Podcasting from Beijing - Popup Chinese One Year In

[trevelyan]

Hi Everyone,

When we launched Popup Chinese almost a year ago, we made our first announcement here, so I thought it would be appropriate to drop a quick note now that we're a year older and have just released a major update.

If you last visited a while ago, you'll notice a number of major changes. In addition to a new menu system, our test-prep center now has single-click HSK Flashcards, HSK Vocabulary and practice HSK tests. Bookmark these and be studying in seconds. As before, we automatically save all questions and words people miss for review with our SRS system or for export to Pleco, Wenlin, Anki.

There are a few new features of note too. Among these is the Chinese Writing Pad, an interactive flash tool designed to teach how to write Chinese characters with the proper stroke order and in the correct proportion. We've also added lessons that provide Chinese speaking practice (one-on-one feedback) via a dedicated toll-free telephone hotline. And there are a lot of smaller tweaks made in the interests of usability,including a dedicated Chinese IME we've added to all comment fields so people can write in Chinese even when trapped in computer labs without support for Chinese input. We also took advantage of our growing sales to actually lower prices, since being affordable matters.

As before, we'd appreciate any feedback the community here has, as well as suggestions on ways we can improve (or stories or books you'd like to see manually annotated now that we're through Dream of the Red Chamber). Comments are welcome here, on the site or through email. If you do want to get in touch outside the messaging system, you can reach me directly at service@popupchinese.com.

--dave

[Petit_Scarabe]

Hi,

I like your tone color plugin for firefox, but as mentionned in another post, I'm having trouble copy-pasting. Is it just me or is it something you could change in a future release ? (http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/31-is-it-an-idiom384)

Also, I saw on your site that you also have a pop up dictionnary plugin too and I thought why don't you "merge" both functionalities ie give an option to show tone colors in the pop ups? For me, that would be terrific and the only reason to switch from Chinese Perakun.

Cheers

[trevelyan]

Thanks for the feedback Petit_Scarabe,

It's a great idea and definitely something I'll take a look at putting together. Nathan Dummitt, who pioneered the entire Tone and Color approach actually suggested the same thing, so great minds are obviously thinking alike....

Right now we're providing the backend dictionary for the Perakun plugin, although I'm not sure how frequently Justin is updating it at this point. From a data perspective it doesn't really matter that much which plugin people use as long as they like it. The major reason we coded our own was to add read/write/edit functionality and integration with Google Translate and our on-site vocabulary lists, but those are features mostly useful for translation and dictionary compilation work.

I think that as long as people know they can direct edits to perakun to our online Chinese English dictionary that is really all that matters for keeping momentum with the projects.

[PhilipLean]

I have just discovered popupchinese and I am using the trial. I will get a subscription at the end of the trial, probably the $49 or the $149 - it depends on my budget in the short term, it is not clear if I can upgrade from $49 to $149 later.

I have been subscriber to chinesepod for a while, at the base level.

I am impressed with popupchinese, I like the style and the Beijing accents.

A few minor issues, the gray menus can be difficult to read, I am not as young as many of your users.

The searches are good, one of the better searches that I have seen on this sort of site. It would be good if in addition to the examples the search lists, it also brought up a listing of lessons which covered the word or topic.

A much smaller point - once you leave the main page browser shows the the header and tablistings as "account" "tools" - only "lessons" has a header name/page name that relates to pupupchinese. I have attached a screenshot to explain. It only matters when I have a lot of tabs open and I am looking for the popupchinese tab

Edited August 25, 2009 at 02:07 AM by PhilipLean

[trevelyan]

Thanks for passing along this kind of detailed feedback Philip. It's very useful to hear this sort of thing about site usability. We'll see what we can do about the menu system,and I'll polish up our page titles for the tools section.

It's always possible to upgrade and downgrade accounts, although we handle all of that manually right now. Just send us an email anytime and we should get back to you in a couple of hours.