New Chinese reading app for iPhone looking for Beta testers

[sinamon]

Hi everyone!

 

We’re working on an iPhone app for reading Chinese texts called ChineseReader, and would like your help to get some feedback.

 

The app contains Chinese lessons of different difficulties ranging from newbie to master. Choosing a lesson you want to read brings up a reading screen with voice recordings, where you can easily look up translations.

 

Features

• Human voice recordings

• Word translations

• Sentence translations

 

We’re working hard to make the app as useful as possible, but need some help to find out which parts need improvement, and possibly get some ideas for new features. We would also like to get feedback on the quality of our lessons, and find out what topics everyone is interested in.

 

If you would like to help us make a better app for Chinese learners, please sign up for the Beta test at:

 

http://beta.chinese-reader.com/

 

If you’re too busy to participate in the Beta, but would like to be notified when ChineseReader is released, you can register you email address here (we won’t spam you with newsletters!):

 

http://www.chinese-reader.com/notification

 

Thank you!

 

[Flickserve]

Links don't work for me

[sinamon]

Hmm that's strange. It works for me and seems to work behind all the different proxies i tried.

 

It might be a problem with the DNS not being propagated, please try http://52.76.47.244/ for beta registration or http://52.76.47.244/notification for release notification.

Let me know if it still doesn't work. Thank you.

[imron]

I'm not sure if you have this feature or not, but one suggestion I would have (based on looking at the screenshot) is make sure you have the ability to *hide* the pinyin so users can practice reading with characters only.

[sinamon]

Yeah, sorry it wasn't in the screenshot, but it has a button at the bottom of the screen which turns pinyin on/off.

[imron]

Sounds good!

[Flickserve]

Hmm that's strange. It works for me and seems to work behind all the different proxies i tried.

It might be a problem with the DNS not being propagated, please try http://52.76.47.244/ for beta registration or http://52.76.47.244/notification for release notification.

Let me know if it still doesn't work. Thank you.

thanks. That works

[imron]

Also, just a quick note, signing-up for the beta fails if you have cookies disabled.  It'd be much nicer instead to have a message saying to enable cookies.

[sinamon]

 

 

Also, just a quick note, signing-up for the beta fails if you have cookies disabled.  It'd be much nicer instead to have a message saying to enable cookies.

 

Thanks for the heads up, I'll make sure to fix that.

[xiaokaka]

I just downloaded the beta this morning, and I must say that I am very impressed so far!

Is it okey if I post feedback in this tread or would you prefer an email?

The only thing I can think of right now is that I would prefer if the audio didn't start immediately as default.

I also wonder what criteria you have for the different levels. Certain vocabulary lists? HSK? Or are they chosen based on something else?

[sinamon]

 

 

I just downloaded the beta this morning, and I must say that I am very impressed so far!

Is it okey if I post feedback in this tread or would you prefer an email?

 

Thank you very much! Glad to hear you like the app!

Posting feedback here or by email are both fine, whichever is easier for you! We're eager to get as much feedback as we can.

 

 

 

The only thing I can think of right now is that I would prefer if the audio didn't start immediately as default. 

 

This always annoyed me as well. It's on the top of our list of things to do next, and we plan to fix it together with a new progress bar for the audio download as the current one is kind of dodgy. Unfortunately didn't make it in time for the beta.

 

I also wonder what criteria you have for the different levels. Certain vocabulary lists? HSK? Or are they chosen based on something else? 

 

 

 

It's not super strict, but mostly based on HSK. We look at the percentage of words from each HSK level and set the level from that and the total length of the text.