Firefox 3 and the ChinesePod traditional plugin?

Thank you Chinesepod for the plugin.  It works fine in Firefox 3 and Flock 1.2.  It is much more convenient than copying links and appending "trad" to the filenames.  :)

One nitpick - while the plugin correctly modifies the dialogue link inside each lesson's page to get you the traditional Chinese pdf, downloading the dialogue from the "My Lessons" page gets you the simplified Chinese pdf.

Thanks for the explaination. Seems like a complicated problem which could be simplified.

Historically? That's a little complicated and, well, loaded.

Practically? Taiwan uses almost exclusively traditional characters. Many ChinesePod users live in Taiwan and want to practice Chinese that looks like what they see every day, that looks like all the books and textbooks that they buy here.

Also, from my experience many overseas Chinese communities (Singapore, Vancouver, Malaysia, even Hong Kong) use traditional characters.

Can someone tell me why there is a need to have both Simplified and Traditional characters?

the link worked for me... I just had to notice the warning bar at the top of the window asking for permission to install...

thanks cpod!

Many thanks to everyone who requested better support for Traditional Characters. I felt I was the only person in ChinesePod who wanted the traditional characters.

Some people are very well versed in technical language but I am not among them. I am sure there are others in the same position, and the option at source as suggested by a number of people would make a great difference.

Frances pointed out that the Vocabulary manager and flash card system are not up to standard.

Since the upgrade I have made numerous requests that the facility to amend the pinyin be restored. 

I thought I was using the latest Firefox version as I got frequent updates.  Bazza suggested I use Firefox 3 so I looked for it and downloaded it following the instructions but I am not sure if there is something else to do before it works.  I have tried Amber's link in total six times and the last three times the link page look different so I thought I must be using Firefox 3. I got a message titled http.//facebook.praxislanguage...the message was an error occured:-210. I checked a lesson and I have Traditional Characters in the dialogue and expansion simplified in the vocabulary.

Traditional characters are still far more commonly seen in the U.S. than simplified ones. On the internet I find that simplified characters seem to enjoy a narrow lead. As I encounter traditional and simplified characters with somewhat equal regularity, I have made it my goal to learn them both together. For this reason I am less bothered by the limited traditional character support than those who are trying to learn only one set, so I don't want my comments to be taken as a disagreement with others' opinions. I just want to express my own view of the situation.

Though I am a huge fan of CPod, the vocabulary management and flashcard systems are not nearly up to industry standard for that type of application. The only real plus is the integration with other CPod website features. My CPod vocabulary is unsearchable and difficult to manage. It allows duplicate entries. It depends on users to say when words are mastered, even though most good modern flashcard systems are able to figure this out themselves more reliably than users usually can. Since I'm going to be moving my vocabulary and reviewing it in another flashcard system anyway, I feel a lot less limited by the CPod character set decisions.

If people are looking for flashcard options, I highly recommend PlecoDict (pleco.com). It's a PDA application which has been discussed before on CPod. It's nice to be able to pull out my PDA when I'm on a bus, sitting in a waiting room, etc... to try a few flashcards, and it's also good to have the portable dictionary and character handwriting recognition handy while I'm on the go.

@LostInAsia:
I just checked the workability of the plugin:

Lesson/Dialogue: trad. OK w/plugin
Lesson/Vocab: only simpl.
Lesson/Expansion: trad. OK w/plugin
Lesson/Exercises: OK, option to choose, but no option to magnify

Me/Vocab: only simpl.
Me/Flashcards: only simpl.
Me/Concentration game: only simpl.

That's not learning traditional Chinese on my terms :-(

Thank you for updating the plug-in. I do wish there were better traditional character support, but it's better than nothing. And may I once again suggest improved and speedier communication on such things?

Next question: could someone please confirm for me that the plug-in is working? Seeing as how my subscription expired, and before I renew again, I want to make sure the money is well spent...

Oh, rjberki: I think I got the "last line repeating" bug that you were talking about.  Just one line of text, repeated, after a few lines blank? It was on a vintage Windows computer at work, using IE, er, 6? Pre-tabbed browsing anyway. For that matter, it had one USB port only, and that was on the back! It was probably a huge blunder to enter a password on that system, even if it was just my Netvibes one.

Why is this plugin hidden on a "Facebook"-subdomain of CP?

Seems that viewing trad. script forces me still to use Firefox. And I see that there is still no possibility to switch the plugin temporarily on/off. Still not very convenient.

Sorry guys, but only by upgrading the old, quite poor software solution you won't attract any traditional character lovers...

Is there an intention behind as some other posters assume?

Hi all traditional character lovers:

Great news.  We've released a new plug-in that is compatible with Firefox 3 to give you back your traditional characters.  Please click on this link to install it.

Once you install it, you will be able to again view ChinesePod with traditional chinese characters instead of the simplified (like it use to work with previous version of Firefox).

@LostInAsia: ChineseLearnOnline and Serge Melnyks provide excellent traditional character support (after subscribing), but both are missing the CP fun factor :-(

Bumping once again... thank you for the "We're discussing it and we'll get back to you in a couple of days" comment from five days ago. I hope a decision and announcement will be made soon, so I can decide whether I should just give up and quit coming here, or renew with a basic subscription, or renew with a premium subscription.

Not entirely off-topic: does anyone have advice about other Chinese-language podcasts that DO offer decent traditional support? I haven't looked into this yet, because until recently I've been quite happy with ChinesePod, but I will start looking soon.

LostinAsia,

Dave is looking smarter all the time.:-)

Sorry about the late reply. We've got the general consensus about your urge for the continued support of the Traditional Chinese plugin under Firefox 3 and will got back to you in the next couple of days when we made a resolution on this issue.

BUMP. Will ChinesePod PLEASE comment on whether or not the traditional plugin will be updated for Firefox 3?

Or maybe I'll have to find a green monkey hulk avatar.

h4rrydog's question is unanswered since June 21.

Will ChinesePod's traditional plugin work with Firefox 3 sometimes in the future?

LostinAsia- (Brent is Calkins btw)

your last post repeats as I see it.

Brent?

(For what it's worth, I don't think I'm getting the "posts repeating the last line" bug. On a Mac with Safari or sometimes Firefox.)

Brent - maybe we are just turning into cranky curmudgeons. And yes, I will have some cheese with that whine.

by the way, why do random posts repeat the last line partially or in full? very annoying and it has been going on for weeks not days. At least put the new guy on it. Not critical, in fact very small issue but it seems if no one mentions it .......

Yep things have changed and it will have an impact. Write directly to them if you have not already so they can not pretend they havent seen the complaints. Bear in mind you are a minority with this issue but they dont seem to be doing much better with common issues either. For me its do it or dont do it, but at least communicate. Such an arrogant disrespect for the users and it would be so easy to remedy, thereby eliminating many hard feelings and much resentment.

At one point I was quite interested in ArabicPod, but now I'm seriously wondering about commitment to quality and addressing user issues. 

I can't believe there's still not even been a comment about the traditional plug-in and Firefox 3 issue. I first raised this on June 6, over a month ago, and others have repeatedly called attention to it. How many posts do we have to make?! I was a premium subscriber, and my subscription expired a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't renewed because I am sick of half-hearted to non-existent traditional support.

Now, I also wonder - what if I renew. And then another problem appears. Will it once again be over a month before ChinesePod even acknowledges the problem? How much of my subscription will be wasted waiting for a fix that never comes?

Yeah, this is a whinge, but... well... apparently squeaking, or downright screeching, is required to get some attention.

They are quite busy to launch GermanPod, ArabicPod, JapanesePod, RussianPod, ...   Don't expect too much in the future. Read also this.

The lack of response from our friends at CPod is strange and not all how it used to be.

I hope this is a temporary situation.

Thanks for the plugin Bazza.  However, as a paying subscriber, I don't think I should have to resort to a 3rd party plugin to do something that should be built into CPod's website.

Now if CPod would say something like "we have no future intentions to improve traditional support," then I might be willing to spend the additional time and effort to use a plugin like this.  But no word from CPod on this in a very long time, and it's been asked for a million times.  I don't understand the silence.

Thanks for the link bazza, but I'm a little confused--how do I install that? I just get a downloaded .xpi file, and then I don't know what to do with that. (This is on a Mac.)

I can't find tongwen if I try searching within Firefox add-ons.

I did find this plug-in, for Gb2Big, which seems to do a similar job, although it can't just be set to run automatically. I'm not sure how well it works across ChinesePod because I'm currently not a paying subscriber.

Gb2Big does let me toggle all the comments into traditional, which is an improvement on the ChinesePod plug-in... I may spend more time with Chinese-language comments if they're already in characters I'm comfortable with.

I haven't had a chance yet to see how reliable it is, re: issues like 面 and 麵 and or 准 and 準.

You could always use this plugin. It easily converts any page between simplified and traditional, you also set it to auto-convert. Version 0.3.9.1 works with FF3.

It's not the end of the world, it just means that if I want to add TC words to my vocab lists, I need to pick them from the dialogue instead.

Ideally I'd review this content on my PDA, but the characters appear so small that they could even be in Korean and I still wouldn't be able to tell!  Does anyone else have this problem?

Gareth, you're right.  The dialogue and expansion pages are converted to TC, but not the vocabulary page. 

Doesn't make much sense, does it...."Here's some dialogue using TC, but you have to learn the vocab. in SC."  Kind of like teaching a child new words using the Roman alphabet, then showing dialogue of those words using the Greek alphabet.

However, you can still get the TC vocab. in the traditional PDF, and/or the html version of it.  No plugin needed for that.

Hi,

One more person here who would like the TC plugin to support Firefox 3; in fact, as stated above...better TC support in general.

Also I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed that whilst the dialogue is converted to TC, the vocab remains in SC. It doesn't ruin my day, but it would be good to see these annoyances resolved.

Gareth

Bump.

The cake's getting stale.

how do you say "let them eat cake"?

ChinesePod: nobody want to comment on this?

Bump, basically.

Firefox 3 tells me there's no updated version of the traditional plug-in. Am I missing something?

And, while an updated plug-in would be nice, I second what  甜西瓜 (甜甜的西瓜?) said above.

This plugin should be abandoned, and replaced with REAL traditional character support, which gives learners the possibility to choose. Why not via a preference under "Me" > Profile?? And access the correct PDF, HTML script, all in the selected script Trad/Simp. ???

This has been asked for a thousand times!

It would be learning Chinese ON MY TERMS!