I've had to update the Course schedule to reflect a week break from lessons that will be taking place this week. I am going in for laser eye surgery on Tuesday and was told that I need a week of rest for my eyes to heal. Hopefully this won't put a cramp in anyone's learning.

You will notice other breaks in the schedule between now and level 3. Those breaks represent travel time as I will be in Taiwan for a month. How does that benefit you, you ask? Well for one thing I'm in Canada now and Kirin is in Taiwan which means you won't hear anymore of her voice till I get there. I also hope to shoot some nice scenic videos for some of the older dialogues (some of you have been asking for more). Between now and then the speaking roles will be divided between Bing and Jen, Leo and Amy and possibly one more new speaker.

I'm glad you see benefit in the Word-bank. Initially it was just meant to be another tool but now it's expanded into a way of linking all the lessons together with the enhanced search tools. The real benefits will be realized once it has been updated with content from all the lessons. You will then be able to click on a word or a Chinese character and it should pull up examples from all lessons where that word / character was used.

I'm still hoping to find a solution for the font troubles I've been having on the site (the comments on the main site don't display Pinyin now?!?). Maybe a week of lying in bed with my eyes closed will give me a flash of inspiration...

Update: A small change in the Word Bank code suddenly fixed the font troubles I was having in the Comments section.  Can our Mac users tell me if this has had any difference in the other font troubles you were having?