ChinesePod Website Updates for August 2017

[GwilymJames]

ChinesePod.com Updates August 2017

The first big update is a new sidebar on the majority of pages that makes finding content easier. You can now easily jump to the dictionary or dashboard without getting too lost.

We have also moved the dashboard filters to the top and made them more user-friendly. You can now filter dashboard lessons by difficulty/show/option or date, and it will display which active filters you currently have selected.

When a filter is active, the drop-down menu will turn red, and a label will be added. If you want to remove a label, either click the “x” or turn off the drop-down filter.

We have also consolidated some of the menus and moved the previous menu / badge icon to the avatar on the left in the sidebar. If you want to see your previous self-study and course feed, you can click on the drop-down menu under your avatar where it dsiplays your membership info.

We have also made lots of small design tweaks such as custom icons for the sidebar and filters as well as making the play button and download button on the lesson tabs easier to differentiate and press, especially if you’re using something like an iPad.

You will also notice some new buttons you can switch on or off to show/hide the characters (Chinese, pinyin, or english).

Other fixes include one that caused blank areas to show on the dashboard if a lesson title was too long. Now we truncate the title and ensure they all show in nice, ordered rows.

That’s it for this month. We still have lots of work to do, and will hopefully have another update next month.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave them below or email gwilym@chinesepod.com

[stevinsjs]

Very professional and polished upgrade. The webpage is very user friendly and a powerful study tool. Thanks for taking care of us podsters Gwilym and the team at CPOD!

[Paulperrett]

What happened to my lists??? This was by far the most convenient way for me to manage my feeds.

[GwilymJames]

Your self-study feed is located below your avatar.

[Paulperrett]

Unfortunately, that is not quite what I mean. Similar to your new Dashboard page where I can filter on lesson attributes, their used to be a list page that made it really easy to bookmark lessons and mark them studied with one click. While the new page is much better looking, for high volume premium users like me functionality is much more important than the look.

I note on the Dashboard page that one can toggle the bookmark tag on and off with one click. If you could enable the same functionality for the studied tag so that I don’t have to physically go into a lesson to click it as studied, then that would be a substantial improvement to its usability. Would still prefer my lists back though . I primarily get my chinesepod fix via direct feed to me podcasts, so I just want to go to the website once a month to quickly click some new bookmarks and update those I have studied. I just want the drive-through experience rather than have to get out of my car and physically go in to get my Chinesepod burger.

[805088602]

Where can I find the lessons that I marked as studied? I can’t seem to find them anymore

[GwilymJames]

I see what you mean. We’ll re-add that page and look at adding the mark studied button to lesson thumbnails as well.

[GwilymJames]

You can view studied lessons on the dashboard using the options filter at the top. If you’re talking about the previous list view which had text only, that will be added today or tomorrow.

[GwilymJames]

Here are some more updates before the end of the month;

Library List has been re-added and now lives in the More sidebar menu with a slight improvement in aesthetics. Thanks to @Paulperrett for spotting its disappearance.

Many more new custom icons appearing all over the website including the lesson page sidebar. We’ve updated this menu to make it easier to read and see the download options. This was in response to @598735503 request.

Another update is the vocabulary manager which organises all your decks and flaschards.

We have updated the buttons and re-arranged them to make them more logical for creating/editing decks, as well as moving vocab items between decks. Hopefully, all the changes make it easier to manage your words which you can either export or study on iOS or the upcoming Android release.

We’ve also made a slight change to the lesson pages by moving the lesson info out of the sidebar and into the main lesson page. Now you can see all the topic/function and grammar tags associated with each lesson, and click them to find related lessons with the same theme or grammar.

Another small change is that Pinyin and English are no longer highlighted in red since we want you to focus more on the characters. If you prefer to just see Chinese, you can de-select the new buttons for English and Pinyin. English is now italicised to make a clearer distinction between the pinyin.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

We've also made lots of small tweaks to the website to hopefully make using it a bit nicer and logical. We hope to continue improving it for all of you.

Thanks,

Gwilym

[598735503]

It seems that with the new update, the English automatically appears, even if you have set it to “hide English translations by default”. This is the same for pinyin.

[GwilymJames]

with the new update, the English automatically appears, even if you have set it to “hide English translations by default”. This is the same for pinyin.

ok we’ll look into this.

[Drenstro]

Is it possible to save my selected filters? Every time I refresh or reenter the main page it resets itself. Thanks.

[aurelio156]

in my oppinion is much better to be able of hide/show the pinyin individually.
Thus you dont have to turn on/off at every moment you want to read the character, moreover you can know later in which sentences did you have some troubles.

Respect to the filters, I also miss the filter of the courses that before We had it. In that way i could select several courses at the same time and choose the non studied yet getting having a geneal vision of all the podcast of the courses Im interested in.

Thabk you very much fpr the attention and I hope that you have in consideration to re enable it ,because affects directly to the funcionality of the course that is much more important that the design…

[GwilymJames]

in my oppinion is much better to be able of hide/show the pinyin individually.

Thus you dont have to turn on/off at every moment you want to read the character, moreover you can know later in which sentences did you have some troubles.

We’re working on fixing that bug, and improving it somewhat, so that hiding/showing pinyin and English will be a permanent option, and you can change settings direct from the lesson page.

The next big project is courses, and we hope to improve how they show on the website

[GwilymJames]

Is it possible to save my selected filters?

It’s not possible at the moment but we can look into how we can improve that.

[aurelio156]

Thank you James.

In my opinnion I liked to have the course as the dashboard before where you can select the courses, the level, the different options…

[GwilymJames]

This functionality is now back, and now easier than ever to change with a quick setting in the lesson sidebar. We also have the Hanzi red button to hide/show the Chinese in case you want to practice translating from the English, or writing out a sentence without any hints.

[GwilymJames]

This should be fixed now (See the GIF above)

[justincunningham]

Can we please get this changed back to how it was before? like this:

The ability to selectively show and hide english/pinyin one by one, was for me one of the most valuable tools for improving listening! Right now it’s all or nothing, and it’s completely thrown out the way I’ve studied. Thanks!

[justincunningham]

To make matters worse, now if i want to hide the english/pinyin but be able to scroll down to view it after listening, i’m presented with this:

So i can barely even press the play button because of the ‘help’ button in the way. This help button has been a pain for a while now, but now it’s even more in the way because of the inability to selectively control english/pinyin

Sorry to be a whinger, most of the changes I like, but it seems like every time you change the way dialogue is presented within the lessons it’s less effective, at least for my style of learning. Cheers!