We are currently in the process of redesigning the ChinesePod dashboard to show users more useful information in one centralised place.
We are working on draggable widgets (similar to Fitbit/Wordpress) so that users can customize what shows on the dashboard.
If you have any features you would like to see added on that page feel free to comment below.
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I would very much like to see similarity ratings between the lessons. One of the long standing concerns with CPod has been a seeming lack of structure for the users. Compared to traditional Chinese books where the lessons build on each other, the CPod lessons seem to rarely do this. An incredible feature would be for CPod to look at the words used in each lesson (all the words, not just featured vocabulary) and compare them to all other lessons to give a percentage overlap. If I were able to study a lesson, and then study a different lesson with a very high degree of overlap, that would enforce the language I’ve learned in each, thus cementing the language in and speeding up the rate that I can acquire new words. As it currently stands, I may study a word in one lesson, and not come across that word again for another year.
A similar idea would be to provide a percentage of a lesson that a user should know based on lessons the user has marked as studied. If, for example, a user was transitioning to Upper Intermediate, they could choose a lesson with a high degree of overlap with all the Intermediate lessons they have studied. This would make this difficult transition a lot easier.
This is an interesting idea. Seems like something that Steve Kaufman is doing over on LingQ. I’ll discuss it with the IT team and see how technically difficult it is to do this for our website. I think it would be pretty cool.
I actually first saw something like this at FluentU. Great feature.
Another thing that might be good is search sets that you can pin to the dashboard — basically a set of bookmarks linked to a search term.
Say, for example, I want to apply to become a zookeeper here in Chengdu, but prior to applying for the job, I need to improve my vocabulary when it comes to breeding pandas and looking after snakes.
If I could do a one-off search for ‘zoo’ (or even a more complicated Boolean search?), and then pin the search results as a set of lessons onto my dashboard, this would be pretty useful for building customised content sets.
We are actually looking to develop a kind of custom tags feature like Evernote, gmail labels so that users could make similar sets like you describe.
I have noticed that the lesson tags and “related lessons” cited often miss a lot of very pertinent similar lessons. I’m not sure if an automated search of overlapping word count will catch everything either, but probably worth a try. Maybe not so useful for newbies either; I don’t think they want to see the top 1,000 matches for other lessons that also contain more than one instance of the words “我” and “是“
On a related note, I’d like to be able to curate my own courses. Once I find a bunch of related lessons as @yibuyibu describes above I would like to be able to put them in a virtual binder and find them quickly and easily, maybe with a button on the dashboard for “my custom courses.”
That’d be great. I look forward to it.
Agree. I think this is why it would need to be a percentage. So, yes, just about all lessons will have a bunch of 我， 是， 个， 不， etc. But lessons with the highest percentage overlap should also pick up lessons related to, coffee, for example. Also, maybe not straight word count, but simply that the same words are used, regardless of how many of times.
[quote=“GwilymJames, post:1, topic:219”]
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[/quote] Hi guys,
Here some ideas for a seemless experience when comes the moment to switch lesson.
On the web version :
What about a button “previous”/“next lesson” on the lesson’s page ? Like this no need to press “back” in the browser and directly pass on the next lesson within the same level.
On the app :
When I am already in a lesson and want go back to choose another lesson, I land on the “latest” lessons’s page.
I would rather prefer land were I just left my previous page within the same level.
Especially when you went far in the level and that you have to scroll all the way down to find where you did stop previously.
Hope that can give you nice ideas for future updates !
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll look at getting some of these ideas added on the site and app. I’ll let you know if and when it’s done.
Hi @326022520, we have added this feature. It lets you skip to the next/prev lesson from that level.
Hi,
I hope it’s not too late to suggest additional features for the dashboard.
What I’d love to see:
(1) Instead of seeing ALL latest lessons, I would like to see lessons that are appropriate to my level. At the moment the first thing I see is mostly advanced and intermediate etc. lessons, but my level is elementary so they are almost all irrelevant.
(2) In addition to the ‘latest lessons’ tab it would also be great to have a ‘recently studied’ lessons tab.
Thanks!
Hi,
i totally agree with the ideas of @372648812 372648812
This would be very valuable.
This could be realising by persisting my selection of the filter (level, bookmarked) etc. It is annoying to select a filter (my consist of 3 parameters) before every podcast.
Furthermore:
At my level (elementary) almost are current shows are with Fiona and Gwylin. While you do a great job your precessors already did great, and probably diversification is motivating.
I tried yesterday very hard to find elementary shows from 2011. There is no real way to do that.
I can start either from 2017 and go back with 50 clicks or start from 2005 and to the same (via oldest first filter).
To find shows from john, jenny, vera, ken and all the other hosts and guests we need better options.
Maybe this could be a filter for years. Maybe a range selection for the number (podcast 2000-2500).
The best filter criteria would be a filter for the host. But i admit this would probably too much work for you, because then you add to the necessary metadata to all 4000 podcast.
I found some old features in your website, that it didnt notice before.
There are really many entry points into content in different places on the web site.
A bit confusing.
There is the filter function on the dashboard. This one i used intuitively the last year.
There is the “lesson library” tab on the top
Here is also the “playlist” site with different interesting search options.
Here is even the “list” function that allows me to get to content from different years (with acceptable comfort).
There is “my courses” below the profile menu.
Interesting features for experts and probably a lot legacy stuff over 12 years of chinesepod.
Is there any plan of consolidating search features into one place?
You’ve stumbled upon the main problem facing ChinesePod. 12 years of a hand built website makes for a tricky time navigating and updating without breaking things. We are working on a large project to overhaul most aspects of the website, and search is top on our priorities.
Regarding your search for all elementary lessons, I think the List function is the fastest method.
How could a great resource be even better? I’d like custom reviews from lessons. I’m hoping the response to this is “It’s right there, silly.” haha Right now I export the words to pleco and review in there. But it’d be nice if I could build a test similar to the placement tests but that pulled exclusively from studied lessons.
Also, is there a scheduling feature anywhere? Like, I’d like to study three [intermediate] lessons a day and then they’d add to my podcast feed at three a day. Doing this manually kinda gets hard unless you’re super diligent about marking off the lessons as studied.
Again, great site.
We don’t currently have any scheduling features. The closest thing we have is a custom playlist feature on our Android app that lets you select lessons in your desired order.
We don’t have this feature either. We are in the process of updating the website (a big job) and hope to improve the tests/gamification of it.
In the Android app I’m able to filter for lessons I have bookmarked and lessons I have completed. It would be really useful to be able exclude lessons I’ve completed or book marked. Hopefully I haven’t just missed this feature.
I also would enjoy being able to filter by host. I usually just put a playlist on shuffle. In this way I recently discovered a Qing Wen combo that I really enjoyed — I think the hosts were Clay, Amber, and Connie. They had a great effortless on-air rapport that had me smiling and giggling right along with them. We all probably have our favorite hosts and teaching styles. I’ve thought for a long time would be kind of extra sweet if it were possible to filter by hosts or make the hosts searchable in some way . There are tons of super relevant lessons to discover with hosts that many of us may not have ever come across. Lilianna anyone? Greg? Pete? Tom? Shanell? Vera? So many different hosts 
Filtering by year would also be a nice entry point into the huge collection.
That feature gets my vote!
Clay and his coffee…
They really crack me up lol and all from just pure audio !
Yes please, just today I thought the same. Sorting by hosts and year would be awesome.
Agree. Concur. Same here. Putting stuff into the “Self Study” category is fine for a current study list, still sorting with more choices, e.g., hosts, etc. would make my study sessions more effective.
Hi All:
Thanks for this suggestion! I have forwarded this particular request to the IT team who is working on website revamp and design! Admittedly the current filter function is limited, but if you type the instructor name, you should get the lessons given by the named instructor. Just a reminder that over the years, we have instructors who have the same name.
Another feature I have suggested to our IT team is to increase the categories/series and levels to include more different types/levels of lessons. I saw that when we introduced the character series with traditional characters this month, users are negatively surprised because they expect to see simplified characters and not traditional, while a good number of our users are tradition system learners. So I am seeing that our present level/category system is not sufficient to help users to target and effectively search for what they really need.
This is THE time to make your suggestions while the IT team is in the process of designing the website and app. Your suggestion is much appreciated and please don’t stop writing in!
I’d like to be able to make my own playlists or to tag videos for my own use (any sort of grouping system really), so that I can throw some videos or podcasts together and then work my way through them over several sessions and come back later to revise the content. Eg I recently did a search for illness related material as we were covering that in class and found some suitable ones, but I can only bookmark them and then I have to search through all my bookmarked ones to find them.
This feature would also allow me to keep a list of easier material for when I’m a bit tired and harder stuff for when I feel up for a challenge.
Hello, thanks for writing in, and your suggestion is passed onto the IT team. Currently, our playlist function is quite limited unfortunately…
If there’s a revamped playlist feature, I’d also like to be able to share it. I’ve sometimes seen complaints in comments, and I’ve thought, “I’d love to make a short playlist for that guy of lessons he might like.”
I’m guessing this has been mentioned, but just in case it hasn’t…
One of the most valuable thing I do on my iPhone, since I have all the dialogues downloaded and organized into iTunes, is have a playlist of only dialogues at each level, from 2008 through 2014. I can then choose a level, then play it on “shuffle” to both review and discover material I had missed.
On the website and/or app, it could work by creating a smart playlist of (1) dialogues only (2) at a certain level(s) (3) with other criteria, such as year or teacher, or maybe even topic.
“Read and Listen”
To add to my above comment, ChinesePod has many hours of pure dialogue on file, along with the text. I wonder if there’s a way to create a “Reading Practice” function, where you can either create a playlist, or shuffle the dialogues, and at the same time see the text nicely displayed on the screen.
I used to do that with my iPhone by syncing all the dialogues through iTunes, then using Pleco Lyrics Reader to read along with each dialogue. It would be great to have that functionality built-in, rather than ask poddies to download and organize the whole site into iTunes for themselves!
Thanks so much Elijah for this suggestion, and I am going to raise this to the IT team if they hadn’t seen this in the forum. If I am understanding you correctly, you are seeing a possibility to “break down” lesson barriers that keep the materials (text, dialogues, vocab, recording, etc.) apart, such that the CP materials can be more fluently and personally grouped together for personalised learning purpose. This sounds to me a pretty deep change in the IT architecture, but again, I am not an IT person, so I can only try to use my layman language to discuss with the IT team.
I don’t know how much IT change would be involved. It would simply be an added tool that allows you to have a playlist of only the dialogues, and on the screen it would display the text of the dialogue. I’ll see if I can figure out a better way of explaining it.
I’ve made some YouTube videos to show what I do with an iTunes Dialogue MP3 playlist and Pleco. It would be great if something like this was already built into the app, so you wouldn’t have to download and organize all the dialogues on your own first.
When doing a screen capture of Pleco on the iPhone, the built-in screen capture software wouldn’t allow me to capture audio from the Music app, so I had to do it the “old fashioned” way below:
ChinesePod already has a ton of well-scripted and well-acted audio coupled with the text. If the website or app could do something like this without requiring people to download the whole site onto their hard drive, organize the files and build playlists themselves, sync to another device, and use a third-part app to see the lyrics, it would be a great asset.
As a new user, what I find slightly frustrating about Cpod is the random pattern of the lessons and the lack of a clear pathway. So, anything improving that would be a huge help. For example, a suggested path of progression through the newbie and elementary levels, mentioning which courses and lessons to follow in order. I am using several other resources to learn Chinese, and undoubtedly you have the greatest array of materials, but sadly the lack of structure makes it difficult to make decisions, at least for a beginner. Otherwise, I am very happy and learning a lot.
The playlist would be a huge improvement, I agree!
I do that manually by downloading lesson materials and ordering them in files in my computer, but I agree it would be great if the site provided it. I feel I spend to much time in that kind of tasks instead of learning 
I use ChinesePod on different computers, a tablet and a phone, so it’d be easier for me if it was available on the website rather than me having to download stuff. Plus even if you download everything, you won’t have all the different material available easily. Maybe it’s just me not finding a way of organising them that works well. But I have been thinking of grouping and putting the dialogues on an MP3 player so that I get the tracks in order of various themes.
For the moment, my rather primitive system is to make a folder for each lesson, named after the title show, and put there the show, vocabulary review, dialogue and pdf. They all go into a bigger folder called Newbie. I then put each folder into my mp3, and make multiple copies of the vocab and dialogue, to listen them on the go. I tried using my phone for a while, but it ordered the tracks by “album” and it was a mess when listening them while exercising etc. But it all takes quite a long time to organize, so any improvement in this regard from the CP side would be a blessing.
MayHaNN,
I know this is probably a difficult question to answer but: What specifically is frustrating about it? Is it the indecision of what to study next? Is it inconsistency in the level of challenge from one lesson to the next? Is it something else?
I am a fan of ChinesePod’s original methodology: “Chinese on YOUR terms.” Study whatever you want. But I do have to confess that, even from the beginning, they haven’t done a good job of explaining the methodology to students.
So, I guess what I’m trying to figure out is: What actually is the problem? Is the unstructured methodology itself the problem? Or perhaps might it be the lack of guidance on how to use the unstructured methodology? My gut feeling is that it’s the latter.
If you can think of ways to explain your experience, I would love to hear it.
Downloading is the easy part! I made a video showing how I keep my ChinesePod files organized. They’re easily accessible, but it does take quite a bit of work to get it like this.
I’ve discovered that some of the stuff I do only seems to work due to the tight integration between iTunes and iOS. I tried to help a friend using Android put something like this together, and I walked away thinking it’s probably impossible.
I did watch your video and it was very useful. I don’t have a Mac, so it might not work for me.
