Things Back to Normal

I apologize for the site issues we’ve been having the last couple of days. I’m happy to say that things seem to be back to normal for now. The PDFs that weren’t accessible for the last few days should also be accessible now. If you notice any other problems, please continue to let me know.

Stay tuned to this page for a slick new feature that should be ready within the next week or so!


Email Troubles

We moved our site to a new (hopefully) faster server over the weekend, which caused some downtime over the last day. During this time, emails sent to us were not received. If you sent an email that was rejected, please send it again, as everything should be working now. Sorry for the inconvenience!


Vocabulary Page Reorganization

You may have noticed that the Vocabulary page for some lessons has a slightly different look to it. As we add new features, the page was starting to get cluttered with the Test your Pronunciation recorder and the Sentence Builder app. To maintain a cleaner look, the Pronunciation tool is now hidden behind a link that lets you swap between the different applications we add to this page. Some pages will also let you listen and reply to exercises directly from within the vocabulary page. As well, expect another new tool to be added here during the holiday break to help you learn character. Stay tuned or more details…


Database Issues

During the holiday break, we will be doing some maintenance and upgrades to the website which may cause some mysterious “database errors” to pop-up (looks like they are here already!). As far as I know, these shouldn’t affect usability – they are just error messages that are displayed at the very bottom of the screen. If you do notice any actual issues affecting usability, please let me know.

When the maintenance is complete however, you should hopefully notice slicker (faster!) premium pages, with even more content! More information on the upgrades will be released as they are introduced, so stay tuned…


Happy Holidays from Chinese Learn Online

For those of you wanting to know more about who we are, we created a short, impromptu video during our last recording session. Since this wasn’t planned, the quality and editing isn’t anything fancy, but hopefully the message still comes across. If there’s demand, we could release more “behind the scenes videos” of what goes on around here. Enjoy!


New Flashcard Program

I’m proud to announce version 2 of our flashcard is now available for you to try out. What’s new you ask?

The program is bigger now, so the initial loading time might be a little longer, so please be patient. It now features 2 modes – multiple choice and memorization. The former is basically version 1 of the program. You choose what lesson you’re at, and the program will create a quiz based on vocabulary from your current lesson as well as a few earlier lessons. You’re given a choice of answers to choose from, and the program will keep track of your score.

The new memorization mode uses a different approach. Here, you can specify a range of lessons, in case you don’t want to start all the way from the beginning. The program will then proceed to test your recognition of all the vocabulary taught in each lesson within the range. The difference though is that you won’t be given any choices. A word will be shown on screen and you have to first determine on your own how well you know it. The answer will then be displayed, at which point you can tell the program how well you knew the answer on a scale of 0 to 4, with 0 being no recognition at all, and 4 being immediate recognition. Based on your answers, the program will either return the card back to the deck or remove it completely. The program will keep track of your performance so that on future sessions, vocabulary you didn’t recognize can be shown again.

Obviously the bigger range of lessons you choose, the more vocabulary there will be to test for. If you decide to go from lesson 1 to the latest lesson, there will be more than 1000 questions! I recommend you choose shorter ranges initially. While you are welcome to go through it at your own pace, I recommend using it once a day so your brain has time to remember what is being taught.

One other feature that has been added to the Memorization mode is an export feature. After choosing your mode and lesson range, you can select the export option which will generate a text file featuring the select content in tab delimited format. Note that this feature seems to work on some browsers and not others. In some cases, a window may popup with the data, whereas in others, a download link is displayed above the flashcard window.

I suspect there may be some glitches with this program. Please send me all your comments so the program can be improved.

Update: Thanks to your feedback, there have been a few improvements, including audio playback of answers, the ability to modify your current testing range and an increase in font size of the question. If you have any other suggestions on how to improve it, do continue to let me know.


General Updates

While it may seem on the outside that we’re on a break, there has been a lot of behind the scenes work going on. Here are some updates on different sections of the site:

  1. Exercises page – A new batch of questions has been added, bringing the current total to about 30 or so. Eventually, depending on user response, we could have a question there for most lessons. The idea here would be to get you using what you learn in each lesson by having to answer an open ended question on the subject for that lesson. By keeping the questions open ended, we are encouraging you to find and use vocabulary related to your personal life. So if we asked what your job is, you would need to know how to say your particular profession in Chinese. This page has recently been enhanced to allow “conversations” with the teacher, so if you needed extra vocabulary, you could ask for help and the teacher could guide you through your answer. Each time an answer is posted, you will be notified via email. Links have also been added to the lessons that each question was taken from. Thanks to those who have used this feature and provided feedback so far. Update: I have noticed some users submitting answers in numbered Pinyin. I have since updated the interface to convert numbered pinyin into tone marks. This should hopefully improve the usability.  Update 2: Another batch of exercises has been added, bringing the total to about 70 questions now.
  2. PDFs for levels 1 and 2 are currently up to date. Level 3 will take longer as each lesson has 6 to 7 PDFs associated with it. My target is to have PDFs for all lessons available by the end of the year. Update: PDFs are now current for level 3 as well.
  3. Videos for level 3 were recently added, so almost every dialogue in the course should now have a video associated with it.
  4. Sentence builder questions have been added for most lessons in level 1 and are currently being added to lessons in level 2 onwards. Update: Sentence builder exercises are now available for every lesson in the course.

We hope to be able to use all these tools to improve the approach used at CLO. When we first began this course, new vocabulary was first introduced and then later reused in future lessons. However, with our word bank currently sitting at over 2000 items, it isn’t practical to solely use future dialogues and lessons as review practice. So the new approach is to continue to use new lessons to introduce new vocabulary. Users can then study the examples used in the lesson in the vocabulary page while practicing their pronunciation. The sentence builder program can then be used to play with the words in other contexts. The podcast review will then reinforce this vocabulary further in more contexts. Finally, the exercise page can be used to test the user’s own understanding by forming responses using this new vocabulary. Later, the flashcard program can be used to test the user’s retention of vocabulary from older lessons.

It is hoped that this process will greatly aid in retention of new vocabulary. Where it’s forgotten, the word bank can hopefully aid in quickly accessing old material. All these tools have been added based directly on user feedback, so keep your comments and emails coming in. Let me know how exactly YOU use these tools and what can be done to improve your learning experince.


Exercises Page

As announced in the last post, the exercises page is now ready and has been added to the Premium menu. The Pong Audio forum has subsequently been removed from the Community page.

I expect this feature will take some getting used to, since the idea is to get you from passively studying to actively studying by actually submitting your own input. The questions given for you to answer have purposely been given as audio only. If you’re not sure what a question means, write a text message saying which part you didn’t understand and a teacher will gladly reply.

Each question is a separate entity as we don’t expect you to be able to answer all the questions (not initially anyway). For each question you do answer, the teacher’s feedback will appear below the question after she has had a chance to review your answer. Don’t forget as well that you can answer by recording your voice using the tools on the left side of the page, or by submitting your answer as text (pinyin, simplified, traditional or english if you need more help).

Like the other features on the site, the more you use it and the more input you give me, the more I can improve it, so keep the feedback coming!


Pong Replacement

I’m proud to announce the latest feature to CLO that will soon be replacing the Pong Audio forum. The original premise of Pong was to ask some open ended questions that users could record answers to and submit. Judging from feedback, these were the reasons I found why people weren’t using Pong:

1. System requirements were high – it required a specific version of Java to be installed on your computer, which wouldn’t run on many computers. Also, not everyone had a microphone attached to their computer. Some of those that did had to manually adjust their microphone settings. This was too much to expect the average user to do.
2. Usability wasn’t good – accounts had to manually be entered by the admin, so it wasn’t friendly enough to get right into. As well, there were complaints that the quality of recordings was low.
3. It was public – since most users are still beginning to learn Chinese, they weren’t ready to broadcast their potentially flawed pronunciation to the world.

4. No feedback – there was no way for the user to know whether the answers they submitted were correct.

Solution: I still believe there is merit in a system of this sorts, so I had a new version of this application created in house that attempted to solve the issues noted above. So without further adieu, I’m proud to present (drum roll please…) the new Exercises page!

The premise here is similar. Questions will be asked in audio format. There will be no audio clues however, so you will be forced to use your listening skills. There are references to the lesson that each question is taken from however. To begin with, there are a list of 16 questions – one from each 10 lessons. Go through and see which ones you can figure out. You can then choose whether to respond or not.

Your response can either be in audio format – grab your microphone if you have one and record your answer – or you can type out your answer in any format if you so choose. Then click submit. Your answer will then be sent to a CLO teacher who will then send you feedback. Once the feedback has been sent, your page will be updated with teacher feedback for each of the questions you answered.

Unlike Pong, your answers will not be made public, so don’t be shy! We also encourage creativity in your answers!

This application is still in beta, so I expect there may be some bugs initially. Please send me your feedback on what you like, as well as what we can change to improve the experience further. Enjoy!

UPDATE: It turns out that the audio recordings aren’t working. I’m on it to get that fixed. In the meantime you can still send in text answers. Thanks to those who submitted answers and sent me feedback. Some of your suggestions have already been implemented.  UPDATE: Everything is now working smoothly.  Please continue to send me your feedback.


PDF Mania!

As announced in our October podcast update, we have now begun releasing PDF versions of all the notes on our site. This is a pretty time consuming process however, since in addition to there being 160 lessons worth of material, many of the pages have to be reformatted from the current “pop-up translations format” to one better suited for paper (this is especially time consuming for level 3 on, where most pages are available in 4 different formats). As new PDFs, are released they will be added to the Course Outline.

The release of PDFs allows us to create a new price plan for users who prefer to work away from their computer. They will now be able to subscribe to the podcasts and review podcasts as well as have access to all the PDFs that can be printed out and used offline. Once the PDFs for all current lessons are up to date, I can look into adding them to the Premium feed for future lessons.

UPDATE: The PDFs for Level 1 are now all available. You may have also noticed transcripts in Spanish available for the first few lessons. As time permits, we will be adding more of these for later lessons.


Updated Course Outlines

The Course Outline for levels 1 and 2 have been updated to include Chinese character support.  Logged in users can use switch between Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English modes to view the vocabulary.  Non logged in users can sample this functionality for the first four lessons.  Enjoy!


Course Schedule

The course schedule has been tentatively updated with the rest of the lessons in level 3 along with the start of level 4. I have added some breaks to enable level 3 to finish at the end of the year, so we can begin 2008 with level 4.

So what can you expect in level 4? I expect that we should be able to do more all Chinese lessons then, like we recently did in lesson 154. Certainly by level 5, I expect this to be a predominantly Chinese podcast.

There will also be some refocus over the next few weeks with the Premium content. The Sentence builder will be extended to more lessons. PDF notes should also soon become a reality (there has been a massive editing campaign of older lessons, which is why they have been delayed till now). There are also some other exciting new additions that I hope to announce to the Premium side soon so stay tuned!


Flashcard Rebuilt!

I’m happy to say that the Flashcard program should now be completely up to date!  It’s been rebuilt internally to allow us to update it more frequently from here on.  If you notice any glitches, please let me know.

Thanks for your patience!


Sentence Builder

A new feature will be added to past and future lessons over the next little while.  It will help you gain practice constructing sentences by getting you to put words into the right order.  The feature supports all four modes – Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English so find the mode that best suits you and see what you can make of it.

You can see a sample of what it looks like in the Vocabulary section of lesson 121 here.  If you have any suggestions on how to improve this feature, or other features that you think will help in the learning process, please let me know.


Flashcard Rebuild

The flashcard program is being rebuilt and will take about a week to be completely up to date as the lessons have to manually be reentered. During this time, some lessons and features may not show up properly.  While there should be no change to the end user, the new version will allow us to update new lessons much more frequently. Please bear with us during this rebuilding process.


Chinese Learn Online Universe on Netvibes

As the CLO site has expanded quite a bit to reflect several blogs now (5 at last count), it has become increasingly complicated for users to keep up with the latest postings on the different sites, plus the comments other users have left. To make it easier for you to benefit from the full CLO experience, we are proud to have teamed up with the website NetVibes to create the Learn Chinese Online Universe at www.netvibes.com/clo.

From this page you can see the latest updates from all 5 blogs plus their comment feeds as well. This is another feature brought to you as a direct result of user feedback so keep your comments and suggestions coming!


Vocabulary Section Update

The observant among you might notice that the Vocabulary section for all lessons has a slightly different look to it.  Gone are the old bulky playback buttons.  They have now been replaced with the sleeker playback buttons featured in the Word Bank.  Initial loading times for the page might be greater, but I believe the buffering system and overall performance should be better.  Over time, I will be adding extra related vocabulary to older lessons, so this should hopefully improve the overall experience for pages with a lot of audio entries.


Level 3 Course Outline

You may have noticed a new addition to the Level 3 Course Outline.  Premium subscribers can now view the new vocabulary items for each lesson in any of the 4 modes we’ve been using elsewhere (Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English).  Hopefully this can provide yet another way to review the vocabulary taught in each lesson.

Regular users can sample how this works by playing with the modes for the first 4 lessons of level 3.


Link to Us

For those of you with blogs or websites out there, who are interested in linking to CLO, I’ve set up a link page with some graphics that you can choose from.  This page will be added to the “About Us” menu.  If you have ideas for other images, do let me know.


Couple of Tweaks

In response to some great user suggestions, the following two features have been added.

1. The audio player in the Complete and Podcast review pages now features a pop-up version, hopefully allowing better coordination between pausing and restarting the audio, while scrolling down the page.

2. There is now a direct access window on the sidebar that lets you go directly to the Vocabulary or Complete page for any lesson. This will hopefully be easier than manually looking for the lesson in the (many) Course Outline pages.

These are great, because I wouldn’t have been able to come up with these ideas on my own. If you think of other such features that will help out your overall usability experience do tell!


Pinyin Conversion Tool

In order to make the word bank work properly, we had to have a Pinyin conversion tool installed.  Thanks to feedback, we have decided to turn this into a separate tool.  While there are a lot of similar tools out there on the web, the difference here is that this lets you convert back and forth between numbers and tone marks (all the other ones I’ve seen only go one way).  This will be useful to me for the front page to turn the tone marks into numbers.  If some of you prefer to use numbers or have applications that don’t display tone marks properly, you are welcome to use it.

Again, this is another great tool brought to you by your own comments and ideas.  So do continue to send me your feedback and how you use the resources on this site, and / or what else would help in your learning.

The Pinyin Conversion tool can be found under the Resources tab.


Learning Insights Blog

The latest addition to the community page is the new learning insights blog.

In this blog, I hope to chronicle some of my own personal experiences while trying to learn Chinese, as well as detail some of the practices that worked best for me and how they apply to this course.  Along the way, I hope you will share some of your own thoughts of what ideas work for you, so that we can all benefit as students.  Much of the direction of this course has come from user feedback, so I hope this new blog will provide a better forum for that.


Create Your Personal Feed

In preparation for the return of PDF transcripts to the Premium section, I have added an option for you to select what exactly you would like delivered to you in your Premium feed. The Premium feed currently features 3 different categories – the dialogue summary, the slow dialogue summary with pause for repeating after the speaker, and the podcast review. By visiting the new feed options page, you can select which of the above you want delivered to you in your feed. If you are happy receiving all of the content, then no changes are necessary.

Later, when different PDFs options are available, you will also be able to choose which versions of the PDFs you would like included as well.

If you do make any changes, it may take some time for your old feed to update, so do be patient. As always, if you have any technical issues, please let me know.


Word Bank Update

Thanks to feedback from users, I’ve been trying to improve the functionality of the Word Bank.  As this course has progressed (now heading into level 3), so has the size of the Word Bank.  While this of course is a good thing, it also means that when searching for certain entries in Pinyin, a lot of homonym results may also show which may be completely unrelated to what you are searching for.

In the past, the Pinyin search did not support tone marks, so every variation of a word and all its homonym equivalents were shown with the search.  Recently, I have added tone mark support to increase this accuracy.  This has resulted in better results when you click on Pinyin words from the Complete transcripts.  However the problem still remained that it wasn’t easy for users to enter tone marks when searching for Pinyin words manually.

I’m happy to say that this problem has now been solved!  When searching in Pinyin, you can now use numbers to represent tone marks (similar to the number format used when lessons are released on the front page of the site), and the Word Bank will automatically convert these numbers into the appropriate tones.  Try it out for yourself and let me know what you think.


Really Complete Transcripts

Observant viewers may notice a change in the latest Complete transcript for lesson 116. There is a bar on top that now allows you to view the characters in various forms including Pinyin (the default), Traditional, Simplified or in plain English! The popup translations still work as before translating Pinyin to English, Chinese characters to Pinyin and English back to Pinyin. Hopefully those of you studying to read Chinese characters will find this useful for upcoming lessons.

UPDATE: This format is now being used for the Premium podcast transcripts as well.  So you now have multiple ways to test yourself there as well.  Enjoy!


The Road to Level 3

It is now nearing 3 weeks since I moved production of the lessons to Taiwan and I’ve been quite pleased with the results. I have lots of ideas now for further development of this course and what the future holds for CLO. Here are some of my observations during this time:

1. Producing lessons from Taiwan does mean that the conversations and accents of the speakers will have a distinct Taiwanese sound to them. Some of you have commented on the differences in pronunciation you have heard including the mixing up of “l” and “r” sounds. I’ve purposely left these in the lessons for the same reason you may have heard extra “er” sounds being tacked on to syllables by Ray and Heidi or Jen and Bing in earlier lessons. These are distinctive trademarks of the various regions of Mandarin speakers around the world. Now the question that comes about of course is which version should you as a listener follow? Fortunately for us learners using Pinyin, the Pinyin sounds have been designed to follow the “standard Putonghua pronunciation” system out there. So when in doubt about whether to pronounce a word using a “l” sound or a “r” sound, you may find it helpful to look at the Pinyin spelling and use that as your guide. I will continue to let the speakers use their own versions though since one of the challenges for me early on as a learner was understanding why the pronunciation I was taught differed from what I was hearing. Hopefully, having a variety of speakers will help you understand these different dialects.

2. I have become more of a believer in the use of video now after reading some of your comments as well, so there will be an attempt to create a video version of most dialogues in the course. I believe that having more forms of input of the material in this course will greatly aid in the retention. So in addition to the lessons being listened to, you can now have access to the Pinyin transcripts, Chinese character representations and now a video version! This is also a great chance to look at the type of body language used in such dialogues since that makes up such a great percentage of communication in any language.

3. We are in the process of winding up level 2 of our course and are now preparing level 3. Since this course is designed to be progressive, there is a fine balance required in increasing the difficulty level at different stages to provide improvement but yet not increasing it to the point where the user falls behind (indeed I’ve received pressure from both camps to increase / decrease the lesson difficulty levels). Using small, individual dialogues alone to teach the language isn’t enough since they provide only a small sample of how new vocabulary is used. So the solution here again is to find multiple ways to present the information being taught. New vocabulary is first introduced in the main lesson. It is then reviewed in the podcast review and future lessons where applicable. In recent lessons you may have noticed that words are now making their way into the teaching of the lessons outside of the actual dialogue. So whereas in the past, we stuck to distinct Chinese phrases that were constantly reused in the same format in each lesson, we will now start to mix it up in upcoming lessons. The idea here is to build up your vocabulary by adding new words to each new dialogue, while finding ways to use and reuse existing vocabulary in the explanations. The amount of vocabulary that has so far been taught in the course is now large enough for us to experiment more with extra Chinese used within the lesson. Fortunately, for users afraid of falling behind, there is a safety net provided in the form of the Complete word for word transcripts which translate all the extra Chinese used within the lesson.

So what does the future hold for CLO? As mentioned above, the vocabulary that has been taught so far is now reasonably big enough for us to experiment with more options. This could be in the form of side material for you to consume between lessons, for those of you looking for a greater challenge. There are also plans underway to increase the Chinese character materials currently provided.

On a side note, as was mentioned in the last podcast update, the pricing plan is going to increase later this summer to reflect the new improvements and content to the course (current ETA is August 1) so you still have a chance to lock yourself into a subscription at a reduced price before the price increase. Existing users are also welcome to change to a longer term plan (which produces lower monthly rates) while they still have a chance.

Much of the development of this course has come from user feedback, so I encourage you to continue to send me your thoughts and comments, since that is primarily what drives further improvements.

Happy Dragonboat Festival to all of you in Chinese communities!


New Videos added

Well, you asked for it. 9 new videos were added to the Vocabulary pages bringing the total to 24. These videos show you the type of situations where the dialogues they represent may take place, thereby adding context to the lessons. As one listener put it, no academy awards will be won here, but hopefully their simplicity will still add some purpose.

The videos today feature Luise, Coco (and even yours truly in one!), who will also be speakers in our upcoming lessons. Expect more such videos to crop up over the next little while.

Graphics have been added to the Course Outline page showing which lessons have videos in them.

UPDATE: Another 18 videos have since been added – mainly to level 2.  Also, the links in the Course Outline now directly play the video.  Better get your popcorn ready!


Pong Audio Forum Update

Well it looks like some of you were able to make it in and post some recordings, which was great to see.  If any of you are interested in having an account that you can login to (rather than using Guest access) please email me your preferred login and password and I’ll set one up for you (you can change your details after logging in).  The advantage to logged in users (as opposed to guests) is that you can see who else is logged in and chat with them (through voice or text) so I hope this will allow you to get to know some of your peer learners.

There are some interesting possibilities for this application that I have in mind, that can hopefully be developed as more users sign in.


Update from Taiwan

There seems to be some problem listening and / or downloading podcasts at this point. I am in touch with my host to fix the problem ASAP.  (UPDATE: Problem fixed!)
Today’s lesson (#109 for those of you keeping track), is the first recorded in Taiwan. You’ll notice all kinds of different speakers in the next batch of lessons. Many of you have asked what the difference is between the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan versus that spoken in Mainland China. While the basics are the same, there is a distinctive Taiwanese “accent.” I personally prefer this style for teaching since they tend to enunciate and emphasize the tones a lot more than their Mainland counterparts. The result is a more musical sound. In these early stages of learning, it’s important to emphasize the differences in tones more to get the hang of it, so expect to hear more of the same over the next little while.

As always, your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.