Searching for recordings in a specific language

rillig · Post by **rillig** » September 27th, 2015, 1:31 am

Hi,

imagine I am learning Chinese and want to listen to some Chinese recording. So I go to the LibriVox homepage, click on “Advanced search” and select “Chinese” as the language.

The search result is not what I expect. The first entry is indeed Chinese, but the following 15 entries are not in Chinese; they merely happen to be from a multilingual collection that has some Chinese chapter in it.

It would be nice if the search result only contained books or chapters that are in Chinese. I don’t think this change would hurt anyone, since people looking for “multilingual works that have something Chinese in them” would still find the one Chinese chapter, and they can find the whole work by clicking on it.

If this change sounds reasonable, I’m willing to help implementing it. I just don’t know whom to contact.

Greetings,
Roland

RuthieG · Post by **RuthieG** » September 27th, 2015, 1:52 am

Thanks for your comment and offer. Yes, the advanced search is certainly not ideal at the moment, but we are not currently in a position to make changes.

There is a way, though. If you go to the home page and click 'Browse the Catalog by Language', you will get the results that you require. This is the Chinese list obtained. There is also a small list of Cantonese Chinese books here.

Ruth

Post by **Availle** » September 27th, 2015, 1:55 am

Unfortunately, our search is not optimal, and the way it displays the multilingual collections in full instead of just the language you were looking for is taxing indeed... It's on our list of "stuff to improve".

What you can do is to go to the "language" directly on our homepage and select "Chinese" from there to give you all the Chinese - and only the Chinese - chapters or sections we have in our catalog. I do warn you though, because of another quirk in our search function, you will see all the 300 and more entries of the "300 Tang Poems" right in front, the other, "real" Chinese recordings start on page 19 of the search results.

I hope this helps you further, have fun learning Chinese!

(And Ruth, being less verbose, was once again faster

)

ScottLawton · Post by **ScottLawton** » September 30th, 2015, 8:48 pm

Using my copy of the catalog data, I count 19 books in Chinese. I could post a list of links if that's useful.

ekzemplaro · Post by **ekzemplaro** » October 1st, 2015, 3:58 am

Hello Roland san,

You can try this catalog.
http://ekzemplaro.org/librivox/catalog/

There are 19 books cataloged. And there are 3 books in progress.

Cheers,
Masa