The Course Outline for levels 1 and 2 have been updated to include Chinese character support.  Logged in users can use switch between Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English modes to view the vocabulary.  Non logged in users can sample this functionality for the first four lessons.  Enjoy!

The course schedule has been tentatively updated with the rest of the lessons in level 3 along with the start of level 4. I have added some breaks to enable level 3 to finish at the end of the year, so we can begin 2008 with level 4.

So what can you expect in level 4? I expect that we should be able to do more all Chinese lessons then, like we recently did in lesson 154. Certainly by level 5, I expect this to be a predominantly Chinese podcast.

There will also be some refocus over the next few weeks with the Premium content. The Sentence builder will be extended to more lessons. PDF notes should also soon become a reality (there has been a massive editing campaign of older lessons, which is why they have been delayed till now). There are also some other exciting new additions that I hope to announce to the Premium side soon so stay tuned!

5 new poems have been added to the Tone and Pinyin Practice section for your listening and practicing pleasure.  Enjoy!

I'm happy to say that the Flashcard program should now be completely up to date!  It's been rebuilt internally to allow us to update it more frequently from here on.  If you notice any glitches, please let me know.

Thanks for your patience!

A new feature will be added to past and future lessons over the next little while.  It will help you gain practice constructing sentences by getting you to put words into the right order.  The feature supports all four modes - Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English so find the mode that best suits you and see what you can make of it.

You can see a sample of what it looks like in the Vocabulary section of lesson 121 here.  If you have any suggestions on how to improve this feature, or other features that you think will help in the learning process, please let me know.

The flashcard program is being rebuilt and will take about a week to be completely up to date as the lessons have to manually be reentered. During this time, some lessons and features may not show up properly.  While there should be no change to the end user, the new version will allow us to update new lessons much more frequently. Please bear with us during this rebuilding process.

As the CLO site has expanded quite a bit to reflect several blogs now (5 at last count), it has become increasingly complicated for users to keep up with the latest postings on the different sites, plus the comments other users have left. To make it easier for you to benefit from the full CLO experience, we are proud to have teamed up with the website NetVibes to create the Chinese Learn Online Universe at www.netvibes.com/clo.

From this page you can see the latest updates from all 5 blogs plus their comment feeds as well. This is another feature brought to you as a direct result of user feedback so keep your comments and suggestions coming!

The observant among you might notice that the Vocabulary section for all lessons has a slightly different look to it.  Gone are the old bulky playback buttons.  They have now been replaced with the sleeker playback buttons featured in the Word Bank.  Initial loading times for the page might be greater, but I believe the buffering system and overall performance should be better.  Over time, I will be adding extra related vocabulary to older lessons, so this should hopefully improve the overall experience for pages with a lot of audio entries.

You may have noticed a new addition to the Level 3 Course Outline.  Premium subscribers can now view the new vocabulary items for each lesson in any of the 4 modes we've been using elsewhere (Pinyin, Simplified, Traditional and English).  Hopefully this can provide yet another way to review the vocabulary taught in each lesson.

Regular users can sample how this works by playing with the modes for the first 4 lessons of level 3.

For those of you with blogs or websites out there, who are interested in linking to CLO, I've set up a link page with some graphics that you can choose from.  This page will be added to the "About Us" menu.  If you have ideas for other images, do let me know.