as well, and those 2-character combos gave much more response..

It's clumsy.. but until the tags are fixed, there's no good way to do it.. but that's no different than the old way, as highlighted by boran above.. I've never really had much luck with the search but I have had more, albeit a small amount, luck with the new search.

Just noticed the new addition with Hanzi.. if you hover your mouse over Hanzi in the conversations, it does a popup translation, just like the Firefox plugin does! Not as detailed as the Firefox one but enough to get me by in a pinch.

Hrmm.. it's only doing the popup thing on those characters in my post above, I tried it in other lessons and it doesn't work.. I wonder how I did that.. I must have copied some hidden tag from the glossary when I grabbed that character from before.. That's a shame.. I thought they'd implemented something.. :( Oh well.. At least I still have my Firefox plugin...

Testing..
药
药

Here's the hidden tag info that is making that
character show the popup:

<p>Testing..<br>药<br>
<span onmouseover="tip(event,'medicine',
'yao4','药','');" onmouseout="htip()">
药
span>p>

What strikes me as really wierd is that the Chinespod team keep spending time and money making new lessons, while the huge stock of back lessons is not exploited.

I have been looking at some of the advanced lessons, and it is pretty obvious that virtually no one else is as there are missing mps files, missing sound files, many with few or no comments...

I can not see the sense in continually producing new content at large cost, when you could exploit your current assets a thousand times better.

Incidentally I just tried typing 中药 in the search box - that gives a much better result, but it also picks the 白酒和黄酒  lesson(?).  Alcohol sounds more like a Western medicine than Chinese :-)

mikeinewshot, I'm in those advanced lessons too... and as you say, they are very inconsistent. Earlier I was looking at a lesson that claimed to be about Tibet but most of the comments seemed to be about shopping; the lesson's dated February 2007 but the comments go back to January 2006.

Given that Advanced lessons are a big jump for a lot of us, I'd sure appreciate it if they were more approachable and organized. Of course the level change should be significant, but the current design of many of those lessons (e.g. near-invisibility in English-language searches) makes the transition a lot harder.

Here's that Tibet lesson: 

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/西藏“淘金”/discussion#comment-81711

light 487, cool find with the mouseover from the glossary.

Thanks, but how on earth are you supposed to find which are the lessons?

For example, I typed "medicine" and got a page of chinese which no clue as to what was what, and when I clicked on some of the names I got nothing useful

Thanks Henning - that clears that up a bit. A year back I didn't dare wander into the Advanced section.

The 21 that have been deleted - are those the first edition advanced, with English included in the transcript? I think I've still got printouts of those somewhere, although my MP3s probably disappeared in a hard drive crash or year or so back.

And why do I seem unable to edit link names? I can post them easily enough, and in the box I keep trying to give them a different name so it's not quite the ugly http... stuff, but all that ever appears is the ugly link. Is this a function of using Safari?

Any advice on where to start in Advanced? Right now I'm just kind of picking from topics that seem interesting - of the topics that I can even understand from the titles!

I think I am in a similar state to LostinAsia.  I have started to tackle some advanced lessons like I used to tackle the old (difficult) intermediates - I am listening and re-listening to the dialogues, looking up words until I understand most of it.

Similarly I am trying to find topics of interest and which I understand the titles of!

light487 
            says 

Here's the hidden tag info that is making that
character show the popup:

<span onmouseover="tip(event,'hello',
'ni3 hao3','你好','');" onmouseout="htip()">
你好


It doesn't work if you type the code yourself though, 
you have to copy and paste one that's already been done.

LIA said:

 "I worry about how well ChinesePod sometimes seems to hide the truly magnificent number of lessons here. Casually browsing through a list of them is nowhere near as easy as it should be."

I would like to very loudly second that thought, and the one below added by Boran:

"I don't understand how you can have such an excellent, rich set of lesson content but make it so difficult to find it." 

would it be so hard to add a lesson index? Come on guys.

RJ

The beauty of a simple link-list comes with the unbeatable search capabilities. They come with your browser.

Henning,

So.....isnt the solution obvious. It seems as though for some reason they like to keep us, to some degree, unhappy. Why roll out a new version with less capability than the old. I can live with it this way and make it do whatever I want if Im willing to go through the extra steps and take the extra time but why?

Another simple way to keep the natives from getting restless- John had a list of Items being worked on. Why not update this daily by "checking off" or marking as "done" the things that are done, and adding to the list any new things that they are working on? I will say no more about either issue.

RJ

I strongly agree with all the opinions above.  I'd like to think that improving the lesson search capability and glossary is at the top of Cpod's list, though it seems that some of the same problems have been around for a while, for example including Advanced lessons in search results when searching with an English keyword. 

I imagine that some of the current problems are still a result of the switch from v3 to v4.  I just searched for 'job', expecting to get '工作‘, but it didn't turn up.  I am sure such poor glossary/dictionary search results didn't exist in the previous version.

RJ - great idea.  There really needs to be a list of current projects and improvements.  That would keep the complaints down.  It would be nice to know what Cpod sees as 'enhancement priorities'.  I appreciate the occasional announcements, but an ongoing, up-to-date list of fixes would be useful too.

I see some potential in the "related lesson" box that has been introduced on the lesson pages.

However, it still does not deliver any reasonable results. The current "Airport Arrival" perfectly matches "Airport Announcements" and "Turbolence" both in content and level..yet the "related lessons" box is empty.

The comments in the first "official" 69 Advanced levels have been either deleted or mixed up during the former move to "V3" (May 2007). Among them my first ever pure-Chinese comment (which was on this lesson). It took me about 30 minutes to write it back then (3 sentences). Sniff.

I am currently relistening Advanced lessons. Including those 21 which have been deleted (some of which for good reasons).