posted by 华金 on May 4, 2012 | 3 comments
I was flicking through the flash cards and vocabulary lists on the site and bumped into a couple things that threw me off.
On the flash cards, 岁 came up as ji3 in pinyin, and age in English. Obviously the English is right, but shouldn't the pinyin be sui4?!?!
Also, in the vocabulary lists, a couple of simplified characters that should be written differently from their 繁体 counterparts actually came up the same:
1）da3 dian4 hua4 comes up as 打電話 under the simplified column, instead of 打电话
2）shui4 jiao4 comes up as 睡覺 instead of 睡觉
Am I missing something or not?
oh, and since I'm at it, I downloaded the Chinese Pad app for my iPhone but as soon as I tried to login it said "Network Error". I've tried logging in using different wifi hotspots, as well as at home, and even used a VPN in case the Great Firewall was at work, but to no avail. Any ideas? Has anyone else had this problem?
Hi 华金,
I'll check to see where those definitions are stored in our system (if at all). There are a lot of potential sources/ways to add vocab to your flashcards, and the odd simplified/traditional mixup has been known to happen while updating the site, so the source for those issues is unlikely to be the lesson content. Useful to know about them though -- we try to weed out problems when we find them.
The network error simply means that your iPhone is claiming it can't connect to the Internet when the registration function is requested. We don't have any visibility into why it might not be working, but you can skip this by unlocking the application using the username "popup" and the password "chinese". Hope this helps!
Update: it looks as if the pinyin for 岁 was wrong in the New HSK Level 1 list. Not sure how that slipped by us, but we've updated the list and auto-corrected everyone's private lists. The mixup with simplified/traditional characters was also from that list, but was fixed about two or three weeks ago. We didn't go back and auto-fix people's existing list, but you're right about what is simplified and what is traditional. :)
Great, thanks for the lengthy reply! Checking out the writing pad right now! By the way, I'm still down for the movies blog if there's any interest. Let me know when you've applied the changes that you wanted to and I'll get started!Ps: what did you think about the Chinese translation of the Sisyphus essay? My Chinese students said it went straight over their heads!