Today we launched native traditional character support for ChinesePod (no more need for a Firefox plugin). I’ll explain it a bit in a Q&A format.
Q. How do I enable traditional character support?
A. Look at the top right corner of the main column of any lesson page. You’ll see a small gray gear “settings” icon. Click on this to open up your lesson settings. By default, you’re set to “simplified.” Simply select “traditional” and save changes. The page will reload, displaying traditional characters instead of simplified.
Q. Does traditional support cover the entire site?
A. No, traditional support extends mainly to the lesson data we provide for study. It does not cover: (1) lesson comments or other community discussions, (2) Advanced lesson titles and lesson intros, (3) MP3 ID3 tags, (4) Grammar Guide sample sentences. The current exercises will be replaced soon with the completion of the Assessment Project (discussed here), after which they will also be controlled by the lesson settings. Full popups and traditional character support is also coming to the Grammar Guide sample sentences, but a bit later.
Q. So, wait… are you forcing me to choose between simplified and traditional? I like to see both!
A. Don’t worry, we know all about students like you. If you simply choose traditional or simplified, you will only see that character set in your popups, and your PDF download link will change accordingly as well. This simple toggle is enough for most students of Chinese. However, for the hardcore character freaks among you, we have “Extra options.” These allow you to: (1) display both character types in the popups (your main choice will be larger), and (2) display both PDF download links at the same time.
Q. So what about my vocabulary manager? Does that have traditional character support too?
A. The vocabulary manager has not been changed. If you are in traditional character mode, what you save to your vocabulary manager is traditional characters. If you are in simplified character mode, you save simplified characters. There is no toggle in the vocabulary manager.
Q. So what else is there to this upgrade?
A. I’m glad you asked! We also added a “hide English translation” option for both the Dialogue and Expansion pages. This lets you read the sentences and try to translate on your own before showing the translation. By default English translations are shown (to keep the Newbies from panicking), but advanced students will likely want to turn off translations by default. If you should ever need the translation, just click on the “Show Translation” link below each sentence.
Q. Anything else I should know?
You may need to clear your browser cache so that the new changes display properly.
We’ve also added similar icons to the top of the “Me” section page: one for the RSS feed, and one for the settings page. We’ve done this without removing the existing “Settings” section in the sidebar; we’d like to know what the users think of the changes and which they prefer. We’ve made some usability tweaks to the Community section as well, but I’ll let you discover those yourselves!
Feb. 19 Update: If you have been using the ChinesePod Traditional Character Firefox Plugin, you will need to disable it for proper display of characters. The new changes render it unnecessary, and it interferes with the new display code.
As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
pretzellogic on 
Andrew Cockerham on 
Dave on
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Very cool. Seems well-implemented, too. You might want to link to something like http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html for explaining how to clear your cache, though — not everyone knows how, and it can be really frustrating for those that don’t.
Thanks, John. Good suggestion. I have corrected the oversight.
Well, not bad (bu cuo). After 2 years, finally!
But: Bold case on some pages and too small font sizes makes trad. script unreadable. The exercises don’t offer larger fontsize from the user’s side, and traditional must be selected everytime you start an exercise.
You kept the best till nearly last. I’d developed a skill of ignoring the line below when I read the dialogs so I could test myself as I find access to reading material at my level difficult. Being able to hide the English is perfect for me, I want to read a block of Chinese text and then see if I’ve understood and trying that at Xinhua.cn is Just too demoralising.
I’d love to see some basic articles written using the same mechanism allowing me to test my reading comprehension but not necessarily attached to a lesson per se.
I think it is worth pointing out, if you were using the firefox plugin – you will need to disable it for things to work flawlessly.
If you are having problems with this that would be the first thing I would try:
Firefox: Tools: Add ons:
select the plugin and choose ‘disable’
calkins confirms there are conflicts with the plugin and the new updates.
Yay! I’m so glad that Chinesepod now supports Traditional Characters! Thank You! (^__^)
Nice to finaly see better support for traditional chinese, and that on the day that my subscription expires too!
I am just trying out this site now and at first I was really quite ready to quit, if Simplified was all you used. It’s like learning English with shorthand. Now I may choose to stay on. If you went one more step of adding Zhuyin system of learning voice pronunciation, you would have me instantly. Pinyin is nice to an extent but is not accurate enough to our English pronunciation. I have had experience with learning with that system and find that I can learn to pronounce things far more accurately and quickly. Thank you, though for your improvement and I hope you continue to be an aide to us trying to learn this language.
If you want to see everything in traditional characters, and to be able to toggle between the two, then there is a very easy way; go directly to Chinesepod for simplified, and view it through the Google translate facility ant http://translate.google.com.
This works for all the html and .pdf pages. Obviously it doesn’t work for characters shown as images in graphics. Whereas I often criticised Chinese pod’s early attempts to convert simplified characters to tradition, I have never found a mistake in Google’s translation.
For example, see the latest lesson discussion.
Alan Watson
Sorry, I forgot to add the link to the latest lesson discussion
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http://chinesepod.com/lessons/channels/list/Upper%2BIntermediate&sl=zh-CN&tl=zh-TW&history_state0=
Hi John,
I am a Chinese, and now working in Shenzhen City, I am glad to get this good website and hope I can join with you, becasue I want to make friends with thoes, who are interetsed in Chinese Cultures, and I hope I can do some favors to them.
Here I want to get an English Name, that will be better for me to communicate with each other. I hope my English name will be called based on my Chinese Character: My Chinese Name is Li Chunyi, I was born in the middle noom of Summer. I am male. I hope someone can help me and give me a meaningful English name or similr sound with my Chinese name, and it can be sounded easily and loudly. Thank you! E: infomccoy@126.com
re pin yin and pronunciation: no use of roman characters will ever be able to accurately produce sounds correctly It doesn’t even work in English (How do you pronounce BUTTER since I am from Manchester I pronounce it BUTTER but people from London pronounce it as BATTER… both are correct!) ”
Pin Yin enables me to READ Chinese and look (pronounced loook btw) up in a dictionary. I am in Taipei at the moment and the same street has 3 spellings of 中山北路. see my point? If it used a standard (we don’t care which) then it would make life so easy.Oh and even in Taiwan my Chinese using pin yin as a pronunciation guide has has always been understood and if not 2 seconds to find in a dictionary. Stop knocking pin yin. And it’s the ONLY internationally recognised form of Roman script Chinese.
Howard
Necesito las clases en ESPAÑOL…gracias
Isabel
How about changing the pdf link on the main lessons page? This is where 10 lessons are displayed on one page. I usually download the pdf from the main page so I don’t have to click in, then out of each lesson.
I noticed the pdf link doesn’t get updated unless you actually click into the lesson. Help!
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