Introducing: Epic Mandarin

[Eliot]

Hi everyone,

 

I started learning Chinese in 2012.  By 2015 I was looking for content designed for high-level learners, but I was disappointed with what was available.  I wanted really compelling, textually heavy media, with audio, images, illustrations, you name it.  I also wanted a popup dictionary and an easy way to save words for review.

 

So I recruited some Chinese friends and together we put together a website.  We've just started publishing content last month, and it would be awesome if we could get some initial feedback.  Right now most of the stuff we have published is suitable for higher-level learners.  For example:

 

Tang Poetry: https://epicmandarin.com/content/one-poem-a-day/lady-in-the-moon/

And Journey to the West: https://epicmandarin.com/content/journey-to-the-west/birth-of-the-monkey-king/

 

All of the words in the body text have hand-selected definitions:

 

 

And as you can see from the image above, any word can be saved as a flashcard.  The flashcard is a cloze deletion, like below.  It comes back on a spaced repetition cycle to keep your studying efficient.

 

 

Epic Mandarin is brand new, so let me know if there's a particular type of content you'd like to see on it.  There's a fair chance that we'll be able to make it for you.

 

You can visit the homepage at epicmandarin.com or go straight to the small but growing archives: epicmandarin.com/content.

 

Thanks for taking a look!

Eliot

[imron]

Hi Eliot, welcome to the forums.  Please be sure to read the forums' guidelines for commercial posters.  In particular, please don't go searching for every single topic on MCD and make a post in there.  Your site looks interesting, and it would be a shame for people to get a negative opinion on it from a bunch of spammy posts.

 

A couple of points of feedback.  I have cookies disabled by default, and I get a big popup error message that 'CSRF verification failed. Request aborted' (there's a whole lot more, but I left it out for brevity).  It would be better to detect cookies are off and have a nice message asking me to enable them.

 

Secondly, when using the popup dictionary, if I hover over a word at the bottom of the text and then want to add it as a flashcard, it's a bit tricky because if I move the mouse up to click on the 'Save as flashcard' button, then the mouse crosses over several other words to get there and so the word on the flashcard changes by the time I get to it and it's no longer the one I want.

 

See for example the attached pic.  If the word I wanted to add was '灵气‘, then the mouse will cross over 一块 and 傲来 to get there.

[Eliot]

Hi imron,

 

Thanks for the feedback.  I apologize about the double post.  After making the introduction I was quite surprised to see a thread about MCDs on the front page and got a little carried away.

 

As for cookies, I will work on getting a graceful fix for that as soon as possible.  Thank you for finding that.

 

If you click on a word in the body text, the popup dictionary will "fix" and won't change when hovering over other words.  Admittedly this is not obvious, so I'll figure out a way to make this more transparent.

[dtcamero]

hi eliot, i like your site a lot! and especially the idea of having something that can assist the transition from intemediate-level studying to avanced-level media consumption.

 

my major issue was that for a site that is, as you say, geared toward high-level learners, there is an awful lot of english. i think if you look at the chairman's bao, they have come up with some great ways of getting around that design problem. also, english fonts seemed really big, while chinese fonts seemed good or even a little small...

 

and then my other thought is that I and I am guessing many other high level users may want to use the flashcard creation function but not use your website for srs'ing. if you had a way to export these flashcards to anki as a tab-delimited text file, that would be great.

 

i'm enjoying your journey to the west synopsis. keep up the good work!

[Eliot]

@dtcamero

 

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.  We can definitely tone down the English.  I honestly don't even like writing those English intro blurbs anyway!  

 

Exporting to Anki should be do-able.  Would you want them to be Anki cloze deletions?

 

Glad you like Journey to the West.  I've really had a lot of fun putting them together, and we've got a bunch more episodes in the pipeline.

[dtcamero]

you could totally write them in simple chinese! ;D that would be ideal perhaps...

 

like at the chairman's bao, they have only article headings in english, and if you click even they turn into chinese for a fully-immersive experience.

 

re flashcards, yes to MCDs... and maybe regular vocab cards with an english and/or chinese definition option...

 

cheers,

[Eliot]

@dtcamero, got it.  I'll get to work!