Flash Based Vocabulary: A Major Step Backwards

Technology making our lives easier ;-)

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I just installed the DownloadHelper... which kind of works. I notice that many of the files disappear from the DownloadHelper file listing, and I need to refresh the page to capture those I missed. Maybe there is something I need to tweak... ugh, must read documentation; feeling sleepy. Anyways, it is better than what I had before.

No problem, guys. It's what we should be doing.

Yeah, you're right about the diversity of places-to-post being part of the problem... I guess the option I'd prefer is a revamped-ChinesePod conversations that resembles the Forum (which I long since stopped visiting). The main thing is that conversations with useful tips like this shouldn't be just lost in the ether. A search function would of course be wonderful, and I believe staff at ChinesePod have said they're looking into that.

I seem to remember there used to be a Wiki. Is this just my bad memory, or did it prove unpopular. Maybe this is one of those times when a wiki seemed like a good idea but in practice it never worked out.

My personal feeling is that there are already conversations pages, and a forum. Would a wiki be yet another place that we'd have to search to find hints and tips.

@LostInAsia: no problem about the tip. I only discovered it myself a couple of weeks ago. Glad to help.

Thanks to ChinesePod for going back to the way things were. I really appreciate it, and I'm also happy about the openness with which this has been discussed--I've been able to follow what's gone on here much more than with previous difficult transitions.

This issue has made me very curious about who actually posts on the site... I hadn't heard at all about this Firefox bug, and it seems a lot of other users hadn't either. I'm kind of surprised I hadn't even noticed that people were having such a major issue. Are so many people not posting, or am I just willfully ignorant? (Wouldn't be the first time.)

billgloveruk, thanks for the tip about highlighting everything in the Activity Monitor, copying it, and then pasting in the Downloads window. All this time I've been Alt-clicking on every MP3 in the Activity Monitor. You've just saved me a good minute per lesson.

(Oh, and what billgloveruk and I are talking about, with downloading the vocab MP3s, is yet another example of why a wiki would be a very good thing indeed.)

John et al., thanks for listening and responding so quickly...as always.

@john: I couldn't agree with goulniky more. Many thanks for not only listening to us but also being prepared to jump on the site and update us, not only with what you are doing, but also why you are doing it.

Many thanks for your (and all the others behind the scenes) hard work and openness.

John,

regardless of the final 'fix' you settle on, you guys must be commended for your (b.1) and (b.2) points above which are well understood.

taibeitimes, Try out DownloadHelper, a Firefox addon. Works for me! (The site looks kind of sketchy, but the addon works great.)

OK, guys, here's the deal: We really want to fix the flash player problem that many Firefox users are experiencing. The "giant flash container" implementation was one viable solution, but (1) it turned out to be buggier than it appeared in testing, and (2) it evoked the ire of our beloved userbase. Based on these two issues, our CTO decided to undo the change. He is still hard at work researching a better (non-flash) solution. (He had thought of the pagination solution already, but it's both complex and far from ideal from an interface perspective.) Anyway, to those of you who were highly annoyed by this brief episode, I hope you understand that (1) we were only trying to solve user problems, and (2) we did listen to your cries of anguish. To those of you that are experiencing the multiple flash player bug, we recommend that you either (1) use IE for vocabulary and expansion sentence audio playback (yes, it pains us to recommend this!), or (2) try using IEtab, a Firefox addon that lets you run IE from within Firefox, which will also fix the problem.

@taibeitimes: It is possible but how you do it depends on what browser you are using. It isn't an advertised feature of ChinesePod, but it is one that I find very useful.

Firefox: I tried a few plugins to get the links for the mp3 files, but none of them worked as well as I hoped, often downloading the player rather than the mp3 files. If anyone knows of a plugin that works, I'd be interested to know.

Safari: When viewing the vocab or expansion pages, open the Activity window (Command + Option + A). Here you see a list of all the media files for the webpage you are viewing. Highlight all the ones relating to the mp3 files and copy (Command + C) them. Open the Download window (Command + Option + L) and paste the URLs here (Command + V). All the mp3s will then be downloaded to your downloads folder. It sounds complicated, but once you have done it once the whole process takes seconds to complete. I'm assuming this will work on Safari for Windows as well.

taibeitimes, I don't know about native functionality, but if you download the ScrapBook plugin for Firefox, you can definitely use it to capture pages (or parts thereof) and specify you want to grab .swf (i.e. flash) files too.

There is also a utility (may not be freeware though) to easily extract mp3 files bulk from swf (flash).

From the previous posts, I get the impression there is a way to download the flash sound clips from the vocab (and expansion I assume), no? If so then I wasn't aware this is possible... using a right click on the sound click icon doesn't give a save option.

If this is possible, how can it be done? I personally like the clips from the expansion for listening practice. Thanks

Yeah, I'll be posting more about this whole ordeal soon.

I'd be interested in the thinking behind this. Maybe the Firefox bug has been solved. For now though... I've got some copying and pasting to do. :)

All-clear.

Vocab is back to normal.

I can't view all of the vocabulary on this page using the new system either:

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/pets/vocabulary

In old lessons the new vocab Flash app does not seem to be working, e.g. http://chinesepod.com/lessons/%E8%B0%81%E5%BD%93%E5%AE%B6/

It brings up an error.

@LostInAsia: iFlash is the way forward. I used to be using Safari's activity window (select all the URLs, Copy them and paste them into the download window) but as you say, this is now gone.

What I'm working on at the moment is a script to take the XML from the export feature, clean up the Pinyin, create a delimited file (for importing into iFlash) and download the audio to a folder. A couple of things to iron out before I incorporate it into my workflow, but I think it's the only way forward for now. If you have any suggestions, give me a shout.

What I'd love to see is a place where we can all share resources as a community. I'd be more than willing to make my iFlash decks available to others, but wouldn't want to undermine the fact that vocabulary is only available to paying ChinesePod customers.

Sorry for beating a dead horse, but I don't completely understand the mp3 issue with Firefox.

I use Firefox and have never had this problem. The expansion pages typically have more than 15 mp3's - I've always been able to play them all without any issues.

Why isn't the vocab. page built like the expansion page? Apparently, it doesn't have the 15+ mp3 issue. It looks like the mp3's on the expansion page are Flash-based, but at least the text can be copied and Pera-kun can be used on it.

(Not trying to be a pain...just trying to understand).

I'd have to agree with Yves though...why not break up the vocabulary into 2 pages?

If you export as xml you get the url's of the sound files. When you are uploading audio to your flash cards, can you browse to a website (cuts out you saving it)? I get fed up with waiting too on the chinesepod website so try to do as much offline as i can. Also hunting down words to add to the list is hard work.

Like billgloveruk, I also [used to] use the Vocab page to download the audio, and then add it to my cards in iFlash--and I already really miss the ability to do that! Even though those little 1-3 second MP3s aren't part of any advertised service, they're one of the most valuable things I "buy" from this site. Actually, since the vocabulary is already on the html, those MP3s are the only reason I ever went to the Vocabulary page anyway.

Please please somehow find a way to bring them back. Could they somehow be linked into the Vocabulary Manager listing? (Although I guess that would raise the issue of 15+ flash items on a page.)

(No way am I going to start studying with the flashcards on offer here. I've got too much time invested in the iFlash deck, which faster, more flexible, and available offline. When I try to use the online features I seem to spend more time waiting than I do thinking about answers.)

billgloveruk: it looks like we could add the vocabulary to the vocabulary manager, then study the flashcards with audio, and then when each flashcard comes up, download the relevant audio. Which seems horribly drawn-out. I assume you're doing this through Safari's Activity window as well? I've just refreshed my Vocabulary Manager window, and it took 3m02s to complete. Man, no wonder I've never been sold on that feature.

@John: Thanks for your detailed response. Not being one of the Firefox users (other than for using the rich text editor when posting) I was completely unaware of the bug. I completely understand the need to solve the needs of a large number of premium users (of which I am proud to be one).

Whilst I don't feel as strongly as goulniky, I still feel that the use of Flash is a step backwards. And that more elegant solutions were available.

@all: Apologies for starting a new thread on this topic. I wasn't aware of the older one. Once they disappear from the conversations page they are lost forever :)

'I think there are many easier ways we can solve billgloveruk's issues but not using Flash certainly isn't one of them'

What kind of an answer is that? I am a long-time premium (and practice plan) suscriber and I'm not impressed.

There would have been a very easy way to address the problem, by simply splitting vocab over 2 pages, which in most cases could have been Key and Supplementary. I'm sure this would have been way simpler to implement, if not as slick, at least a lot more in line with web 2.0 principles.

I just hope you don't apply the same silly principle to the expansion section which I do copy/paste but isn't available from the html file.

Anyway, as indicated in another thread, so long as the html file is available, I can copy/paste the vocab and will continue so doing.

Also, here is the explanation direct from our CTO, coming from an internal e-mail: As a veteran in the fields of user interface and interactive design, use of Flash is always the last resource I would use to address any issue in our websites. After spending 2 days trying to find an alternative solution to get around a critical Flash plugin fault associated with the FireFox browsers across multiple platforms without any luck, I had no choice but to use the integrated Flash audio playback method, which I invented myself, to get around this problem (which I believe Adobe has no intention to fix). I think there are many easier ways we can solve billgloveruk's issues but not using Flash certainly isn't one of them, since we still have to look after the interest of 20% of our site visitors which are using the FireFox browser to access our sites. Without this fix, they just simply couldn't get audio on any page from our sites containing more than 15 Flash audio files using the FireFox browser. And worse still, once user clicks on the play button on any page containing more than 15 Flash audio files, the audio will cease to play even on those pages containing less than 15 Flash audio files until user restarts the browser. So that's the whole story behind it.

Also, I think that improving the export functionality is a good next step for improving convenience. I will get on that.

We aren't using Flash just to use Flash, or to limit access to text. This implementation was the only practical way to fix a bug that affects 20% of premium users. With this bug, if a page contains 15 or more Flash objects, all Flash audio will cease to function. Weighing the convenience of text against the ability to reliably hear the audio that premium users pay for, we had to choose in favor of the latter. [more info in this thread]

I only use flashcards on the website after a podcast or lesson just to refresh my memory. Then I use the flashcards I did by hand (omg by hand, sometimes you have to do something that isn't high-tech!) because it shows the tones the best. Lastly, I wrote on the back short sentences that I have a little memorized but I try not to so I can interpret and not translate. Sounds like a lot but it really isn't. About 5-15 or 20 minutes!

Yeah they're no longer machine-readable.

I agreed in a similar thread earlier today. When I study a lesson, I always view the dialog in one window and the vocabulary in another window. This allows me to use ChinesePera-kun to view meanings of characters in the vocabulary section. This really helps me with word retention. You can't use the ChinesePera-kun within Flash.

I use a flashcard program called iFlash. I used to add the audio so that it would play when the pinyin was shown. This way I could correct my pronunciation. I've had a quick look at trying to process the XML file in AppleScript, but it seems like the wrong tool for the job. If I come up with a solution I'll let you know.

Nah, the audio got me stumped too because they are individual files. You're a web programmer, write a program to got through the XML and make a http get request to the sound-bites and save the response.

:)

Seriously though, what do you want to do with them offline - did you want them on your phone or just on the computer not connected to the internet?

@valleygirl: You have highlighted my stupidity/forgetfulness and solved my first difficulty. Thanks. You can still copy and paste from the HTML version of the lesson vocab. Open the PDF, look down at the bottom of each page and click, "text version". You can copy and paste from the resulting web page just fine.

Issue 1 can be crossed off my list above. :) Why didn't I think of this before writing.

Do you have a similar solution for downloading the audio for the vocab? Would really make my day.

Maybe the question regarding the use of Flash should be taken to the forum as it isn't directly related to study.

I tried to copy the pinyin from the PDF's into a Word document to make my own flash cards but that got mangled too. I want to simulate the flash application. Is this possible? I cheat too much with the PDF's as the English is too visible as it’s directly under the pinyin dialogue, though I suppose I could fold the page over for the vocab section.

3rd time lucky? yòng

yòng should have said

yòng

When exporting the vocab using either XML or CSV, the PinYin doesn't come out as intended. For example: yòng Another issue with exporting is that by default all your tags are selected, meaning you either have to export all vocabulary or go down the list of tags manually deselecting the ones you don't want to export. Copy & Paste was simple. :)

> I can live without seeing the vocab on my phone, but not being able to copy and paste vocab into offline lists is a real step backwards.

I would love to have the flash cards on my phone!!!! I've been trying to think of a way around it by using the exported XML (but I really shouldn't have to do that much work). Also, is it possible to print out the flash cards? As bill says, I can't always get to my PC to study and would like some help for offline study too.

Thanks :)