The Official ChinesePod Blog | Learn Chinese on Your Terms

Traditional Characters for the ChinesePod iPhone App

By John Pasden | February 9, 2010

The ChinesePod “Learn Chinese” iPhone app now supports traditional characters. To make the switch, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Update your character “Character Set” settings on ChinesePod.com. You can do this from any lesson page by clicking on the little “cog” icon at the top right of the main column. (See images below.)

2. Update to the newest version of the ChinesePod Learn ChinesePod iPhone app.

3. Continue using the app. All newly downloaded (or previously downloaded but newly opened) lessons on the app will display in traditional characters.

Please note that this is newest update will only affect newly downloaded lesson data. Previously downloaded (and opened) lesson data will not be updated. This is because the app doesn’t store both simplified and traditional character simultaneously, since most users only need one, and downloading both sets every time would results in twice the sync time.

An upcoming version of the app will feature both “clear lesson text data” and “clear audio data” buttons in the settings section. That way users that only want traditional characters can clear their lesson text data and redownload it as pure traditional characters. In the meantime, if you absolutely must clear your app of the simplified character data, you can delete the app from your iPhone and then reinstall it. This will also delete all lesson audio downloads, however, so if you don’t want that, we recommend you wait for the next release.

As for you Android users, expect to see similar updates to the ChinesePod Learn Chinese Android app soon!

Posted in ChinesePod, Innovation, News | Tagged app, Chinese, Chinese characters, iPhone, traditional, traditional characters, update | Leave a comment

March 1st Pricing Changes

By Hank Horkoff | February 1, 2010

To give everyone a lot of advance notice, from March 1st, 2010 we will introduce a number of changes to the pricing structure for ChinesePod subscriptions:

1. Premium and Guided subscriptions of selected lengths will rise slightly.

Premium 6 Months: $149 (was $139)
Premium 12 Months: $249 (was $239)
Guided 6 Months: $249 (was $219)
Guided 12 Months: $429 (was $399)

2. Basic subscriptions will now be priced at 50% of Premium subscriptions.

Basic 1 Month: $14 (was $9)
Basic 6 Months: $74 (was $39)
Basic 12 Months: $124 (was $69)
Basic 24 Months: $199 (was $129)

3. Students will now receive a 25% discount across Basic and Premium subscriptions (previously 20%).

Prices for existing one-month subscriptions, the Executive Plan and the Praxis Pass are unaffected.

Why the change?

Since September 2005, the prices of ChinesePod subscriptions have been pretty much unchanged. With a new Chinese year we feel it is time to update prices to better reflect the value we offer. We take great pride in the quality of our audio lessons and routinely hear from our students that they are the key part of our service. We are adjusting prices for Basic subscriptions to better reflect this perspective.

A Basic ChinesePod subscription provides unlimited access to an ever-growing library of 1,300+ quality audio lessons and full transcripts plus ongoing professional study support on the lesson discussion boards.

With this in mind, we have revalued Basic, pricing it at 50% of a Premium subscription.

Good news for Basic subscribers!

We have gotten a lot of feedback for our Learn Chinese iPhone app. One of the complaints we have heard is frustration from Basic subscribers that they are blocked from downloading lessons. We agree. If you can do it on the website, you should be able to do it on the iPhone. As a result, in the latest 1.0.8 version (available in the App store since Jan 31) of the iPhone app Basic Subscribers are now able to download lessons to help them learn on the go.

What else do we have planned for 2010?

A year is a long time, but in the next few months we will be working on:

A full grammar guide (finally!)
Better support for students with teachers (e.g. Guided, Virtual School, Executive Plan)
A new dashboard concept to replace the current home page to help make the service easier to understand.
Continued iterations for the iPhone and Android apps (sneak peak: the iPhone app will soon have support for Traditional Chinese!)
API’s (we hear you WeLoveChinesePod people)
As well as more and more lessons

Some of you have recently received user surveys from our ChinesePod Community Advocate, Scarlett (username Ousijia), or taken part in interviews with John Pasden. These are part of our efforts to better understand what our users want and need, so we can work to improve and grow our services accordingly. We greatly value this feedback and it is an important part of our planning process.

We welcome your feedback here and are happy to answer questions you might have.

Thanks!

Hank.

Posted in ChinesePod | 28 Comments

New Testing Features on ChinesePod

By John Pasden | January 20, 2010

With over 1300 lessons in Praxis’s signature format (dialogue, vocabulary, expansion, exercises), we’ve got a lot of lesson data to work with. For over a year now, the Praxis Language tech team has been reworking the system architecture behind the scenes to enable more powerful applications of that data. This week we are releasing ChinesePod’s new Placement Test and Level Test.

Both tests offer the following features:

Random selection of questions, drawn from the data of over 1300 lessons
Choice of simplified or traditional characters (defaults to your lesson settings)
Short, medium, or long test lengths
Partial saving of the test, just in case you get interrupted (answers are saved when you go to the next page of the test)
Total breakdown at the end, showing how you did on the different question types, across the different levels
“Virtual test paper” showing your answers, with the ones you got wrong marked wrong and the correct answers highlighted
Test results are automatically saved, giving you a history of your progress (for this reason, you must also be a registered user to use the new testing functionality)

Placement Test

The Placement Test replaces ChinesePod’s former Listening Test. The test takes a random sampling of lesson data from all lessons, in even distribution across the various levels, and then presents them in random order. Initially, there are only two sections of the test: multiple choice and dictation.

Dictation is definitely a challenge; there is no partial credit. This means any mistyping of 的, 得, or 地 will get the whole sentence marked wrong. Fortunately, the system will intelligently allow for “tā” in the audio to be entered as “她” (she) or “他” (he), accepting either character. Still, you won’t find this section easy!

Your final percentage will place you approximately in one level range. Adjustment is made for potential correct guesses in the multiple choice section (which is why the “Newbie” result area is the largest), which is partially moderated by the dictation section, where guessing is impossible. Scores are automatically recorded.

Level Test

Similar to the Placement Test in format, the Level Test draws from only one difficulty level. This has a number of applications, such as confirming that you have mastered the content of a certain level, or testing your readiness for the content of a higher level.

Note that because ChinesePod lesson content overlaps to some extent within each level, you need not study every lesson to master most content of that level. (For example, you may be able to score in the high 90’s on the Newbie Level Test after studying fewer than 100 lessons, even though there are more than 300 Newbie lessons in the archive.)

The Future

These tests mark the beginning of ChinesePod’s greater efforts at quantitatively measuring an individual’s progress in Chinese. We hope you’re as excited at the implications these tests represent. These two tests, while useful as they are, represent just the very beginning of what can be done with lesson data. In the future, expect better question types, a more intelligent testing engine, personalized testing data selection, and more…

Posted in ChinesePod, Features, News | Tagged Chinese, ChinesePod, learn, testing, tests | 5 Comments

Threaded Comments on ChinesePod

By John Pasden | December 31, 2009

As promised previously, we have managed to finish the much-anticipated threaded comments feature before the end of 2009. The ChinesePod community has been asking for this feature, and we are pleased to present this big step forward for the community.

First, we have drawn a lot of inspiration from the site Yammer, which does a great job managing a company’s conversations in a Twitter-like interface. The ChinesePod community is no Twitter, however, so ours is a custom solution. The upgrade is actually a small collection of new features:

You can reply to individual comments, and your reply will be grouped there, under that comment. This works as you would expect it to, as seen on other platforms with threaded comments.
Replies only go one level deep, but the actual reply relationships are all preserved. This means that you can always find the exact comment a reply refers to (by clicking on the “in reply to” link), but without sometimes having to indent 10 times. (This also means that if we ever feel the need to go three levels deep or more, we have the data and structure to do it.)
Long reply threads will be hidden. You can easily reveal them with one click, but all those off-topic tangents will no longer obscure the lesson questions and answers you’re looking for.
All comment posting is now done with AJAX. This means the page will not reload when you post a comment (which is really annoying if you happen to be listening to the lesson while commenting).
The new commenting functionality works across lesson comments, users posts, groups posts, etc.

Please let us know if you have any questions or comments!

And happy New Year! 新年快乐！

UPDATE: Despite extensive testing, the new code to support threaded comments seems to be significantly slowing down lesson page loads. We certainly don’t want the site going down over the holiday, so we’ll be pulling the new feature until early next week. Sorry for the delay!

Posted in ChinesePod, Informal learning, News | Tagged Chinese, ChinesePod, comments, community, Learning | 1 Comment

ChinesePod’s 2009 Round-up

By John Pasden | December 22, 2009

2009 was a very busy year for ChinesePod, as we delivered not only hundreds more of the Chinese lessons you love, but also new tools, features, personalities, and other content. After looking back on the blog, the community discussions, and the lessons, we’ve assembled a review of all the things we brought you in 2009.

Poems with Pete brought Chinese literary culture to ChinesePod with Pete’s own unique style, in the form of a 20-podcast series.
ChinesePod added Comprehensive traditional character support to all lessons, which was received with much cheering.
The ChinesePod Activity Stream (still in beta!) added an informal new way for CPod users to practice Chinese and get feedback and corrections.
We pulled an April Fool’s Day prank: a 24-hour Big Brother-Style Chinese-learning video podcast.
The Menu Stealer
We finally revealed The Menu Stealer, an original 5-part food-centric video series which was a lot of fun.
ChinesePod’s long-anticipated introduction of new, improved exercises were well received, since they offered great improvements in accessibility, cross-platform compatibility, extensibility, and overall learning!
An exciting partnership with Skritter allowed ChinesePod users to practice writing for the first time, using a new optional writing practice add-on we dubbed “Skritter Lite.” At about the same time, the addition of a simple pinyin converter add-on made it easier for all users to post messages with attractive, tone mark-enhanced pinyin text.
ChinesePod Apps!
ChinesePod released four separate mobile apps for ChinesePod users: first ChinesePod Quick Review (for Android, for iPhone), which allowed for vocabulary lookup and exploration, and then later ChinesePod – Learn Chinese (for Android, for iPhone), which provided fuller access to your ChinesePod study materials in a dedicated app.
The ChinesePod Team Page helped make it clearer to all users, throughout the site, who is officially working at ChinesePod.
ChinesePod’s flashcard makeover gave users bigger fonts, easier review, and more cross-platform compatibility. These changes also set the stage for the coming SRS implementation. Win all around!
The Pinyin Program
Jenny and John tackled the tough issues new learners face with pinyin in a new series called The Pinyin Program, which became an instant “must-listen” for beginning students.
Xu Zhou, ChinesePod’s head audio technician, become even further involved with ChinesePod lesson production by participating more and more in Advanced lessons with Jenny, Connie, and Jiaojie, and even the occasional Upper Intermediate lesson. The users asking for more male teacher voices were quite pleased, and Xu Zhou has a lot of experience and knowledge to add into the mix.
The Praxis Language family really started coming together, as Catherine (of ItalianPod) joined the ChinesePod Team as the behind-the-scenes product manager, Jason came aboard as the team translator, John and Liliana (of SpanishPod) joined Connie as regular hosts of Qing Wen, and lots and lots of ChinesePod teachers became much more active in community discussions.
ChinesePod Great Start
Many learners prefer to start with a small set of carefully selected lessons and a physical book. They got just that with the ChinesePod Great Start course.
Following a discussion with the community, a first step towards better ChinesePod discussions was taken with the addition of threaded comments to all lesson comments, user posts, and group posts. (What’s that? Haven’t noticed this yet? Hang in there… this change is slated for the last week of December.)
Finally, there are the lessons themselves… While we work hard on each and every lesson, there were inevitably certain ones among the hundreds we produced that really resonated with the users, or which we, the production team, took special pride and enjoyment in. We already asked for your feedback, and here’s our synthesis of the overall results:
- Newbie – Does it Have Bones? is Jenny’s favorite Newbie lesson of the year (you may not know how super useful this is unless you’ve been to China)
- Toilets!
  Newbie – Toilet Types, one of Matt’s favorites, is so useful, we’re shocked ourselves that it took us this long to create it.
- Elementary – Why are You Studying Chinese?, besides being extremely useful, provoked a great response from the community
- Elementary – Playing Wii was John’s timely video game pick (gamers represent!)
- Drinking!
  Intermediate – Drinking Game got a vote for being “a really fun lesson which challenges both your measure word knowledge and counting ability” (pchenery)
- Intermediate – Two Tough Ladies was Jenny’s favorite Intermediate lesson
- Intermediate – Which Finger?, an innovative new take on the names of the fingers, “stood out” for (rjberki)
- The Lao Wang’s Office and Funny Business series provided an interesting transition from Intermediate to Upper, taking a path strewn with office vocab and intrigue.
- Zombies!
  Zombies also invaded those two levels with Intermediate – Zombies: Deader than Ever and Upper Intermediate – Zombies!
- Upper Intermediate – Fast Cars and Dangerous Driving: “Over-the-top sweetness” (xiaophil)
- The Upper Intermediate Love Tangle Series is “pure gold” (tal_)
- Upper Intermediate – Pirates under attack!: all you need to know is “PIRATES!” (simonpettersson)
- Dinosaurs!
  Upper Intermediate – Dinosaurs “is also the favourite of my 4 year old, so, CPod is definately reaching out to the next generation of listeners” (henning)
- Upper Intermediate – Star Trek was received enthusiastically by the sci-fi fans
- Advanced – 武松打虎 was Jenny’s pick for Advanced
- Anime!
  Advanced – 日本动漫 was a labor of love for Matt, to which he devoted approximately two weeks of his life
- Advanced – 鬼故事：扎着麻花辫的女孩 was a welcome offbeat (and creepy) story written by Xu Zhou

As you can see, although ChinesePod’s reputation as a resource for newbies is firmly established, we had a great year continuing to flesh out the content of the other levels, as well as the various learning needs of the modern student. This is only going to continue into 2010, and we have lots more planned as well.

Coming up in January: lots and lots of tests, leveraging the content of almost 1500 lessons…

Posted in ChinesePod, Features, General, News | Tagged 2009, Chinese, ChinesePod, Learning, Mandarin | 5 Comments

Clarification

By Hank Horkoff | December 17, 2009

There have been a number of stories in the local Chinese-language press about problems at the Kaien language schools here in Shanghai. It appears to be a very unfortunate situation for everyone involved – students, teachers, partners and management.

To set the record straight, Kaien and Praxis Language are two completely separate entities. The 50+ staff here at ChinesePod/Praxis Language have been unaffected by these external events. In fact, we are very busy working on new lessons, new tools and new services to help our students continue to learn Chinese.

Please let me know if there are any other questions about this.

Thanks,

Hank Horkoff, Praxis Language CEO

Posted in Uncategorized | 40 Comments

Learn Chinese with the New ChinesePod iPhone App

By John Pasden | December 17, 2009

Apple has finally approved the new (and free!) “ChinesePod – Learn Chinese” iPhone app, following the release of our Learn Chinese Android app by about two weeks. (For those of you already familiar with the Android app, the following is going to be a big pile of deja vu, but the screenshots are all from the iPhone.)

The app is more than just “Quick Review” (see info on that app for Android, for iPhone); Learn Chinese allows ChinesePod users to download their latest lessons, listen to them, read the lesson transcripts, review vocabulary, review expansion sentences, drill down into vocabulary, play individual word audio, and more. This app is our first big step toward being able to study ChinesePod content entirely on your mobile device.

The app is designed to be most useful for ChinesePod subscribers, but non-subscribers can also try some sample lessons as well. Subscribers log in using OAuth, so you can be sure your login info is secure. (The iPhone version is already waiting on Apple’s approval for release to the iTunes App Store.)

Here are screenshots for the basic functionality (the main lesson featured in the screenshots is a recent one called Wrapping a Gift):

For those of you with an iPhone or iPod Touch, simply click this link to launch iTunes and get the app.

This initial release includes basic functionality (and more functionality than the original Android release), but you can expect further updates in the near future. In the meantime, we appreciate your feedback.

Posted in ChinesePod, Learning 2.0, News | Tagged app, Chinese, ChinesePod, iPhone, learn, Mandarin | 23 Comments

Learn Chinese with the New ChinesePod Android App

By John Pasden | November 27, 2009

This week ChinesePod released a new app for Android mobile phones called “ChinesePod – Learn Chinese.” This app is more than just “Quick Review” (see info on that app for Android, for iPhone); Learn Chinese allows ChinesePod users to download their latest lessons, listen to them, read the lesson transcripts, review vocabulary, review expansion sentences, drill down into vocabulary, play individual word audio, and more. This app is our first big step toward being able to study ChinesePod content entirely on your mobile device.

Here are screenshots for the basic functionality (the main lesson featured in the screenshots is a recent one called Playing Wii):

For those of you with an Android phone, there are two ways to get the app:

Scan the QR Code
- Open your ‘Barcode Scanner’ app (available from Android Market)
- Point your phone camera at the screen, and scan the QR code below.
- Once you’ve found the “Learn Chinese” app, touch to install.
- Follow the onscreen installation directions.
Install from the Android Market
- Go to “Market” on your Android-powered device.
- Select “Search”.
- Enter “chinesepod” into the search field.
- Once you’ve found the “Learn Chinese” app, touch to install.
- Follow the onscreen installation directions.

This initial release includes basic functionality, but you can expect further updates in the near future. In the meantime, we appreciate your feedback.

Posted in ChinesePod, Learning 2.0, News | Tagged Android, app, Chinese, learn Chinese | 16 Comments

Jenny Zhu wins Australia Alumni Award

By Sarah Edson | November 9, 2009

Congratulations to Jenny Zhu, who won the 2009 China Australia Alumni Award in the Media and TMT category in Beijing on Saturday 7th November.

Before becoming Lead Host of ChinesePod, Jenny lived in Australia for over four years (2000 – 2005). She graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in International Relations, and is also an alumna of the University of New South Wales, where she completed a Masters degree in Policy Analysis.

Jenny was joined at the ceremony by a host of prestigious fellow alumni, plus the Australian Ambassador to China and the head of GM China Group.

We’re all very proud of her, here at ChinesePod.
加油, Jenny!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Australia, Australia China Alumni Awards, ChinesePod, jenny zhu, News | 14 Comments

ChinesePod Development Updates, Community Discussion

By John Pasden | October 30, 2009

October has been a relatively quiet month for changes to ChinesePod. We’re not just taking a break and enjoying the beautiful Shanghai autumn weather, though; we’ve been hard at work on the platform behind the scenes. I’ll fill you in a bit now on what we’ve been doing.

Development Updates

We mentioned a while back that we switched to a new AMS (Academic Management System). A few glitches aside, the transition went smoothly, but the ChinesePod site you see didn’t change much, except for a few things like PDFs for Qing Wen.

Following the transition to the new AMS, we’ve been doing a lot of work to get our data in better order (which enables us to do more with it), and to improve and streamline the lesson creation process (which makes work more enjoyable and efficient for our hard-working staff). We’ve made tremendous progress on this front, but the improvements are not visible to ChinesePod users. Nevertheless, it was essential development that is nearly complete.

One of the other new features enabled by the new AMS is the new exercises. While most users have felt they are a huge improvement over the previous ones from a usability and study perspective, there are also more “behind the scenes” changes that went into the new exercises. The new exercises organize exercise data and results in a more modular, extensible way. This means we can:

Generate new exercises more easily
Add new exercise types more easily
Create “quizzes” (similar to exercises, but incorporating data from multiple lessons, and possibly new questions and/or new question types)
Create placement tests (replacement for the listening test)
Create level tests (how would you fare on a test of all Intermediate lessons, with content randomly selected?)

Testing does not excite everyone, but it does provide one very valuable piece of information: an indicator of progress. ChinesePod is working hard on a better system for organizing lessons, presenting courses, and tracking learner progress. The new system is much better equipped to handle the “testing” aspect. (Obviously a lot of other work is needed as well, particularly on the lesson organization and presentation front.)

Community

The ChinesePod community is widely recognized as one of ChinesePod’s biggest strengths, but also one of its major weaknesses. You have told us that the Community section is not organized well, that it’s hard to find the information you’re looking for. We are listening, and we want to work with you, the users, to improve the ChinesePod Community section.

One complaint we have had is that it’s not immediately obvious which commenters are ChinesePod employees, or even which ones are the same people you hear in the podcasts. This will change next week, as each ChinesePod employee’s comments all over the site will be clearly labeled, and also linked to a “ChinesePod Team” page where you can see a list of the ChinesePod hosts, teachers, and support staff, both current and past.

We’ll also be adding a new “reputation” system for users, which helps identify the biggest contributors, the most helpful commenters, and most veteran users, etc. There’s a good amount of research available already, such as in this Yahoo overview, and we’re going over it all. It’s still in development, and we’re open to new ideas. We’d love to hear your input.

The biggest question, of course, is overall community organization. Staff identification and a user reputation system are nice, but they don’t solve the bigger problem: how to better organize your community content. Here are some of the things we’re hearing:

The search isn’t good enough; I can’t find certain discussions even when I’m pretty sure they’re there.
With no history or bookmarking features, I find it hard to find useful discussions again.
The discussions are too chaotic. We need threaded comment discussions like most forums have.
Group discussions are too buried; they need to be made more central.
Lesson discussions are often way too off-topic to be useful. I need help finding the content that helps me learn.
The community discussion often feels like a clique. I don’t feel comfortable commenting.
Lesson discussion, even on Newbie lessons, is way too advanced. I don’t feel comfortable commenting.

We have some ideas for ways to tackle these problems (some pointed out by astute users in the past), but I don’t want to influence your responses too much, so I’d like to hear some of your ideas on how to improve the community before continuing the discussion on some of the options we have.

Thank you, ChinesePod community, for your help, your feedback, and your support. We will keep moving ChinesePod toward the better service we all know it can be.