Support Chinese-forums.com!

[roddy]

Think this is the best site ever? Want to help out and spread the word? Here’s some ideas:

Participate:

The best thing you can do for the site is use it. Write up a review of a really good (or really bad) book you’ve been using. Ask for advice on some Chinese learning problem you’ve been confused by. Answer questions. Search to see if anyone’s been asking questions about the schools you’ve been to, etc. Add us to your bookmarks, subscribe to our RSS feed – whatever gets you on the forums and taking part more often. That’s the number one thing, and is more important than everything below combined.

Organize:

Add and edit the tags on discussions if you can see they can be improved (many are automatically generated, which is better than nothing but not ideal). If you notice a discussion in the wrong forum or running off-topic, press the post report button () and let admin staff know. Point people towards earlier discussions that might be helpful.

Spread the Word:

We’ve always taken a low-key approach to promoting the forums, preferring to grow organically. It’s been years since I asked anyone for a link, we spend virtually nothing on marketing, and you can’t even buy Chinese-forums.com T-shirts (well, if you can it’s nothing to do with us). But there’s no harm in encouraging organic growth, and so you could:

Follow us on Twitter

Add us on Facebook.

Add a link to on your weblog or website. Or even make a full post praising the site.

Mention us (in a non-spammy way, when relevant) on other forums or discussion boards

Share useful posts via social networking / bookmarking sites – there’s an ‘Add this’ button at the top of every discussion to facilitate this. We’re never going to make the front page of Digg, but we do get a steady stream of traffic this way – bring us more.

Tell people about us – your Chinese class, other Chinese students you know, etc. If you find out about a product or service via the forums, or hear something good or bad about it on here, tell the company.

Financially:

The site does not need or solicit donations. If you really have money burning a hole in your pocket, you’re welcome to Paypal it to admin@chinese-forums.com, but be aware it will be spent on beer and food for me and any of the other admin staff or members I happen to be able to get hold of.

If you have an advertising budget, or know someone who does, let us know.

If you’re a regular user of Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, use those two links as your bookmarks and we’ll get a cut of your spending.

Say something nice:

Say something nice below and maybe I'll add it to the list of quotes

This forum is a goldmine of information' date=' and I'm so glad it's here!

Thankfully I found this site and it's been a place where I've gotten nothing but the kindest, most interesting and most useful help.

This forum is a godsend!)[/quote']

[gougou]

Can we get a blue-suited avatar for the Facebook page? (I was thinking of making this a condition before I became fan, but I'm showing some good will here.)

Oh yeah, and is one of the real live member quotes from the guy who five minutes earlier requested his account and all his information to be deleted?

[roddy]

No, I want to get us a proper logo. But I never getting around to doing that.

[Lu]

I think I said something nice in the Restructuring-thread, you can add that if you want :-)

And for facebook, it doesn't have to be a picture of the site, just another Chinese-related picture will also be fine. It just looks a bit bare without any pic there.

[roddy]

Have added a very very old logo from the depths of time.

[Lu]

Looks good. And if you wait a bit longer it'll be up-to-date again :-)

[Meng Lelan]

Logo? What logo? The logo is new? Where is it? What's Facebook?

[roddy]

Some random stats for anyone interested:

Attached are a couple of maps showing visits from different cities in the US and China (actually East Asia I now notice), our two largest sources of visits. See if you can spot yourself.

June has been a pretty good month in terms of visitor numbers, with a significant bump in visitor numbers - just under 100,000 unique visitors, compared to just under 70,000 in May. Cause for this is hard to figure out - I know the majority of those are coming from Google, but why Google's lovin' us more I don't know - could be the recent reorganization had an impact, could be new incoming links, could just be some other relevant site dropped down for some reason. There's been a bit of a slump this week, but that's usual as summer hits.

Top search terms used to find the site:

chinese

chinese forums

chinese forum

sogou chinese input

chinese regents

chinese letter format

gmail china

chinese insults

sogou pinyin

chinese sponge cake recipe

Bottom search terms: (actually technically not the bottom, but close)

taobao

beijing bus route map

hsk vocab list

f4 meteor garden lyrics

language

eachnet in english

rosetta stone vs pimsleur

keats school kunming

the promise english subtitles

beijing teaching jobs

[heifeng]

but why Google's lovin' us more I don't know - could be the recent reorganization had an impact, could be new incoming links, could just be some other relevant site dropped down for some reason.

The kiddies are out of school (or procrastinating b4 finals) and googling for Chinese insults and spongecake, and of course Chinese-forums provides a wealth of information on both subjects, so who could really ask for more in a forum!

Have the # of new members spiked a bit during the month too then? Do you have charts showing the number of unique visitors and new members too? That would be interesting

[roddy]

Lemme see - new registrations were in the range 450-500 per month for the first five months of the year, then just under 600 for June. So another jump there. However, that includes, eg, spambots, so the June bump could be due to lots of people trying to sell viagra and cheap electronics.

Oh, and just for Imron - Pinyinput was downloaded 326 times in June.

[PhilipLean]

You run a great service, I have referred several people to this forum it, including Chinese people wanting to know more about the non Chinese people who are learning Chinese.

My request = when you have time could you update your maps to show where your subscribers are around the world, not just the USA and China.

[roddy]

Attached, global map for April.

Figures generally keep nudging upwards. I'm not paying too much attention to the stats at the moment, but they seem healthy.

[gato]

It's hard to tell the different shades of brown apart.

[PhilipLean]

I see many people are in my city Canberra, now I know that "I am not alone". - Actually Mandarin is taught in several schools and at the Universities here.

I guess these stats reflect the fact that in order to access the forum you need to be able to use English. Hmm, thinks. As far as I have seen there is not a lot out there in other languages in the way of comprehensive material for studying Chinese.

Attached is that chart report with easier to read colors.

[Meng Lelan]

I guess these stats reflect the fact that in order to access the forum you need to be able to use English.

Then again I don't know of any study-Chinese-forums that use Chinese only.

[PhilipLean]

I meant from languages like Arabic, German, Russian, to Chinese.

[Lu]

As far as I have seen there is not a lot out there in other languages in the way of comprehensive material for studying Chinese.

But would you know about it if there was? There is a good Chinese grammar book in Dutch, and at least one high school text book. Okay, not a wealth of material, but for the size of the language, it's not bad.

[Don_Horhe]

There's a lot of Chinese learning material in Russian, the more well-known authors being В. И. Горелов (V. I. Gorelov), С. Е. Яхонтов (S. E. Yahontov) and Н. А. Спешнев (N. A. Speshnev). I'm assuming Atitarev would know more about them.

[chrix]

Yep, there's also a lot in Japanese, much of it better than what you can get in English. Last time I went to Japan I splurged on Chinese learning materials written in Japanese, it's really a difference like day and night... So if you read Japanese, check it out!

[PhilipLean]

A pity, I don't read Japanese. But I am interested to know what materials there are in Japanese and what the difference is in the various approaches.

You said "night and day" could you explain when you have time ?

I know that I would like the idea of taking several books and audios that I have used and producing a really usable functional approach that combined examples in English, Hanzi and Pinyin and audio, together with relevant audio, and then in a section for each chapter going into a lot of depth of explanation of grammar and usage. It seems, in learning from English , you have to have 5 or 6 different texts/books in order to put all of this together and then you have the problem of the various books being out of phase with each other .

Maybe this now needs to be in another thread if people are interested in commenting.