The site was down for about 16 hours over the past 2 days. The problem was identified as a systematic attack on our site from professional hackers, I suppose. Someone seems to really like us out there! Hopefully the problems are behind us now. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We have and are taking further steps to minimize future disruptions. The podcast files are now hosted separately from the main site, so if the site goes down, you should hopefully still be able to access the files themselves. We will be looking at other ways to improve our infrastructure in the near future.

Regards,

-Adam

11 new videos have been added to Level 4. My favorite? Well that would have to be lesson 188’s. Enjoy!

I thought I would share with you some of the exciting developments that you can expect to see over the next few months.

Staff Reorganization

I have a very strong team here at CLO. I wish I could say that I did it all by myself, but that would be far from the truth. I will be investing heavily in them over the next few months. What does this mean for you, the listener? I’m glad you asked. There are a few major changes planned for the long term:

1. Existing premium content:

There has always been some lag between when lessons are released, and when the premium content for them is released. As the difficulty of our lessons has increased, this lag has begun to increase as well. Rest assured, I plan to have this lag eliminated so both lessons and premium content can be released together.

2. Earlier lessons:

Since about lesson 196, we have hired a local university teacher with ten+ years teaching Chinese, as a consultant. Her job has been to look over our lessons before they are released, to make sure the material being taught is relevant and appropriate for our course. I’ve been so pleased with her work, that she has now been instructed to go over earlier lessons to correct and update their content too, where appropriate. As you might expect, this is a pretty time consuming task that will take many months to complete. Sections of earlier lessons will be rerecorded where necessary. Stay tuned for updates on this blog for details of which lessons are updated.

What this also means is that the lessons recorded prior to our moving production to Taiwan (lesson 109 on), will be rerecorded completely with our current speakers. The end result for you will be a much more developed course, with a more consistent feel to it throughout. I personally feel that the quality of lessons after 109 (both content and audio quality) are a much better experience than the earlier lessons. My goal is to eliminate this gap altogether.

There are other changes that have also been taking place behind the scenes. Key staff members have been enrolled in courses specifically for teaching Chinese to foreigners. These changes have been implemented not only within the lessons themselves, but also in our Skype one on one sessions.

New Premium Content:

While I’m pleased with the many resources we have been able to offer our Premium subscribers, I still have a few other ideas that I plan to roll out over the next little while. I am looking for a replacement to the Podcast Review that is still in the development stage. The podcast review was a great way to review the dialogue based lessons. However, since many of our more recent lessons aren’t dialogue based, the podcast review in its current form doesn’t always work out.

We also have another review tool that is ready, and will be deployed over the next few months as well.

Overall User Experience

- We are still having issues where our site has been going down, due to too many users trying to access site content at the same time. Thanks to investment in new hardware, the problem is much more manageable now than it was a few months ago. However it’s still not at the stage I would like. Rest assured, there will be more investments made over the next little while to improve the speed and usability of the site.

- We have commissioned a local artist to create pictures for each lesson for us (another time consuming process). I’ve been very pleased with the work I’ve seen so far. Again, with more than 200 lessons to go, it will take some time before pictures are available for all lessons, but I’m confident that the results will be worth it. Like the videos, I’m hoping the pictures will add some visual context to the lessons, better allowing you to remember what was taught.

Please continue to use this blog to give me feedback on what works or doesn’t work for you. You are also welcome to email me directly or visit our new Facebook fan page for other ways to contact us.

-Adam

1. You may notice that the Word Bank results now show up color coded. The main colors are:

Green - New vocabulary
Black - New character
Blue - Sentences from dialogues
Red - Related vocabulary (but not explicitly taught) for that lesson (see point #3 below)

2. It recently came to my attention that the Sentence Builder exercises were not functioning properly on Internet Explorer browsers (they seemed to work fine on all other browsers). This has since been fixed. Please let me know if you notice any features not working the way you think they should be.

3. Since our goal is to limit new vocabulary to only a few words per lesson, we might not be able to teach all the vocabulary for a particular topic within a lesson. For example, if we are teaching a lesson on colors, the main colors will be taught - but what about the more obscure colors that you might want to know? The solution we have been using is to add this supplementary vocabulary to the vocabulary page for each lesson. These will not be tested in the flashcard program. If any of these words are reused in later lessons, they will be taught as a new word first.

By doing so, we hope that as our course progresses, our word bank can begin to resemble a real dictionary. Hopefully the color coding above will help distinguish between words taught within the lesson with related words that weren’t explicitly taught.

In the next few days, this supplementary vocabulary will also be added as an option on our export page. Update: This has now been added.

For those of you on Facebook, we have created a new fan page. Feel free to join in, view pictures, videos, start discussions etc. This will be a great way for me to connect with listeners and of course for you to connect with each other.

You can view the page here.

Our PDF pages have been updated with a new set of PDFs for most lessons. The PDFs allow our premium offline users to practice writing the new characters for each lesson on paper. There are two versions for each lesson, one featuring just the new characters for the lesson and another featuring all the characters for that lesson. As many characters will be repeated in future lessons, use the latter to practice writing characters that may have shown up in earlier lessons. Doing things this way will automatically give you more practice writing characters that show up more often, than those that don’t.

Take a look at the following samples:

New Simplified characters for lesson 4
All Simplified characters for lesson 4

Traditional character versions of the above will be added in the future.

Update: Traditional character versions of the above pages have now been added!

As well, since our PDF list seems to be growing daily, we have begun to color code them to make it easier to find what you are looking for.

Blue - Simplified character version
Green - Traditional character version
Yellow - Spanish translation of complete transcript
Purple - Italian translation of complete transcript
Brown - French translation of complete transcript

The Flashcard program has been updated to load a lot faster than before. Previously it took a few minutes to load up, whereas this should now be reduced to a few seconds.

It seems that the site has been up and down for much of this weekend. Lately, we’ve been the victim of some massive spam attacks on our Contact Us page, and this weekend it seems that hackers have been trying to wreck havoc with the site in general.

The good thing is that we will be using this opportunity to improve the infrastructure that holds this site together. Please bear with us the next few days as we there may be some more ups and downs. In the end however, I hope to have a faster site with better performance.

Update: The site will be down for an hour on February 20, 2008 from 9:45 to 10:45 a.m. GMT for some hardware updates that will hopefully improve the recent sluggishness.

It seems that this since we moved the site to a new server, the recording tool wasn’t working for the Pronunciation and Exercises. Well I’m happy to say that after some lengthy testing and reinstalling, everything seems to be working again! I’m also happy to say that the user experience should be better than in the past, thanks to the better equipment it is now running on.

We will continue to look for ways to update the site and improve your user experience. Next on the list is to improve our actual course content. We have added a new consultant with over a decade of teaching experience to our team who will be overseeing the material in new lessons. Her work will begin from lesson 195 onwards. Some of our staff are also upgrading their credentials in teaching by taking courses in Mandarin teaching.

I hope to use the added experience from all of us (including me) to edit and / or redo some of the earlier lessons in our course later this year. When we get to that, I will release a separate set of updates so you can see what changes were made.

In the meantime, please continue to send us your ideas and suggestions in all areas. Some of our newer lessons feature content and material suggested by users like yourself, so keep them coming.

All the best to everyone this Chinese New Year - welcoming the year of the rat!

As mentioned in the latest podcast update, a new export page has been added. Previously, an export function was added to the flashcard page. However, since this seems to be a popular feature, it has now earned its own separate page. It has also been improved to support multiple formats.

If you have other requests, do let me know.