trevelyan on April 22, 2012 | reply

Sound is on the way.... or... is half implemented now. Click on the question (i.e. the word being tested) and if there is audio in the system we will play it for you. Will see how this turns out before we implement anything more specific like auto-playing the audio on load, etc.

> Make the system for keeping track of studied lessons work right and make it comfortable to use.

I'd be very interested what suggestions people have with this. We're looking at the front page now and thinking we should be redesigning things to combine the main page with the study center. One reason being that right now we have two pages that can be used to do essentially the same thing (go through the lessons in one's account).

So yes -- please let us know what issues you guys have. We are looking for more stuff to break.

Xiao Hu on April 22, 2012 | reply

I too would very much like to see a fully integrated practice and testing system.

EXAMPLE EXERCISES (IN A PERFECT WORLD):

- Verb to Object matching

- Select or Fill in Collocations

- Skim and Scan (with time limit)

- Pick the Chinese character

- Pick the radical

- Write a character/Fading character

- Fill in the blank, translatiion (both L1 to L2 and L2 to L-1)

- Speaking exercises (utilizing currect voice recognition software)

- Fill in Pinyin/ Fill in Chinese Characters

- Identify and Select Grammatical Patterns from a Piece of Text

- Identify Register (IE: read a piece of text or utterance and decide if it's formal, informal, neutral, direct, indirect, personal, impersonal etc.)

- Select a Summary (IE: what answer best summarizes the passage)

- Write a Summary

- Synonym/Antonym exercises

- Register Conversion exercises (converting a piece of text or a word between registers, in other words, convert Formal to informal, colloquial, idiom, Idiomatic, etc.)

- Picture-Adjective exercises (a picture comes up on screen and we have to pick what best describes it, or type in a description)

- Video-Adjective exercies (just like pictures except with video)

- Identify the mistake

- Correct the mistake

- Teacher for a day, students explain a concept (using Chinese) like they were the teacher

- Identify Parts of Speech exercises (label a piece of text with the part of speect, EG: noun, verb, subject, object, verb, subject, predicate, co-verb, etc.)

- Reorder the sentence

- MATCH YOUR VOICE TO NATIVE SPEAKER (speak and pass only with a 90% or above phonic match)

- True/False exercies

- Consolidation exercies (consolidate a long, run-on piece of text into a shorter more concise version while keeping the meaning intact)

- Convert to Chengyu exercies (pick and/or key in a Chengyu that best matches a given phrase)

- Convert to slang/Colloquial language exercies

- Colloquial to Business conversion

- Explain or Define a Chart or Graph exercies

- Listen and Summarize

- Categorization exercies (IE: categorize the word as positive, negative, object, animate, inanimate, edible, inedible)

- Cultural Training (identify Chinese cultural and historically significant figures, events, slogans, etc.)

These exercies should also be fully integrated as testing/exerciese features in individual lessons as well as the study center.

I can think of so many more, but I think this is a good starting point and, admittedly a very tall order. Not everything can be fully implemented the way I invision it, but, at least we can have goals, dreams, visions...like I said, in a perfect world...

Oh yeah, and Popup Groups would be another feature at the very top of my wish list.

Noah.Pflugradt on April 26, 2012 | reply

I like the combination of those two:

- Select a Summary (IE: what answer best summarizes the passage)

- Write a Summary

That means David can give out the Test to like a dozen people and then he has a dozen answers... now all he has to do is select a correct answer and he has the data!

trevelyan on April 25, 2012 | reply

This is a great list, Xiao Hu. There are so many suggestions here and in your next post, some of which are immediately practical and some of which are a lot more speculative or difficult to reliably script. So this deserves a really lengthy post, but since we're at a cafe with limited online time, let me try to rush this.

First -- yes! -- we're definitely planning to expand the number and range of questions offered in the default popup review. The big conceptual restriction for these questions is that they have to make sense in the context of students who are studying the lessons in any order. The reason for this is that we are trying to emphasize to people that there ARE these review tools built into the system, so more people are aware that we're building (or trying to build) a more comprehensive study system and not just throwing out podcasts.

What this means practically is that the very granular percentage type questions which map to an objective cognitive map of grammar and vocab concepts is going to be difficult to incorporate by default. But what should work are questions which can be auto-generated given the materials explicitly covered in the lessons (sentences, vocabulary, etc.). We will be expanding the number and type of questions in the next few months. We'll go through this list and see how many we can come up with. Then allow people to enable and disable on the review tab.

Identify the radical, etc. are nice ideas we have not thought of, but which should be relatively easy for us to put together. We've been looking at a way to incorporate more character etymology into the lesson process as a result of feedback from a lot of people (thanks pefferie!). So this would be a nice complement to that sort of material.

That said... I don't think we'll be able to push more granular materials into the popup review by default. That is more the sort of direction we were (and still are) hoping to go with the Popup Chinese test which is still available but has been somewhat de-emphasized. Right now we have a backend "grammar map" of concepts and questions and aim to push the test in this direction ("strong grammar, but your listening skills are weak, etc.") in order to simplify the process of recommending materials that people will find more useful and avoiding testing people on stuff they already know. So this is definitely on the roadmap, but it is also really, really difficult. As mentioned below, we are still working on getting explanations for our existing questions into the system so it is still a work in progress. But the backend grammar map is also quite messy and feels too arbitrary for my tastes. Reliable categorization is often difficult and sometimes very arbitrary. It is going to require a lot of hands on work to nail out something that is academically sound and also comprehensive enough.

I'll look at implementing a groups feature. Some of these ideas are also sort of steadily percolating waiting for technical improvements to make them more feasible. For a case in point, I've actually already looked at voice recognition -- the issue right now is that the technology isn't there yet in terms of its accuracy and reliability (is a system that gets 80% accuracy useful or misleading?) and it would seem to be more of a sales pitch rather than a really useful tool. There are also minor issues with flash which mean it would involve recording and waiting while data is sent to the server for analysis. So the usability. Maybe a separate app would make things easier if we could push the computation itself to smart phones. There may be more limited and fun ways to handle this.

Xiao Hu on April 22, 2012 | reply

While we're on the subject of using science and technology to boost our language performance, besides testing and exercises, I'd love to see a ranking system that's categorized, like in the NBA, they don't just count points, they also count blocks, asists, steals. etc.

On Popup, our new ranking system would, not only have an cummulative score of overall testing time put in, it would also rank lesson exercise scores, test scores, HSK test scores (for each level), count those with the quickest answers, the highest percentage of correct answers, the most "native" pronunciation, the most correct grammar, the best listening comprehension, the best reading comprehension and the most correct writing.

The way I see it, this is just a matter of running a program that calculates all the different statistics using different permutations (I hope I'm using that word correctly here), in other words, it analyzes the data in different ways. It would also display pie charts, graphs, lists, naked statistics, etc. It would also be helpful to know where one ranks in the grand scheme of things, as right now we only know where we rank among the top 20. If we fall below the top 20, we could have this data available to be analyzed and ranked, at least on our own personal account control panel.

The ranking would look something like this:

听力 #28

阅读 #47

口语 #88

语法 #49

This information should also be able to be displayed in account pages as grades, A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, F , and/or with percentages.

I think it would be very helpful because we can use the information as a gauge our progress, and to know where we're weaker and where we're stronger.

I'm 100% confident that I would score on the higher side of listening and speaking but much lower in grammar, writing and miserably low in handwriting. When we see the scores boldly staring us in the face, it becomes a motivating factor to improve. When we see our scores improve, it then takes on the role of positive reinforcement thereby motivating us to continue to improve, as well as to know where we should put the time in to improve.

The system would also make suggesstions based on our strengths and weaknesses. Right now it only suggests lessons. A more scientific system would analyze the strengths and weaknesses and suggest, in a more pointed and specific way, what we could do to improve in those area. Giving us the big picture and enabling us to make a plan. IE: listen to a certain podcasts, review grammar, do more HSK grammar tests, do more speaking exercises, review flashcards, etc. As data is accumulated the suggestions would become more precise and pointed towards specific activities which could help us improve in each area of the language by making suggestions of specific types of exercises (like the ones listed above) that would help us improve.

Of course, for those who don't care about learning to read and write (which I hope EVERYONE would, but there are those out there who only care about speaking and listening), then those areas could be deselected in our personal control panel.

I think that this way we could know what kind of study plan we need and know better how to plan our study time and advance more quickly.

trevelyan on April 25, 2012 | reply

Yes. As mentioned above, this is definitely the direction we're hoping to take the Popup test. The tricky thing is developing the backend grammar map so that it accurately captures what people need to know instead of becoming a list of very arbitrary pieces of random knowledge about Chinese.

Usability-wise, I'm not terribly pleased with the current distinction between the Popup Test and the popup review thing. I suspect that as we move forward (and as the test improves) we'll gradually erode the distinction until there is a test mode that simply works and a more seamless series of study activities which are recommended based on what people study and how they work. Figuring out a good default way or recommending next lessons steps (lesson clustering? vocab similarities, etc.) is probably a more realistic first step.

We definitely believe that the best way to structure things is to impose structure on the study process from outside the lessons rather than within them in the form of an explicit lesson series. So I think we're on the same page here.

丹尼 on April 22, 2012 | reply

Holy cow Xiao Hu. If they did all that I'd definitely purchase a subscription. Right now I'm kind of on the fence about buying one. I'm certainly willing to be convinced though.

drummerboy on April 26, 2012 | reply

@ Danny,

Get off the fence and take the popup plunge, you won't regret it! :-). There's no better place around to improve your Chinese and have a ton of fun at the same time.

丹尼 on April 27, 2012 | reply

Alright alright alright alright. I'm part of the family now.

Echo on April 27, 2012 | reply

@Danny,

Welcome to join the family!

欢迎 :)

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

Echo on April 24, 2012 | reply

@murrayjames & Xiao Hu,

谢谢你们这么大的支持！有你们——我们泡泡中文所有的粉丝，才有泡泡中文。感动 ^.^

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

murrayjames on April 23, 2012 | reply

Hi Danny,

The biggest reason for buying a subscription is that you get unlimited access to all the content on the site. The extras are cool, and longtime users do care about them, but ultimately the reason we're all here is to learn Chinese. The podcasts, dialogues and transcripts at Popup Chinese are first rate.

In money is your concern, please consider.... The value of a paid subscription here is heads and shoulders above any of the comparable websites. Example. A one-year Premium subscription at Popup Chinese now costs less than the Basic package at ChinesePod. I don't have an axe to grind with ChinesePod (I have friends who work there), but the difference in value is undeniable.

Popup's pedagogical approach works. I know, because my Chinese is improving. I like their sense of humor. I like the *vibe* here. I like uncluttered lesson pages, dialogues about torturing poor Echo's cat, and that David enabled popup transcripts for all users for free.

So, be convinced :-) A subscription is well worth it.

Xiao Hu on April 23, 2012 | reply

@Murrayjames,

Amen to that!

The Popup vibe is second to none.

Not to knock Chinesepod, but...while Jenny Zhu (a very beautiful Shanghai socialite) and John Pasden (a very handsome coolguy who speaks fantastic Chinese) are, both likeable enough, the problem is that Jenny had no teaching experience to speak of before joining Chinesepod and John's teaching style is a direct holdover from the training school environment. The way they both teach and explain material, most especially John, is to treat the student like they're in elementary school. To explain concepts only in the most basic, lowest-common-denominator way, as if the students aren't capable of understanding it in another, more academic way. They offer little in the way of grammatical guidance, cultural insight or to help the student internalize the material or understand the emotional subtleties of the language.

Chinesepod does nothing to educate the student on the structure of the language, to help them learn HOW it's put together and WHY it's put together in that way. There's also zero emphasis on providing any sort of road map for the student to actually raise up his or her level, short of purchasing their ultra expensive executive package at several hundred USD per month.

They seem to believe that having a lively discussion about a topic and explaining the meaning of a few words is adequate. In my book John's peronality is too straight to be a host. He would be, (and probably currently is) a fantastic manager, which seems well suited to his personality type, but a host needs another level of charm, wit, creativity and magnetism.

Chinesepod's dialogues tend to lack creativity and naturalism and all the hosts are a bit bland. Although I do really tend to like David Xu as a host.

On the other hand, Brendan's knowledge of grammar and mastery of the subtleties of Chinese is absolutely astounding and his sly wit often leaves me rolling on the floor. David Echo and Brendan all inject the dialogues with humor as well as academia. Echo's background in teaching Chinese as a second language shines through in every podcast.

Popup Chinese is great edutainment.

This is the only site that has any sort of emphasis on learning WRITTEN CHINESE. Every lesson offers downloadable PDF character practice sheets. There is also a character writing practice pad. Best of all, if Echo senses that a student has any sort of command of written Chinese at all, she will actively post a message in Chinese that's catered to the level of the student. Jenny on the other hand rarely, if ever, even tries to post in Chinese, even at advanced levels. If she's trying to elicit a discussion from the students, then she's going about it in the wrong way, because a discussion in English is useless to the student and worse, pushes them back into an English mode.

In short this is all a product of Chinespod's somewhat watered down “轻轻松松地学汉语”approach.

Studying a language, and actually learning it to some appreciable level is not, and never will be the entirely enjoyable and relaxing experience that it's promoted to be on Chinesepod.

Especially not a complicated language like Chinese.

Yes there are certain elements that can be entertaining, fun and joyful, but at the end of the day, it's painstaking work and a long and winding road.

The shortcomings of the site are most evident in the host of students who have, after four or five years of heavy Chinesepod usage only now been able to make the jump up one or two levels from where they originally started. These students' "upgrade" is only based on their listening comprehension, not their SPEAKING and definitely not their reading or writing, which are at much lower levels.

In my mind, to start with C-pod at Newbie level in 2008 and graduate to elementary in 2012 is a bit slow. And most of these students have absolutely no knowledge of the written language, simply because it's not promoted. Most of these students can't put together an actual sentence in the language (spoken or written) beyond basic, canned phrases. It seems they would have been better off with Pimsleur.

In my mind it's a bit of a tragedy.

Other shortcomings are that C-Pod wraps up everything in a tidy red Western bow. By trying so hard to make the language appealing and sexy to Western audiences, one can gain precious little insight into the cultural background of China. To understand the Chinese mind, to learn to mingle with the Chinese in a Chinese way. One can only hope to understand the simple and obvious Chinese social protocol of, fighting over the bill, maintaining face, purposely wasting food at a dinner table, Tai Chi, China's one child policy, Treating friends to dinner, Chinese family closeness, etc. These social phenomena are present in and explained in every basic China travel guide, but for a site that boasts a backlog of thousands of lessons, there are very few that actually deal with Chinese culture in any appreciable way.

Besides, whenever I listen to Chinesepod's lessons, it always seems like the language originated in English and it was translated to Chinese, not that it began as actual, native-level Chinese.

It's all tinted in a Western hue, flavored with Western spice, given a Western zing.

It always seems so inauthentic.

In my mind, this is all a product of Chinesepod's relax and freely study Mandarin "on your terms" approach.

Sorry, you can't successfully learn a language "on your terms".

Imagine that I'm coming from zero. Starting from no knowledge of how to learn a language and suddenly I'm going to come in and start calling the shots? To decide for myself how to learn a language when I have nothing whatsoever to go on? To make an effective study plan for myself and stick to it?

Oh really?

Languages are not learned, beyond those rare and precious few brilliant polyglots, by process of osmosis.

Popup Chinese on the other hand is like a University online, with an fully academic approach. With a complete, systematic pedagogy. With great hosting presence, clear grammatical and linguistic explanations, realistic voice acting, memorable dialogues, a wealth of enlightening study materials that include comprehension questions, exercises, tests and HSK tests, as well as full staff support and a great community. Popup is, pretty awesome.

Besides, like David said, it's put together by people who really know the language.

If Chinesepod were the only game in town it would be an okay place to learn the Mandarin language, provided you know how to organize your study, but with Popup Chinese as an alternative, the choice is clear.

Advantage Popup Chinese.

murrayjames on April 25, 2012 | reply

If I can go off-topic for a second... Re: John. I won't comment on his work at CPod, which I'm less familiar with. I want to add that John is one of the good guys. The Chinese tools he's written and his blog Sinosplice, in particular, have encouraged a lot of students of Chinese (including me, many moons ago). John's also a friend of mine :-)

Xiao Hu on April 25, 2012 | reply

@Murrayjames,

I know John is one of the good guys, he seems like a nice enough guy when you listen to him on C-Pod. I've been to his Sinosplice site a few times, but it never actually jived with me. Perhaps because when I found it I was already past the target level for which it's written. Sinosplice gives tips and tricks for newbies and novices of the language,but beyond that one can't find much in the way of guidance.

EG:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2006/12/13/mandarin-tone-tricks

Here he gives mnemonic devices and tips for some basic Chinese words and tones, like for 饼 imagining that a cake has caved in so it's third tone which has a dipped, "caved in" contour to it.

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2012/03/09/types-of-tone-mistakes

Here he is giving advice on tone mistakes, kind of like a coach saying, "you can do it, you'll make mistakes but don't worry, keep the faith and it will get better." Which is fine for those who are new to the language and having tone troubles, but at that point I'd already worked out my own methods for resolving tone issues.

The "Chinese Grammar" link on his site is a bit misleading, if you take a look,

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/tag/grammar

because he offers very little grammar guidance himself, there are some uses of "ma", some "measure words for beer" a link to a grammar book, a link to a Wikipedia article on tenses vs. aspects, etc.

This is all fine for the new student, but again, doesn't really teach much, just offers a pointer or two and then links to someone else to do the teaching.

I'm aware that Sinosplice is just a blog, not an actual study site like C-Pod or Popup Chinese, I just felt that it wasn't as helpful for me as I would have liked.

That said, one thing that did help me quite a lot was the following guide:

http://www.sinosplice.com/learn-chinese/pronunciation-of-mandarin-chinese/4

This details how to correctly produce the Chinese sounds, j, q, and x.

Before I found this (from his link on C-pod) I struggled to find the correct placement for those three sounds, which are not given any prominence in any Chinese language teaching materials that I'd come across, most likely because our own gee, chee and she can suffice as substitutes with no breakdown in understanding.

However, for those looking to sound "native" knowing this is a necessity.

I just wish that Sinosplice had more guides that actually help a student on up to the higher levels.

Which reminds me of another suggestion for Popup Chinese that I'd forgotten.

Popup needs a full Pinyin Chart with example pronunciation pronounced in all four tones, and visual pronunciation charts for all the various, difficult sounds of Chinese.

Noah.Pflugradt on April 25, 2012 | reply

Popup has that: in the dictionary you can browse by pinyin and then listen to all the sounds. :-)

drummerboy on April 25, 2012 | reply

I can't agree more! Trust me, I've spent time and money on other texts, teachers, and websites. Popup Chinese rules the Chinese language learning universe! As someone who has been involved in learning this beautiful language for a while, there is nothing that even comes close to this place in terms of quality, value, and humor!

David and Echo - I bet you didn't know you were rulers of the universe, did you? :-)

Xiao Hu on April 25, 2012 | reply

@Drummerboy,

Absolutely! Popup does rule the known universe...and I'm pretty sure rules in other as yet undiscovered universes and dimensions.

As I've been often known to say...

万岁万岁泡泡中文！

:)

Xiao Hu on April 23, 2012 | reply

@Danny,

I just wanted to go on record by saying that if you purchase a subscription you will not regret it. And David is always improving and upgrading. Also Popup has an actual pedagogical approach to learning which mirrors the way that he and Brendan learned Mandarin. Other Mandarin learning sites don't have such a clear approach to learning, they just put a bunch of lessons or study materials out there for you to forage through by yourself and offer little or no guidance. Besides that, the users on Popup are the best Mandarin learners that there are. Other sites may be more populated, but the vast majority of the users spend the vast majority of time posting things that are completely unrelated to learning Chinese.

On Popup, the great majority of posts have been about topics which can help us improve our knowledge of the language or Chinese culture.

My point here is that you will get actual community support and support from Echo and David themselves to speed you on your way to learning.

Besides, if you don't like the results, it's always backed by a money-back guarantee, so you've got nothing to worry about by trying it.

丹尼 on April 23, 2012 | reply

It's hard to argue with a pedagogical approach... I'll probably end up getting one soon. I came to China two months ago knowing absolutely no Mandarin, and I've found the thing's I've learned on this site to be much more useful in everyday conversation than what I've learned from other places (rosetta stone, ect).

Noah.Pflugradt on April 22, 2012 | reply

Wow. Those are a lot of really neat ideas. I’d love to see them all implemented.

I’d like to add a proposal on how to implement all those different tests smoothly into the website and make sure that the right test is shown at the right time.

Now from my (so far admittedly limited) experience, learning Chinese words is split in two phases. The first phase is committing the word to memory and making sure that it sticks. This happens within the first few hours or days of meeting a new word. The second phase is reviewing the word to ensure it’s still present, reinforcing the memory and, if it was forgotten, learning it again. This is continuous and lasts forever.

To be able to deal with any situation, I think the following connections have to exist in memory:

- Hanzi character to English meaning (this is needed for reading and understanding a text)

- Hanzi character to Pinyin (or sound) (for seeing a character and knowing how to pronounce it)

- Pinyin (or sound) to Hanzi (for hearing a character and knowing how to write it)

- Pinyin (or sound) to English (for hearing a character and knowing what it means)

- English to Hanzi (to be able to write your own sentences)

- English to Pinyin (to be able to speak)

A lot of learning methods don’t consider the need to have all these connections, which leads to people being able to understand everything, but struggling to put together a sentence or being unable to read a text out loud, even though they understand what it says or some permutation of those problems.

I think Xiao Hu put in tests for every direction. And answering tests is certainly a better and more fun way to build those connections than endlessly reviewing flash cards. The question is which tests are easy enough to implement that David can actually find the time and how to integrate the tests into the website.

My proposal is this: As you can see in the settings, Popup Chinese (PC) is counting up SRS score for each word after each correct review. Failing a review resets the score back to 0.

I think it would make sense to use that score to determine which test to show. Maybe something like this:

Score 0-2: Show multiple choice Hanzi -> English

Score 2-4: Multiple choice Hanzi -> pinyin

Score 5-6: Multiple choice pinyin -> Hanzi

Score 6-8: Multiple choice English -> Hanzi

Score 8: Generative PinYin

Score 9: Generative English

And so on.

That ensures that the user really knows the character and the word and the sound before switching to harder, generative tests. I think it would make sense to put in all the other tests exactly like this: Bind each test to a certain SRS score. If you fail a test, reset the score.

This would be phase one, with a minimum of like 5 minutes and a maximum of 1 day between each review of the same word. After all the tests are exhausted, PC should count the word as “learned” and only then start the spaced repetition. This would be equal to a srs score of probably about 20-30.

The spaced repetition should then randomly select any test from the list and if the user fails the test, it goes back to SRS score 0 and the entire thing starts over. That might seem frustrating, but answering a dozen multiple choice questions is really, really quick and David could even add a button saying “I know this word. Stop bothering me” which instantly switches the status to “learned”.

I’m rather curious how other people use the site btw. Why do you come to the website instead of simply using iTunes to download everything? Where is the value for you? For me it’s the vocab review feature and the vocab management…

-- Noah

trevelyan on April 25, 2012 | reply

I have to say that I really like this idea of mixing the tests and making sure people are tested in different ways as part of the process of making sure they know the words.

I've found the generative reviews much more challenging than simply identifying the definition at the upper levels, especially when you have to ask yourself -- "is this neutral tone or not"? How exactly to work this into the current SRS approach is a good question -- we want to strike a balance between being able to intuit what people know and avoid questioning EVERYONE on all of these words multiple times. That gets irritating pretty fast, especially for upper-level students who find easier words in their lists for various reasons.

Noah.Pflugradt on April 25, 2012 | reply

Yes, but that's pretty easily solvable by adding a button saying "I know this word, skip the learning phase" and then having a second button during the later SRS review phase saying "I really, really know this and never want to review it again.".

My opinion is that you shouldn't put in generative too early, that's just frustrating. It's like having a Lvl 80 Mob in the beginners area in WOW. Not good design.

I think finding an automated way to determine which tests to show the user should be done after all the tests are put in and work correctly.

Xiao Hu on April 22, 2012 | reply

There's something else I thought of that would be fun and educational.

The Popup Olympics.

We could organize the contests weekly, bi-weekly or whatever time frame would work for everyone.

Users would register and take a Popup placement test to determine the level, and competitions would be organized for elementary - advanced levels.

During the competition, a synchronous test feed would be sent to all registered contestants. The test would consist of multiple choice, true/false, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, sentence arrangement, parts of speech tagging, essay writing (about the same topic) and speaking (all on the same topic).

Each test component would count for a different percentage of the overall score, multiple choice and true and false would count for a lower percentage than speaking and writing.

For the speaking portion a total of 5 various topics would be announced 1 week before the games. On the day of the competition, one of those 5 topics would be selected and sent to the users who have 5 minutes to prepare their answers which would be a 5-7 minutes long. After the speech, a series of follow up questions would appear on the contestant's screen and when they're finished they click next and the following question would come up on the screen. This would ensure sponteneity for at least part of the speech portion and put our language abilities to the true test.

The speech would then be recorded and reviewed (along with our essays) by Echo and company and the winners determined and announced at a later date.

The winners and runners up would be placed on the Popup wall of fame.

Trophy award icons along with our accolades and decorations would appear in our control panels.

First Prizes would be a free Skype lesson and a month of free premium access. Second prize, (like Film Friday) a month of free premium access to Popup Chinese. Third Prize would be a free month of limited access to Popup.

Every contestant would get a participation award, which would be their writing corrected and their work critiqued by the Popup staff.

Entry fees would be minimal, just $5.00 US or ￥20.00 RMB if the contestant lives in China.

This would also be a fun way to motivate learners to sharpen their skills would compel us to learn to speak on a deep level about a wide variety of topics and hopefully even begin to think completely in Chinese.

pefferie on April 22, 2012 | reply

One suggestion that I would like to make is not about the tests, but about the popups themselves. I have no idea how they work. I believe they still get stuck on IE if you click on them and don't get unstuck, but that bug may have been fixed. Then (after you've clicked on it) you can edit its contents. I am not sure what that feature is for, since after you close the popup (on Chrome, since in IE this is broken), its contents does not change. I had rather, instead of the useless editing feature, have popups split multi-character words into separate characters, as it is impossible to learn a word (in its written form) without learning the individual characters.

Alternatively, the vocabulary for a lesson could just call out the individual characters. That would avoid readers having to look that up. As the characters do not appear in the podcast on their own, that would naturally be a premium feature.

trevelyan on April 25, 2012 | reply

I'll take a look pefferie. We've noticed just this weekend that popup behavior on iPad Safari is also sort of inconsistent.

We use some of the same tools for text annotation and editing, which is why there is some of this unexpected behavior. If you're reading News in Chinese and want to add a word, highlighting it and providing the definition queues the materials for review and eventual incorporation in our dictionary, etc.

As mentioned in a comment above, we're trying to figure out how to incorporate more etymology in the system. I'm not sure if we want to encourage everyone to dive-down to the character level with every word. But I agree we should provide more support for breaking down words and intuiting why characters are the way they are. A data issues as well as a UI issue.

trevelyan on April 23, 2012 | reply

Hi Everyone,

Echo and I are going to be traveling this week and are actually heading out very quickly, so while I haven't had time to write something in detail, I wanted to post quickly to let you guys know how appreciated all of these suggestions are.

Some of this stuff we have already thought about, and some of it is new to us as well. Just generally, I can guarantee that we'll be introducing more variety in the popup test. We also have a few features in active development that we'll be releasing once/if we are happy with them. These will make the points more useful and meaningful, and heighten the value of having networks of friends through the site.

I think usability and interface design is an open question as well -- we are wondering if we need two prominent pages to display and manage lessons or if perhaps there is a better way to do this. So this is a good time to have a discussion of what the site should look like and what people find useful and useless. The really key thing is that whatever we do, we want the site onboarding process to work for total beginners to mandarin as well as more advanced speakers.

Anyway, I'll get back to these points in detail in another day or so. Very briefly, some of the things which are being requested we have already looked at and simply aren't ready to launch for various reasons (i.e. speech recognition). With others there are tradeoffs. That said, please feel free to keep brainstorming, and please don't take our lack of posting here as a sign of neglect.

Cheers,

--david

Noah.Pflugradt on April 25, 2012 | reply

Maybe do a 3 page design for the two pages?

- A start page that's a cross between your standard facebook page and a typical portal page. There should be links to new forum posts, a newsfeed with important stuff, links to the next lesson, links to the review and all that.

- a channel selection page (I think calling the "lesson subscriptions" channels would make a lot more sense and avoid confusion with the paid popup chinese subscription. Does anyone agree?). That page should contain explainations what the channels are!

- A lesson management page where I can manage my lessons, add the vocab from all my studied lessons to my vocab list and stuff like that.

-- Noah

Xiao Hu on April 23, 2012 | reply

@David,

I think changing the home page to a bit more slick and modern design might be a good move. I personally don't mind, I believe never judge a book by its cover, but some people do. Pictures of the cast, yourself, Echo, Brendan, an artistic home page design might be in order. When we log in, if we could go straight into our control panels that would be a plus. To be able to control every aspect of our experience here easilly and efficiently is always a plus. In other words, consolidate everything into an obvious and ergonomic whole in a single, “My Popup” area. There we can manage calendar, lessons, vocab, drills, HSK tests, handwriting practice,scores, messages, ect., all as a popout windows (just like the current review format).

Getting and recording our performance and rating it is paramount.

Separate the messages into their own area because I feel that they make the home page look cluttered.

Separate forum posts from lesson posts and allow us to select them via Tabbed browsing format.

Enable forum post replies to send us an email notification if we get a reply.

Set up an obvious area where we can scroll through lessons and by level.

Feel free to toot your own horn a bit on the home page, I'd be happy to write a positive review for you.

Metatag and write desriptions and write content for each lesson so the content is searchable by the Popup search engine as well as Google, this will help Popup show up a lot higher and in many more searches.

Make all written content on the site visible to Google, this would greatly increase search-ability of Popup.

Xiao Hu on April 23, 2012 | reply

@David and Echo,

一路顺风！

drummerboy on April 23, 2012 | reply

@ David and Echo,

Have a great time! You both deserve a break :-)

craigrut on April 23, 2012 | reply

I see a lot of great ideas here. Mine is a little more simple. There are a ton of questions on the popup test, but most of them (at least in my experience) have no explanation as to why a specific answer is right. Although there is certainly merit in tracking down answers on my own using a dictionary, I'd love to see more of the answers explained (in English).

Xiao Hu on April 23, 2012 | reply

@Craigrut,

I agree, and I'm kicking myself because correction was on the list of suggestions. You get an answer wrong but have no idea what to do to correct it. Correction is an important component.

The only thing I disagree with for the explanation to be in English. Bilingual explanations would be better, but honestly the earlier point we disconnect from the English crutch, the better. Perhaps beyond intermediate level the explanations should be in Chinese.

craigrut on April 23, 2012 | reply

I agree the sooner you can move away from English the better, but keep in mind your Chinese level is above most users on the site (nice job!). I'd vote for bilingual. Reason being, some of the questions do have explanations, but I can't understand the explanation as I feel it is another question. I have to spend 20 minutes looking up words in the explanation to understand it! If I can't understand the explanation it is no more useful than knowing the right answer to the question.

Either way though, I'll take any explanation over none :).

Xiao Hu on April 24, 2012 | reply

@Craigrut,

Thanks for the compliment.

我不敢当!

I'm just thinking that it's kind of natural to gravitate to your own language and if all the explanations were in English then I fear the students would just ignore the Chinese.

Like you said though, any explanation is better than none.

trevelyan on April 25, 2012 | reply

Craigrut and Xiao Hu,

Yes! We've actually had our HSK team compiling answers for existing questions for the last few months now. The system is actually setup (if you click on the red/green button you'll see the question you got right or wrong, ideally with an explanation of why it was incorrect).

So this is a data issue. We need to review the explanations -- many of which I believe are in Chinese at the upper levels -- and then get them imported into the system. I expect that we'll have this implemented in the next two weeks.

Best,

--david

Xiao Hu on April 25, 2012 | reply

@Trevelyan,

Sounds great, I'm looking forward to it and if it's not implemented in the next few weeks, don't worry too much. Take your time.

tangculiji on April 24, 2012 | reply

It'd be helpful to have a place next to each character or phrase in the vocab section where you can make personal study notes and comments.

craigrut on April 25, 2012 | reply

One other one that may be simple. When in a specific thread, I don't see a link back to the 'forums' page, so I either have to hit back twice or click the homepage banner and click forums again. Not that this difficult by any means, it would be nice if there was a link back to the root though.

There could also be the chance I'm blind and I just don't see the link...

Noah.Pflugradt on April 26, 2012 | reply

How about a wiki for the FAQs like:

- why is popup chinese the best

- what other tools are there and what are they for?

- Best TV shows

and stuff like that. All the wisdom that's hidden in ancient comment threads currently.

drummerboy on April 26, 2012 | reply

Not sure if someone has mentioned this yet, but I personally would enjoy seeing a brief bio of the wonderful popup voice actors. Maybe a photo along with a paragraph of thier background. I think that would add a nice personal touch to the voices we all enjoy listening to so much.