tangculiji on June 15, 2012 | reply

I'm still new to much of this, and I'm not sure if this is what you're asking for, but I think what you're trying to do, regarding playlist organization at least, can be achieved by clicking the checkboxes next to the words in your master vocabulary list, then clicking "Review." This will allow you to review only your checked words. If you wish to save your selected words for later in their own list, go to the "Action…" dropdown menu and select "label checked," and assign it whatever label you want. The name of that list will now appear in the "show all vocabulary" dropdown. It's a sort of tag system, but it's kind of cumbersome--to delete your list, you'd have to delete the words from your vocabulary list altogether--so I haven't used it much. Is that what you're looking for?

seamus5 on June 15, 2012 | reply

well, it seems like that is heading in the right direction. Like you say, it is a bit cumbersome, but at least it is a way to organize/separate certain words.

it is very helpful, thank you!

trevelyan on June 15, 2012 | reply

Help us out here guys. What changes do we need to make in order to make this easier for everyone?

We've been meaning to overhaul this whole page for a while. Adding search is definitely one of the things needed, but what else? If the labeling functionality isn't useful or is awkward, how do we fix this?

murrayjames on June 16, 2012 | reply

Wow, those are some great suggestions.

Mine's mundane by comparison: the ability to sort vocabulary by pinyin. I have 13 pages of vocab now. It's hard to locate specific words the way the list is currently organized.

Granted--if the vocab search is done well, then sort functionality may not be necessary.

Noah.Pflugradt on June 16, 2012 | reply

Quick workaround for now, if you haven't already done this:

Go to the vocab page.

Open the drop down "Action"

Select "Edit Page Length". (Yes, that really should be put into "Settings". I only found it by accident too.)

Put in 1000 or 2000 or something like that.

Now you get the entire vocab list on a single page and you can use the search function in firefox or chrome or whatever to find the word you are looking for.

murrayjames on June 17, 2012 | reply

Thanks Noah.

seamus5 on June 16, 2012 | reply

Ooo, I like a lot of the above suggestions.

Namely, metrics. That would help us identify where we are weak and focus on those areas. SRS rank is a good one, number times wrong, last reviewed, review frequency, word source (so imported, from what lesson, from what news paper article, etc)

Tagging would be great to help with the play lists. But, related to this, I think that more list functionality would be better. So the able to click words and add to a pre existing list, or remove them. Ability to review more than One list at a time, ability to chose how the list is displayed (so begin with pinyin, or simplified, or traditional, or JUST AUDIO! Audio review would super kick ass!)

Honestly, I would like to have the ability to focus more on grammar. Initially, this could be done by reviewing whole sentences from various lessons. This can be done just like the vocab now: sometimes you get simplified, sometimes pinyin, sometimes fill in the blank, sometimes just audio & select correct character, sometimes translate the sentence.

Eventually, it would be nice to take a whole sentence and say things like, 真 is the adjective here. Which other adjective could also be used, and select from options. Or, here are a bunch of hanzi: 手，以，可，用，掏，啊, tap on them to add them to the sentence in the correct order. How about having 4 sentences that look similar, but there is some kind of grammar mistake, but we have to find the one with out the mistake.

Finally, here is the big one: selecting the correct response. So a sentence from a lesson is displayed (or played audibly ideally). You must either type or select the correct response to that sentence.

The big problem that these suggestions are looking to avoid is that I don't feel like pop-up is teaching me how to manipulate the language well. There are lots of ways to remember words, but very few ways to practice putting them all together...

Thanks for being so diligent in asking for suggestions. It makes me feel like you care. It really makes me feel like you care when I see them implemented. 泡泡中文加油！

seamus5 on July 1, 2012 | reply

Another interesting idea just came to me. Often, I find that when I am studying/reviewing, I come across a word that I don't know how to use, even if I know the word.

If possible, it would be nice to go back to the original source of the word, from a lesson or whatever, to see it in context.

Noah.Pflugradt on June 15, 2012 | reply

Couple of suggestions:

- Make a true tagging function, meaning that each word can have one or more tags. Then there should be a list of all tags with the number of words in brackets(like this: "Taxi driver (15)").

- Imported words should automatically tagged with something like "CSV-Import of myfile.csv 18.6.2012"

- It should be possible to select all the words from one or more tags

- Make it a bit more obvious that the review function reviews only selected words

- Make the columns customizable and let us select which columns we want to display

- Add two more custom colums: "SRS_Rank" and "Last review"

- Maybe a "Added on Date"-Column?

- If you want to get fancy, count the fails in the review too. Then display that too and let me export like all the words with more than 5 fails so that I can focus on studying those.

- Put in a word selection tool based on this idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search

You can see that implemented on google searches on the left side on the result page.