The New Vocabulary Manager

John
January 25, 2008, 10:05 AM posted in General Discussion

The new ChinesePod Vocabulary Manager is now ready for public consumption. Please try it out and let us know what you think. Just go to your Vocab Manager and look for the "new version" link at the top.

The new design was heavily influenced by Gmail, so much so that we even started using the term 'label' instead of 'tag.' (Don't be fooled, though... same function.)

Significant changes include:

  • Display 20, 50, or 100 words on one page
  • Select all or none
  • Bulk delete
  • Bulk label addition
  • Bulk label removal
  • Multiple, reversible sort options
  • Edit-in-place for definitions and pinyin (just click on the text)
  • Add your own words

Check it out and let us know what you think below. The changes we made came from YOU, the users. We hope you like it.
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lunetta
January 25, 2008, 12:37 PM

John, the new vocabulary manager looks great! I'm especially happy about my personal pet peeve, bulk labelling, and you can sort the words alphabetically! I smell a nomination. :-)

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dalaoshu
January 29, 2008, 10:53 AM

Great improvement. Nice to see a site being grown and improved. A few small suggestions if I may: 1. don't automatically uncheck the selections at the end of a label operation (I may want to do another on the same selection) 2. shown the word being edited, on the "label" dialog. It's easy to forget which word you're working on. 3. provide a list of unique labels so the user can select and apply, rather than retype. But, still, much better, especially the bulk tagging/labelling operations.

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goulnik
January 25, 2008, 12:59 PM

it looks like my previous post was off-topic, I was refering to the Dictionary rather than vocab manager. Issue still there however, as mentioned somewhere else (dictionary verrrry slow)

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billglover
January 25, 2008, 01:24 PM

The new vocab manager is looking good. I'm glad to see that lesson numbers have been kept as labels. Adding labels to multiple words is great. However, it would be nice to see a list of labels used before/used by others to help when choosing labels for words. Tagging/labelling is everywhere these days, but the best implementation I have seen bar far is the one on http://del.icio.us/ Slightly separate issue, but nonetheless related: When adding vocab from lessons, it is good to have the split between lesson and extended vocab. However, there are two "add vocab" buttons and it isn't clear if they add all selected words or only the selected words in a given section. Thanks guys. The site continues to get better :)

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lordstanley
January 25, 2008, 02:40 PM

This is very good news. Given that I griped a couple of times about the slow dictionary earlier this week, only fair that I share my positive comments on the new Vocab manager. 1. Love being able to display 100 words on page. Makes for easier printing. Just last week I bit the bullet and printed out 150 pages X 20 words per page, and I had to print each page individually. Took well over an hour. If I had done it next week that would have been 30 pages only, big time-saver. 2. Love the multiple, reverse sort options. By pinyin, the first 25 words of my list of 3000 were off (went back and forth between some words starting with a and e for some reason at the beginning) but the rest fine. And by English, took about 75 words to really start (since any definition starting with a parentheses was placed before any letters of the alphabet) but then fine. So overall definitely good enough. 3. Probably won't use the the edit-in-place much, but good to have. Wasn't able to ADD pinyin to the handful of words in my list that had characters and English but for some reason were missing pinyin. But able to edit pinyin and English. 4. Loved the Add a Word feature makes me much less dependent now on the Dictionary feature - I get definitions elsewhere, such as MDGB, the main reason I used ChinesePod's Dictionary was to add words I had picked up from other sources. 5. I don't really use Labels, but I understand most people do.

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calkins
January 25, 2008, 04:16 PM

Great improvement John and CPod! This will definitely make working with vocabulary easier. One issue I noticed: "Sort by" and "words per page" don't seem to work with each other. For example, If I want to sort alphabetically by Pinyin, then display 100 words per page, the vocab is no longer in alphabetical order. One function cancels out the other and forces it to go back to its default.

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calkins
January 25, 2008, 04:41 PM

One other nice feature that I just noticed you changed: When you save your vocab from within a lesson, it doesn't take you to the vocabulary page - it just automatically saves the vocab and you get to stay on the lesson page. Nice!

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John
January 26, 2008, 06:02 AM

calkins, Yes, you're right... we need to make those settings "more sticky." Glad you noticed the Lesson page thing. I think everyone will appreciate it... :)

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mnixon
January 26, 2008, 03:09 PM

Excellent addition John. Thanks CPod and Cpod community! AY

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mnixon
January 26, 2008, 03:31 PM

Was just playing around with my vocab lists (absolutely love the flexibility that comes with the sort and bulk labelling function). Much easier to organize! Question, to my own chagrin, a while back I had started a vocab list in Excel that I have never fully been able to integrate with CPod because I have never been able to figure out how to import such a list. Is there anyway to do this with the new version of vocab manager? Thanks. AY

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goulnik
January 25, 2008, 12:56 PM

I don't know about nominations, but 'stable' links such as http://labs.chinesepod.com/dictionary/word/%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB no longer seem to work (time out).

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tvan
January 26, 2008, 06:06 PM

I concur with the general opinion that the addition is overwhelmingly positive. The only minor item that bugged me a little was having to use the underscore character rather than a space; obviously, no big deal, but it did make some of my prior tags obsolete. Along the lines of RJBerki's comment above, it would be nice to review old terms without having to search through the whole vocabulary list. For example, I like to rereview business terms in general. However, if I select terms tagged "business" it only displays unchecked terms. I don't know what the rest of the community thinks, but maybe one treatment with the general vocabulary manager (i.e. display only unchecked terms) and a different one when dealing with specific labels (i.e. display all terms with that label).

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brandonruss
January 26, 2008, 10:14 PM

Awesome improvement. Love it.

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hecameforu
January 26, 2008, 10:41 PM

Very good improvements. One thing I noticed is that when you open a word to see what other lessons you can find it in, I don't see a way to close it.

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xiaohu
January 27, 2008, 03:23 AM

Overall looks great, just more searchability would be nice.

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phil
January 27, 2008, 10:36 AM

A couple of observations on the definitely improved vocab manager: I have been adding labels, all in lower case, but whilst most don't change (e.g. weather, clothing), some end up with the first letter capitalised (e.g. Education, Sport) and one ended up all capitalised (TIME). The label panel on the left hand side includes the automatically created lesson number labels aswell as the user created labels. Is there a good reason to keep the lesson numbers in that panel? I can't imagine why I would ever click on a lesson number and they are cluttering up my own labels. There will also be an awful lot of them after a while.

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lordstanley
January 27, 2008, 04:53 PM

Is the New Vocabulary Manager fully-synced with the old or should we consider it only beta at this point? Because I added about 25 new words yesterday and all are visible at the top of the old vocabulary manager. Yet when I go into the New Vocabulary Manager, although the increased word count is still reflected on the side counter, only a select few of those new words are at the top. Nor do they show up when I sort by Add. Trying to find where if at all they are hidden within my list is difficult in New Vocabulary Manager, because as Calkins pointed out, if you sort alphabetically then the "display 100 words per page" function doesn't work. Makes hunting down a word whose English translation starts with the letter "t" tedious. Any plans for a "search" function within Vocabulary Manager?

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RJ
January 27, 2008, 09:31 PM

Phil, youre right. It saves two separate tagged groups. One with the old name and one with the new. The only way to make it work is to remove the labels after select all and then bring up the no label group and add a tag using the edit function. (make sure the no label group is empty before you start). This should not work this way. I tried in both firefox and IE - both malfunction.

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gardener
January 27, 2008, 11:07 PM

Thanks for the improvements. I especially appreciate the bulk labeling aspect and the ability to get many more words on a page. The constant improvements to this site really show your commitment to helping us learn Chinese! How do I find the Dictionary that was mentioned above? I've been wishing I could check C-Pod for definition, usage in sentences, and pronunciation when I encounter words I don't know (or should know ;-) in my other study materials. By the way, I like having the lesson number labels.

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RJ
January 26, 2008, 03:49 PM

In the flashcard feature you can turn turn words in any given tag list "off" so they dont show again. To turn them back on you have to go to the vocab list and re-check the little boxes one by one. The s"elect all" will check them all but it doesnt stick for this application. Still have to do them one by one to get them back into the flashcard auto rotation. Would be nice if this could be done by batch but not a huge deal. Also when you set to 100 words per page and then change pages, there are still 100 words but the drop down at the top now says 20. A small thing but should say 100. Good addition over all.