ChinesePod Olympic Site

clay
June 11, 2008, 10:42 AM posted in General Discussion

In the spirit of the Olympics, we here at ChinesePod bring you a fully interactive site dedicated to the most spectacular athletic competition on Earth, happening right here on Chinese soil for the first time in its history. You'll find:

  • a clickable map of Beijing with all the athletic venues
  • a list of all the events and some basic vocabulary
  • links to Olympic-themed ChinesePod lessons
  • the characters, pinyin, and audio for every single country in the world.
Have fun with this site, and feel free to leave questions and comments here for us.

 

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light487
June 11, 2008, 11:12 AM

Is the site live? I went there and just displaying the title and feed link as well as the Praxis logo of the little person. If not live yet, when will be live? (Gawd.. look my Chingrish.. getting bad now.. haha..)

 

 

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kimiik
June 19, 2008, 05:09 PM

After one week, the mistakes with Bangladesh and Cyprus are still there. Is it deliberate to leave false informations on this educational pages ?

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sarahjs
June 11, 2008, 11:32 AM

WOW WOW WOW and another WOW, there are all the lessons for the olympics, grouped aswell, then all the sports and the group words in each sport.

now I can 屈体 和 下法 yeah!!

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sarahjs
June 11, 2008, 11:37 AM

ooh ohh I can 刺和犯規!!!

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boran
June 11, 2008, 12:08 PM

Nice site folks.  It looks like a lot of effort went into this.  I particularly like all the key words for each of the sports.  Now I need to find a way to work the "clean and jerk (挺举)" into a conversation!  The section on countries is useful irregardless of the Olympics.  Hopefully this sub-site is a sign of things to come with regards to other sub-genres of interest to the CPod community.

Are any of the CPod staff making official visits to  the Olympics?  Perhaps a Dear Amber live from Beijing.

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sushan
June 11, 2008, 12:14 PM

This is the skeleton of something really impressive but it takes 3-8 seconds between clicking on a sound link and the sound actually playing, which makes it feel like there is something wrong with the site. The lava lamp effect in the banner is kind of annoying too. The keywords are displaying funny for me; anyone else?

 

 

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kimiik
June 11, 2008, 12:23 PM

Just one question from me about the old world division.

Why is Cyprus (塞浦路斯) still in the large group of the Eastern countries ? I don't really mind about Turkey but actually Cyprus is in Europe.

Btw, thanks for all the vocabulary. That will be useful.

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lostinasia
June 11, 2008, 02:58 PM

The Cyprus comment made me hunt around a little... er, I believe the name of another country should be Bangladesh, not Bengal. (Half of what was once Bengal now being in India - where it's still called West Bengal.)

Those old-style-calligraphy symbols for the different sports are really cool. Very impressive design, far better than the Fuwa or whatever the mascots are called.

The Flash player set up is a little annoying. I'm so used to opening things up in new tabs now, but of course that won't work.

So "Natatorium" is the English name for a building containing a swimming pool? And all these years I thought it was just "Indoor Swimming Pool." I'd like to paste the characters in here, but I can't seem to paste them... just the pinyin, you2yong3guan3. I guess it's a sign of progress that if, two hours ago, someone had shown me the Chinese word I'd have understood it, but I'd have had no idea what the English word meant.

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bazza
June 11, 2008, 03:46 PM

Very cool. Doesn't seem to work properly in Firefox though.

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penben
June 11, 2008, 04:41 PM

I am very impressed.  You all have been very busy.  Now all I need is a Chinese language feed during the olympics.

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sarahjs
June 11, 2008, 11:23 AM

have to click on the chinesepod olympics bit and then wow!!!!!!!

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clay
June 12, 2008, 01:56 AM

Lost in Asia,

we definately are not placing any political meanings behind any country name errors if there are some. Ill go and have a look at it today and see if i can spot any more.

for those with problems, let me know specifically what you are experiancing (outside of slow players) and ill report it to the tech dudes.

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clay
June 12, 2008, 02:06 AM

i initially had some viewing problems with the site until i upgraded to the newest flash version. click on the following to get there.

Newest Flash Player

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henning
June 12, 2008, 04:37 AM

Wow. Cool ressource. You should definately put a link on the home page.

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John
June 12, 2008, 05:39 AM

bazza,

What problems are you talking about? As far as I can tell, it works fine in Firefox for me (v. 2.0).

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bazza
June 12, 2008, 06:03 AM

I'm using v2.0.0.14 and I've tried both the English and Chinese versions with the same results comparing to IE.

1. The page doesn't load the first time, I have to click the banner and refresh the page for the index to come up.

2. The lesson scrollbar is missing.

3. If I click on any country on the map it just show one and a half flags with no other information.

4. If I click on an event it shows the Chinese, pinyin and audio at the top, but only 3 keywords underneath in English only with no chinese, pinyin or audio.

5. The links on the Beijing map seems to work ok but the popup boxes are blank.

I'll give it a try on my computer at work and see if I get the same results.

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bazza
June 12, 2008, 10:41 AM

It works ok at work. So I guess there's something wrong with my browser at home.

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bazza
June 19, 2008, 03:42 PM

I'm still having the same problems, even after upgrading to Firefox 3.

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johnrash
June 19, 2008, 04:07 PM

I'm on a Mac running Firefox 2.0.0.1.4  and have never had a problem viewing this site.  Looks great!

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penben
June 11, 2008, 04:46 PM

For the countries list I would add a thin line between the columns.  I pressed what I thought was the play symbol for a country, and it played the one in the other column.  I was first very surprised, then I realized I had picked the wrong one.