New collaborative chinese learning site - Chineseblast.com

[necroflux]

I'd like to introduce a new project of mine that I'm very excited about - Chineseblast. Lame name yes, but easy to remember I hope.

The site is free, and it is my hope that it will grow to be a massive resource for anyone learning our beloved Chinese language. You can visit the site to see what it's all about, but here's a snippet from the front page:

Chineseblast is a new resource for learning 普通話 pǔtōnghuà, or Mandarin Chinese.

On this site you will find a growing variety of lively, real-world examples of Chinese usage that are perfect for learning. These examples are provided in the form of user-submitted “projects” that begin with the posting of any Chinese related media (video, audio, etc.) and are in turn discussed and translated by the entire community.

In its complete form (as seen at left), each project represents a discrete and organized block of study material that can be learned and reviewed by all. Most importantly, that study material consists of actual Chinese culture - something most language programs can't provide.

That's pretty much it - let me know of any comments or suggestions you might have - and more importantly, if you're interested, sign up and start contributing!

[md1101]

hey i like the idea. is it all going to be in traditional?

[necroflux]

Hey thanks. No, the choice of traditional/simplified is up to the project originator, so hopefully there will be an equal number of projects from each. I'm also going to suggest in the "Getting Started" page the great combo of Firefox and the Traditional to Simplified conversion extension, which would make either script accessible to everyone.

[Language Guy]

Hey man I LOVE the name. I'm definitely going to try to use this resource.

[md1101]

well i like it. im signing up now. what is that traditional to simplified extension in firefox? that sounds great. i did a quick search but cant find it..

[Toffeeliz]

wowzers! this looks absolutely fab! I think a good look is in order (hugs)

[JohnSmith1980]

sounds great. im signed up ready to go!

[Kathy]

When my son left Taiwan to come to the US 20 years ago, the thing he hated most was leaving 小叮噹. He used to watch that cartoon and belly laugh in a way that he hasn't laughed since. What a great idea. I am a great lover of taking material someone else has already spend a great deal of time, effort, love and money on, and ratcheting it up with more layers of activities. This is wonderful example of of adapting, repurposing, and extending content.

There is so little material out there that boys will even look at... and it has romanization!

What a boon to all of those Saturday Chinese school drop-outs who cried, screamed and otherwise carried on, who are starting to figure out that their parents were right in making them study Chinese.

Who do we have to thank for this?

[kudra]

Who do we have to thank for this?

Looks like his name is Dr. Insano, he of the orange lightning bolt hair, kind of like the Harry Potter scar, but in this case the lightning bolt is not from an Aveda Kedevra curse that bounced off, but if I had to guess probably because of repeatedly banging his head against a wall trying to learn Chinese.

[Toffeeliz]

lol ^_^ - that is all the more funnioer becuase i have just about an hour ago been sat watching harry Potter film1 !

[gamerfu]

i am signing up to try. good luck with success!

[Tyr]

What a great idea! I'm not good enough to contribute but I'll be using the site as a learning tool.

Keep up the great work!

[roddy]

Looks good, I think you could have a very useful site there, and I love the look of it. Couple of comments . . .

1) I (as an unregistered guest, might be different if logged in) couldn't see a search function. I think search might be useful for allowing users to find examples of usage - ie, if they come across a phrase they can search to find real-life examples of usage.

2) Your 'active' projects currently include ones with lots of info that look pretty much finished and ones that aren't yet transcribed / started. It's probably not a major issue, but I might be inclined to have three overall categories - 'pending', where nothing has been done, 'underway' where there's something already done but it needs more work and 'completed'.

3) A flash animation started playing and I had to hunt through 20 browser tabs to find out where it was and kill it

Roddy

[Prodigal Son]

This looks really excellent. Thanks a lot for setting it up and for keeping it free!

[necroflux]

Thanks for your thoughts, Roddy, much appreciated.

1. There is a search function, and now that you mention it I think I will enable it for guests now that I think about it. And you're exactly right, one of the ways in which I hope the site will become very useful will be for people to search for actual usage of various phrases. I can imagine being able to find even 3-4 uses of a phrase would be huge in being able to understand it.

2. Interesting idea. What would be the functional difference in a page that is underway vs. pending in your mind?

3. Yes this is annoying to me as well, I have been looking for some way to get the flash animation to not play by default but it appears that's part of the SWF file itself and there aren't any ways around it.

[roddy]

2. Some people (me, for example) wil be happy to swing by now and then and help out with questions - which is why I went for 'active' projects. However, there's no way I'd have the time to start a project - ie, do the transcription / text layout - which is why I think it might be useful to keep 'not yet started' and 'underway' seperate. However, at this stage where there are a small number of projects, it's probably not necessary.

3. Don't think there's much you can do apart from editing the swf file. Perhaps an option for the media to only load / pop-up on a mouseclick?

Ah, I love complicating other people's projects . . .

Roddy

[Prodigal Son]

I signed up and submitted a photo that I took in Chongqing of a government poster that I found, but I don't see it under the active projects section. Is there something I'm missing? It was submitted yesterday.

[hughitt1]

Cool site- really good idea. some comments / ideas:

1. under "Active Projects --> Images", you get a list of the different tags out there for that category: "Image Translation | Active | Traditional | Hard | comic book | 死神 Bleach", i think it may make more sense however to separate content descriptive tags that describe the content (eg. bleach) from meta tags that describe information about the content (e.g. difficulty: hard, characters: tradational, type: comic book).. this is just a thought, but it might make it easier to navigate if they were separated.. just have ppl fill out the meta info as required, and provide some descriptive tags.. then you couldn't get things like people describing it as "challenging" vs "hard" vs "difficult"... or "manga" vs "comic" vs "comic book".. etc

Also you could maybe list the most recent projects on the first page (Active Projects --> Images), or perhaps sub menus to go to comic books or difficulty etc.

2. What are your plans for handeling simplified vs. traditional characters? Right now you have a mix of both. There are some free systems out there (eg the one wikipedia uses) to translate in real-time from traditional to simplified.. why not implement one of those to make your content more widely available? Then it wouldn't matter so much what style the users contributed translations in. (granted implementing the system is easier said than done.. it would be a very worthwhile task none the less).

3. How about a "text" section? Then people could contribute news/web articles, novels, etc.

4. Any reason you don't keep an edit history? This may not be much of a problem now.. but further down the line it may be easier to just allow users to revert to previous edits if appropriate. similarly a wikipedia "talk" style page might be useful to discussing translation questions rather than leaving the potential for edit-wars..

5. It would be cool (maybe different than goal) if people had a little more freedom in the flow of content.. Rather than merely having straight translations.. if you could create your own 'article'... eg. maybe have a breif intro.. some vocabulary, names of characters involved, etc.. then you could have more of a 'reading guide' rather than just a 'translation'... you could always have a translation in addition, but it would be nice to be able to do things like seperate out names / important vocab etc..

But aside from all thats, site looks really promising, gonna have to try it out

Take care,

Keith

[hughitt1]

Oh ya-- one more thing.. since you have an emphasis on "collaborative" projects.. why not have a separate place for discussion? people who post ideas for projects to work on and gauge interest or see who would like to help out before they start.. also could do polls to see what would be good next project, etc.

[necroflux]

Roddy, it's not complication, it's clarification - always a good thing.

ProdigalSon, you actually have to set some of the project's category information for it to be listed - by default I had that menu "collapsed" to keep things simple but I think that was confusing. So now you'll notice that upon starting a new project there are project category options at the top of the page. I'll also add a message that if those options aren't set, the project won't be listed.

hughitt1, great suggestions. Some of them have been on my list for a while.

1. Right on, there are far too many tags listed to make any sense out of it all. I want to actually eliminate these tags from the project listings altogether, I think they serve their purpose in other ways anyway. There's a lot of room for improvement on organizing the projects, and improving the navigation process.

2. I haven't found a module like that for Drupal, which is the platform the site is based on. My plans were to endorse the usage of firefox along with a traditional-simplified extension called "同文堂" or "Tong wen Tang", the latest version of which can be found here . Ideally an automatic conversion system would be best, I will have to keep my eyes peeled.

3. I think this and any other type of project would be covered by the "Other" category.

4. I do, but only I have access to it. If all users had access to revision history it would make it that much harder to deal with potential vandalism (which hopefully won't be a problem but probably will).

5. I think this is a terffic idea, and I really don't want to limit people's thinking to just translations at all. There is an upcoming quiz module for Drupal which would make it possible for users to create their own quizzes for other users to take. I think things like that are just the beginning of what is possible. So maybe I need to indicate more strongly that "Translations" are not the only types of projects possible. Can you guys think of other types of "projects" that I could list as potential options? A user-created "reading guide" or "lesson" of some sort is a great idea, any others?

As for a forum, I wanted to keep things simple at first but perhaps a very simple forum might be in order. I don't want to compete with Roddy though as he's put together a great central hub for "all things Chinese discussion" already.