The Chairman's Bao

[TheChairmansBaoTeam]

Hi Mati1, 

 

Can you try adding a few bookmarks on the website and let me know if this solves things please for both? There’s a small bug at the moment sometimes causing issues like the ones you have mentioned when no bookmarks exist. 

 

Can you email us your IP address? It could be also be our Firewall blocking your IP. 

 

Thanks Mati,

Team TCB - contact@thechairmansbao.com

[splotchycat]

There seems to be a disconnect between the flashcards of the website and the app version. There are four word status groups for the app but five for the website, and some words that are shown to be "not attempted" in the app are higher in status on the website, etc. Also, I cannot seem to review the original sentence on the web version.

[Moshen]

If the Chairman's Bao team are still reading this thread, I want to say that I *love" your service.  I've paid for a year and read articles there every day.   The content is consistently interesting, and being able to choose an HSK level is great.  Thank you.

 

The quizzes are extremely helpful for reinforcement of learning, but I do have a suggestion on that.  Sometimes your interface indicates in green which quiz items were answered correctly, and sometimes this doesn't happen.  Without that function, it's not as good of a learning tool, because I just have to go on and give up on getting better.  If I can see which items I got wrong, I can focus on those, rereading them and possibly looking up a few words to see where I went wrong.  Can you please implement this function consistently?  It makes a big difference for me.

 

I am using your site online, using a Foxfire browser.

[TheChairmansBaoTeam]

Hi both,

 

Thank you for your messages and I hope you had a nice Christmas.

 

splotchycat, you're correct on the flashcards. We are releasing brand new apps within the next 6 weeks which will sync these back together, as well as introducing a lot of exciting new functionality. Apolgies for the inconveneince in the meantime. Thanks for the heads up on the original sentence example on the website and we will get this added in the coming weeks.

 

Moshen, thank you for your lovely comments! Thanks also for bringing the above issue to our attention and it should now be fixed. If you have any further problems or suggestions, please feel free to get back in touch here or email us on contact@thechairmansbao.com.

 

Thanks and Happy New Year to you both!

 

Sean (Team TCB).

[Mati1]

I have forgotten to reply to this thread; I have not been on  this forum for some time :/

As far as I remember the bookmark trick worked in preventing my TCB client from crashing all the time. With your new client (and backend?) updates this probably turned into a non-issue.

I should really use TCB more often and along the way try the newest version. In time I shall post here again.

[i__forget]

I have a feedback I'd like to write for the mobile application.

It would be extremely helpful if I could download the audio of the story I'm reading on my phone. Maybe using a small button next to the 5 seconds forward button? This way I can play 5-10 of them in a loop or in random order from my playlist while going to work, washing the dishes etc. My current option is to login in to the website and download it from there, but it's a pain because it somehow logs me out from either the phone or the browser so I have to login again. Do you think this is a feature you could provide? Thanks!

Edit: I somehow couldn't submit my feedback through the app so wrote it here instead.

[TheChairmansBaoTeam]

Hi there,

 

Thank you very much for your app feedback re the lesson audio download.

 

We will be releasing a brand new app in the coming three weeks which is a complete overhaul of the existing app. We are introducing some new audio features, but unfortunately the audio download option won't be included as part of the first release. We will, however, add it in over the coming months.

 

Thanks again and all the best!

 

Team TCB

[Jan Finster]

I was wondering, if someone here has used TCB intensively and how well it smoothes the transition to native, non-simplified news?

[Jan Finster]

On 4/19/2018 at 10:47 AM, TheChairmansBaoTeam said:

Hi there

 

I wonder if the TheChairmansBaoTeam still reads this, but maybe other people may also know:

 

a) I noticed even in HSK 3 or HSK 4 lessons about 25-30% of words are non-HSK words. What is the total word and total character statistic of the entire TCB library until this date? If you have that data, could you also please break it up into the 6 levels? (e.g. total word and total character statistic of all HSK 4 lessons)

b) do the HSK 6 lessons as a whole cover all HSK 6 vocabulary?

c) are the writers only paying attention to using the words of that HSK level or do they also try to cover all grammar aspects of the respective HSK level? If so, is the grammar coverage comprehensive? 

d) is there a way to search for certain grammar points?

[yanux]

9 minutes ago, Jan Finster said:

a) I noticed even in HSK 3 or HSK 4 lessons about 25-30% of words are non-HSK words.

I think this will definitely help in the long run. Else we can all just stick to the official HSK books. During the HSK5 exam last year and now while doing HSK6 prep exams I must say that 20% +/- of the vocab isn't part of the HSK word list. Here CMB is helpful enriching vocabulary. I read CMB since 1 year, 3 articles daily. sticking to CMB's HSK6+ articles for a while makes the transition to native newspaper articles more smooth.

[Balthazar]

Anyone else experience issues with bookmark synchronization?

 

This started for me with the recent major update on my android phone (Samsung S20). I usually bookmark 100ish articles at a time, and delete them as I go through. Did this a couple days ago on my computer, but in my Android app there's no bookmarked articles to be found. I have tried restarting my phone, logging in and out from the app. Still no bookmarked articles to be found in the app.

 

So in short: If I bookmark an article from the app, it will be bookmarked both in the app and when I browse thechairmansbao.com on my computer. If I bookmark an article from  thechairmansbao.com on my computer, it will be bookmarked there but not in the app.

 

Also, where on earth did the option to set an article as "Read" (as in "I have read this article") go in the new app layout? I can no longer find it. Still there when i browse on my computer.

 

(As a general complaint, while I think the Chaiman's Bao content is great, the android app has been a major disappointment in the years I've used it. I cannot think of another app that frustrates me more in terms of general navigation, slowness and synchronization issues. I've had similar problems as the current one on my previous phones, but they've always been resolved by logging in and out of the app.)

[TheChairman'sBao]

Hello there Balthazar, 

 

We're sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the app - your feedback has been noted!

 

With regards to the your issue, please ensure you're on the latest updates and then pull down to refresh your bookmarks. To find your "read" articles click on the open book icon!

 

If my explanation isn't clear or doesn't resolve your issue (apologies!) then you can:

• Flag an issue within the app (click feedback) ,
• Email us
• Message us on Facebook.

 

We'll try our best to be more active on this forum too!

 

TJ, 

The Chairman's Bao 

 

[i__forget]

On 4/10/2020 at 1:47 PM, Jan Finster said:

I was wondering, if someone here has used TCB intensively and how well it smoothes the transition to native, non-simplified news?

I have! I went all the way to HSK 5 (I am not HSK 5 but was reading their HSK5 articles). The transition is smooth, no question about this, you can confirm this by looking at their free sample articles, they are as hard as a native news story.

I didn't move on to their HSK6 articles as I have found them more difficult than native newspapers articles (at least for the subjects I would normally read).

If what you want to do is read newspaper articles, just go for it. It's not as complicated as people make it sound be, it is as hard as any other aspect of the language. Most people in the forum can confirm, you only get good at what you practice.
 

[i__forget]

Balthazar

On 7/23/2020 at 8:48 AM, Balthazar said:

As a general complaint, while I think the Chaiman's Bao content is great, the android app has been a major disappointment in the years I've used it.

I sorted out all these problems by installing the browser Yandex on my phone. It supports extensions, so you can simply click on the word to see the translation. 

[imron]

3 hours ago, i__forget said:

Most people in the forum can confirm, you only get good at what you practice.

Well, at the very least I will confirm it

[roddy]

8 hours ago, i__forget said:

The transition is smooth, no question about this, you can confirm this by looking at their free sample articles, they are as hard as a native news story.

I'd be surprised if they're AS hard, especially at HSK5. They shouldn't be, after all, that's the point of the service.

[i__forget]

1 hour ago, roddy said:

I'd be surprised if they're AS hard, especially at HSK5. They shouldn't be, after all, that's the point of the service.

Not all newspaper articles are equally hard. Some are significantly harder than others and you can tell by the writing style of the author. I said TCB HSK6 was harder than the articles I normally read. That made sense to me, it didn't bother me. Whether their HSK5 is as hard as native articles, that depends entirely on the specific article you compare it to.

[Jan Finster]

On 7/24/2020 at 4:27 PM, TheChairman'sBao said:

We'll try our best to be more active on this forum too!

 

That is great!

 

So, I can maybe reiterate my questions:

 

On 6/21/2020 at 3:27 PM, Jan Finster said:

I wonder if the TheChairmansBaoTeam still reads this, but maybe other people may also know:

 

a) I noticed even in HSK 3 or HSK 4 lessons about 25-30% of words are non-HSK words. What is the total word and total character statistic of the entire TCB library until this date? If you have that data, could you also please break it up into the 6 levels? (e.g. total word and total character statistic of all HSK 4 lessons)

b) do the HSK 6 lessons as a whole cover all HSK 6 vocabulary?

c) are the writers only paying attention to using the words of that HSK level or do they also try to cover all grammar aspects of the respective HSK level? If so, is the grammar coverage comprehensive? 

d) is there a way to search for certain grammar points?

 

Thanks a lot!

[Balthazar]

On 7/24/2020 at 4:27 PM, TheChairman'sBao said:

Hello there Balthazar, 

 

We're sorry to hear that you're having trouble with the app - your feedback has been noted!

 

With regards to the your issue, please ensure you're on the latest updates and then pull down to refresh your bookmarks. To find your "read" articles click on the open book icon!

 

If my explanation isn't clear or doesn't resolve your issue (apologies!) then you can:

• Flag an issue within the app (click feedback) ,
• Email us
• Message us on Facebook.

 

We'll try our best to be more active on this forum too!

 

TJ, 

The Chairman's Bao 

 

Appreciate the reply!

 

"and then pull down to refresh your bookmarks." ... this is what I was missing. The old app used synced automatically, didn't realize it was necessary (or even possible) to do so manually in the new one.

 

By the way, it seems synchronization is a "one-way street" in the new app. When I pull down to sync, I can choose to sync from app to desktop or vice versa. Is it not possible to do a "two-way" sync? So let's say I read a couple of articles at the desktop while I eat breakfast, I remove these bookmarks in my desktop and then head out to the office. On the bus I read two more articles through the app (without having synced the bookmarks from my desktop) and remove them from my bookmarks there. Is it not possible to do a "full sync" (my apologies for the probably clumsy phrasing, I'm not sure about the correct vocabulary here, but I assume you get what I mean) so that all four articles are removed both from the desktop and app?

 

"To find your "read" articles click on the open book icon!"

 

Maybe I was unclear, but what I wonder is how I mark an article as having been read through the app. I want to do this so that it no longer shows up when I browse articles at that level.

 

So on the desktop I would press this button:

 

 

 

... but where is the corresponding button in the app?

 

 

... is it the open book icon at the top, to the right of the highlighted bookmark icon? I think it would at least be helpful if pressing the buttons prompted a message telling me what the button does (e.g. "You have marked this as read", as in the desktop version). I seem to recall that earlier versions of the app used to do this (but I may be wrong).

 

[Arthur]

Hi guys, did TCB remove the function to export word bank using Anki format? I only get csv, memrise, pleco and skirtter formats when I click "export" on the flashcards...
Is there any work-around method to get these flashcards available on Anki ?