Bug in vocabulary List?
Juriaan
August 27, 2008, 01:18 PM posted in General DiscussionI have a vocabulary list with 25 words. When I try to use the Flashcards with the "English" option, only 16 words appear. With "Hanzi" or "Pinyin" there is no problem.
billglover
August 27, 2008, 09:45 PMI second this.
I've been so frustrated by the vocab features on the site that I have taken to studying all vocab offline (iFlash is my program of choice). But this involves copying all the vocab into flashcards and this takes time. I can also only study them when at my computer.
As a consequence, when work gets busy, the first thing to go out the window is maintaining my vocab study/list. A real shame.
Please please please can we have a working vocabulary tool before we take on the challenges of video and other new features.
John
August 28, 2008, 01:39 AMpenben,
We really are working on the vocabulary manager functionality. Just last week we restored editing functionality with improved code and UI. We also restored the "words per page" dropdown choice, and this time it sticks (uses a cookie to save your setting).
I'm curious what words and what lessons are not displaying for you. I have a hunch it's Advanced lesson vocabulary, added by clicking on words (not the "add to vocabulary" button). Am I right?
The vocabulary manager used to tag words with the ID number of the lesson they came from, but we got the sense that this feature is not useful and was just junking up people's tags. We can restore this feature if it's really missed.
Proper export functionality is a big item on my list of things to fix. My goal is to have a fully functioning, bug-free vocabulary manager that can flawlessly export to any major format, putting the user truly in control of his learning experience.
I'm sorry for this long wait, penben, but the vocabulary manager is not forgotten.
John
August 28, 2008, 01:42 AMbillgloveruk,
I hear you. We've just finished a big quality upgrade project which upgraded old lesson content, adding the Audio Review to every lesson which didn't have it previously.
The vocabulary manager is also key, and I am working on it.
mikenotinjubei
August 28, 2008, 03:39 AMHi John
I think vocabulary lists are potentially useful. At the moment I keep notebooks with words and sentences (lexical chunks) With Chinese, knowing words is necessary but not enough to communicate.
How hard would it be to add a few more editable or filterable catagories. One I would like if the word or phrase could have a tag with whether it is a noun, verb, lexical chunk.... And perhaps one or two the user poddie can set up. Such as food, business sayings. Or even within "adverb vocab words" those related to frequency; often, usually, never, always........so I could reinforce specific words or phrases.
A second request would be a way to add my own sentence using the word. Perhaps some of this is possible and I just need to figure it out. I guess this second request I could do by exporting the file But having a way that might end up usable in a mobile environment (Future) would be nice.
Is this possible or would it be possible or just too much in resoures both manpower and bandwith are required?
billglover
August 28, 2008, 05:33 AMJohn,
I have just read about the quality upgrade project on Ken's post. It's reassuring to hear that this has gone on. Many thanks.
Personally I did use the lesson number tags in order to break down vocabulary into manageable lesson sized chunks. I could then review the vocab/flashcards before tackling the exercises. However, if I'm the only one using this feature then it clearly isn't something ChinesePod should be worrying about. It would be nice to somehow study the vocab for a given lesson and test myself on it.
Does anyone else find that they are tackling the exercises and getting nowhere because they don't know the vocab, or can't recognise the characters? I'd be interested in bouncing study ideas of you to see if I'm missing a trick here.
Once again John (and the team), thanks for listening to your users. I feel reassured.
lostinasia
August 28, 2008, 06:40 AMbillgloveruk, re: not knowing vocab: I don't use the exercises as much as I should, but I know in the expansion sentences I'm often thrown off by surprising vocabulary. I've actually commented (er, complained) about the expansion sentences quite a few times - I think they should try to stick to vocabulary "below" the level of the lesson, except for vocabulary within that lesson itself (i.e. Upper-Intermediate expansion sentences should use Intermediate-level vocab). Fairly often I'd run across Upper-Intermediate expansion sentences that use vocab found nowhere else in ChinesePod.
So yes, I guess I do have the same problem, but to be honest I think that's an issue with the material rather than the study method (short of memorizing everything).
That being said, I DO think the expansion sentences have improved in the past few months - they seem to be more controlled/ "graded".
billglover
August 28, 2008, 08:17 AM@lostinasia:
I'd never thought of it like that but now that you mention it, I can relate to what you say. My personal feeling is that the odd new word is always welcome, but it would be good if these were included in the lesson vocabulary.
penben
August 29, 2008, 07:55 PMI have added words from about 130 or so lessons (over 700 words in all) to my vocab manager. However, I only get 25 lessons when I list the lessons. So, most of them don't show up! Also, the lessons show up as numbers, not the name of the lesson, so that's particularly useless. And no, I haven't done any advanced vocab yet, I've maxed out at intermediate. But I have added some vocab by clicking on words in expansion sentences. And forgive me if you've fixed them in the past few weeks, but I believe a few words from the Moscow lesson and one of the translations for "plan" always come out with garbage in the xml export. If I could find the words in the vocab manager I'd get rid of them but I find it quite difficult to find anything with 700+ words and no real working search or filtering tools.
But yeah, I'm hanging in there for now. I've made my own flashcard program and I just have to deal when it barfs on the bad words and take them out one by one from the xml. I'll be happy to see the fixes though!
penben
August 27, 2008, 05:15 PMMy experience is that the vocab list has been for a long time, and continues to be broken in many different ways. The list fails to show all the lessons you've inserted vocab for, fails to show all your words, and outputs some words as garbage in the xml export. 哎呀！The cpod staff has claimed they'll work on it but it must be at the bottom of their buglist since this stuff hasn't worked in weeks, perhaps months.
Its a little upsetting when the premium features I pay for don't work while the free stuff works great! Of course, I use the free stuff too, but I would think the pay features should get priority. <sigh>