Popup Chinese seeking beta testers

[trevelyan]

Hi everyone,

Just a short note to invite interested Pleco users to participate in our beta testing at Popup Chinese. Popup Chinese is a new learning website with daily podcasts, HSK tests, videos and more. It is designed as a resource for advanced students looking to move from conversational Chinese to fluency. Comments on the both the materials (difficulty levels and pedagogical approach) as well as the usability and design of the site are very welcome. Free premium access is available to beta testers. To get access visit:

http://popupchinese.com/voucher

and enter the voucher number

2008AOYUN

This voucher will only be valid until we slip out of beta (likely in two weeks), so if you're interested be sure to take advantage of it quickly. In terms of feedback, we're especially interested in solving usability problems, making the site useful to Pleco owners (is the vocabulary export functionality adequate?), and figuring out what major obstacles exist to usability on next-gen mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you have the time to drop by and check us out, we'd love to see you.

Best Regards,

--david

 

[ipsi]

The vocabulary export function should be exporting tabs, not commas. Or, at least, I've always used tabs when importing flashcards into PlecoDict. You may also want to look at exporting an XML file, which would be compatible with 2.0. The 2.0 XML format also supports importing statistics, among other things .

I would also like to be able to import flashcards (ideally my nicely-formatted 2.0 XML flashcards).

Another comment is that forcing someone to add the entire lessons worth of vocab at once isn't really a lot of fun. I'd like to be able to go through and pick words I don't know, ignoring the ones I do.

How do you handle duplicate flashcards?

 

[stephanhodges]

Few quick notes:

Doesn't really seem like much on the site yet. I'd prefer to see titles of "upcoming" items (I realize it is a beta)

That said...

Overall, site is very quick from Harbin

Flashcards flip a bit slowly.
Flashcards pinyin, meaning, and notes are too close together. Looks like the whole thing is the definition. Should be clearly 3 separate items.

When you copy paste the card, you get both simplified and traditional hanzi, even though I said only simplified. (I understand what's happening behind the scenes, but perhaps you can change it anyways).
Example
欢迎
歡迎
huānyíng
to welcome
verb
================
Need option to show notes with the definition.

Are you going to add example sentences?

Repeated clicking on a flashcard "face" cycles between two words. I expected it to just flip the same card.

 

[stephanhodges]

Not sure where best place would be to post bug reports. This forum seems a little strange for that...

The bottom line at http://popupchinese.com/lessons/archive ... /cats/text pops up text BELOW the line of the browser (which is maximized) Firefox 3.01

Would be nice if there was a highlight moving along the text to highlight things. I think you could record someone moving his mouse and capture the timing and then figure a way to play it with the audio control?

Will the premium subscription allow downloading the stories to play in an mp3 player? I'd like to be able to download the text to also put into my ipod (could be small slides/photos, for example)...

Would also be nice if the top tabs opened a new window/tab, so that the audio wouldn't stop if I clicked on vocab, for example. Also, if I click on a tab, there was no way to advance to where I was already at in the recording.

 

[stephanhodges]

Downloading the vocabulary and DIRECTLY opening it in Excel 2007, it comes up as total garbage. I assume that's because you didn't include the Unicode BOM.

Putting into Notepad and resaving either as UTF-8 OR as plain Unicode both open without problems in Excel. Notepad puts in the BOM.

Also, you don't have CRLF codes at end of lines, so it doesn't look good in Notepad.

Basically speaking, your site is a bit primitive right now. You need a forum, for one thing, the "community blog" is nice, but doesn't provide the same functionality.

Looking at the RSS feed, I didn't see any clear set of feeds segregated by level (beginner...)

 

[ipsi]

It's worth noting that the community thing is not actually a blog. It should come up with a list of posts, and the ability to create a new topic. Or, at least, it does on mine. To get that, I just click 'Home' then 'Community'

Also, I don't know what the hell encoding you're using for those CSV flashcard exports, but it's utterly broken. Attaching file plus hex dump of what I got. Nevermind, I can't actually attach files, despite there being a dialog to do so... It's not exactly pretty. Downloaded on Firefox 3.0, Ubuntu 8.04. Would not open with any encoding selected (GB2312, GBK, GB10803, UTF-8, 16BE, 16LE, 32, 7, etc). So yeah, something's kinda wrong. I have no idea how stephenhodges managed to open his. Notepad under WINE gives me ||||.

Hexdump below:

00000000  d0 cf 11 e0 a1 b1 1a e1  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  3b 00 03 00 fe ff 09 00  |........;.......|
00000020  06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  |................|
00000030  01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 10 00 00 fe ff ff ff  |................|
00000040  00 00 00 00 fe ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000050  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
*
00000200  fd ff ff ff fe ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
00000210  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
*
00000400  52 00 6f 00 6f 00 74 00  20 00 45 00 6e 00 74 00  |R.o.o.t. .E.n.t.|
00000410  72 00 79 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |r.y.............|
00000420  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000440  16 00 05 00 ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
00000450  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000470  00 00 00 00 fe ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000480  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000004c0  00 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
000004d0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000004f0  00 00 00 00 fe ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000500  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000540  00 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
00000550  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00000570  00 00 00 00 fe ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000580  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000005c0  00 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff  |................|
000005d0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000005f0  00 00 00 00 fe ff ff ff  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000600

EDIT: Shortened hexdump. Where there is a '*', it means there are n lines identical to the one above the '*', where n ≥ 1

 

[stephanhodges]

Their format is Unicode UTF-8 without the BOM. If you save it and then open with Notepad (assuming you run Windows, which some will not), then you can just save it again, because Notepad will correctly write the BOM (Byte Order Mark) for UTF-8. You can also change with notepad to either big or little endian 16 bit character unicode if you want.

Here's a good explaination: http://www.websina.com/bugzero/kb/unicode-bom.html

 

[trevelyan]

Thanks for the feedback ipsi and stephen.

The vocabulary export function should be exporting tabs, not commas. Or, at least, I've always used tabs when importing flashcards into PlecoDict. You may also want to look at exporting an XML file, which would be compatible with 2.0. The 2.0 XML format also supports importing statistics, among other things .

We've added a "tab-separated values" export function on the vocab page, and will add support for the Pleco 2.0 XML format when we get the definition file from Mike. It is supposed to be on its way. I'd like to implement vocab import directly using the Pleco standards for full cross-compatibility, and will look into the BOM issue as well - I wasn't aware of the need to add that - thanks for the tip Stephen.

When you copy paste the card, you get both simplified and traditional hanzi, even though I said only simplified. (I understand what's happening behind the scenes, but perhaps you can change it anyways).

We're using javascript for maximum compatibility and toggling visibility. A pretty simple solution, but one that avoids all the compatibility issues flash has, and keeps the site working with mobile devices. The flashcards weren't really intended for copying and pasting data though. Can you let me know why you wanted to copy and paste the data from there instead of - say - doing it from the vocab page? Trying to keep track of the entries you got incorrect, or something else?

The display issues were being caused by listing all five fields. Until we get our designer to resize the flashcards, we've simply eliminated the fifth field (notes). This should avoid having text run off the bottom of the cards in all but exceptional circumstances.

We're not quite sure how to handle duplicate flashcards. The system will keep cycling through all provided entries until the user has correctly identified them all. There is room for improving the underlying algorithms and that is on our roadmap.

Thanks for your patience, and such great feedback. Will do our best to work out the kinks.

--david

 

[stephanhodges]

(had a long reply but firefox has a bad habit of just closing tabs if I click the tab (not near the "x")...

http://popupchinese.com/lessons/archive ... rvice/text

Errors: Shouldn't have a circle-period in the middle of 一个A套餐。两瓶啤酒。
I think you should have used "sir" instead of "mister". Is that an American thing?

All the download links should open in a new tab. Otherwise, it destroys the current session (loose your place with audio, etc).

All lessons should have a unique ID number. That number should be included in the downloadable transcripts, and also include the grade level. Someday you're going to have thousands of these!

Add a customer profile item to select "Letter (US)" versus "A4" for PDF downloads. This is really annoying right now (personal taste)

Underline all the vocab words in the "premium" PDF. Also, vocab words in PDF should starting on a new page. Same goes for the quiz.

Create a teachers version, with lesson plan, teaching notes, and syllabus suggestions, extra quizzes, etc.

Put the full link in the PDF, both to your website, and directly to the lesson. Make the links clickable

I'd really really like to have the pinyin completely separated from the Hanzi. Don't know about you, but I read large blocks (in English) and I cannot help but see the pinyin if it's adjacent. For me, it would be OK to have it as a separate block after the hanzi. Again, I feel this should be a user profile thing. I assume you can generate

 

[trevelyan]

Thanks Stephan,

We've been working on implementing feedback that we've received from a lot of users, including your comments below. Among recent changes have been the addition of support for exporting vocabulary into the Pleco 2.0 XML format, the lengthening of the cookie session to a month (no more need to login on every visit - a request from ipsi), opening downloads in new windows, and a number of javascript improvements to the lesson creation system.

I'll be doing some work on the PDF later today. The placement of Chinese/English/Pinyin in such close proximity hurts readability in my opinion too, but totally customized pdfs may not work either if they require a convoluted settings page. We've add the ability for people to switch display modes (simplified/traditional/pinyin) without going to the settings page, and I think this approach is very usable - it presents display customization options right where people will use them and then generalizes the preference to other media. If that feature gets decent feedback we can do similar things for customizing text displays for the PDF. In the meantime we'll switch to having the URL to the lesson displayed directly at the bottom right, and keeping the header as a clickable link to the lesson discussion page.

We actually have internal number references for specific lessons, but I'm not sure what value this actually providers users, and think it has a negative effect on usability. Even when you have hundreds of lessons, does it really provide that much value to people to know that *this* is lesson #2843 and *that* is lesson #5243? The provision of numbers also encourages users to view IDs as sequential guides to the materials ("I guess I have to start at lesson #1...."). We're working on other ways to provide structured guidance for students who need it and still experimenting with the podcast format. It's likely that certain formats will get split off into their own shows as well, and entire lesson grades may pop into existence. The username is currently the best sign of lesson difficulty - and that will stay constant.

Great feedback, thanks again!

--david

p.s. Am not sure about American vs. British english on "Mister". I'm personally Canadian and we're caught firmly in the middle: both British and American english feel quite comfortable, and I'll often get caught up on spellcheckers with "ise" and "ize". The difference to me feels more one of implied class, with "Mister" coming off as maybe a bit low-brow, but that's just my own personal impression.

 

[stephanhodges]

Regarding pinyin in the transcript, when I was just starting out the pinyin under the hanzi was fine and helpful. Now, it's not, and actually a detriment. Current textbooks don't have pinyin or even english grammar explainations any more (intermediate) and I find that is helping me more (not having pinyin).

So, just the option to place it completely separately would be OK.

Regardless, the most important is just that you understand the usage scenarios, since I don't know your customer targets <smile>.