Notes / Note

Zitou gets zitou.uz

The Uzbek pages of Zitou moved to their own .uz address, the HSK 1 course reached lesson 6, and a class now joins with one short link.

· 2 min read · ZitouDomainsChineseEducation

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On 19 October I bought zitou.uz and moved the Uzbek half of Zitou onto it. Here is what changed on 18 and 19 October, and why.

Two addresses, one app

zitou.uz is now the Uzbek site: the home page, 7,823 word pages, the dictionary guide, HSK lists, grammar, the mock test, articles and China news. zitou.app keeps the other nine languages and the app.

The split follows one rule. Anything that holds a sign-in or saved progress stays on zitou.app, because a browser keeps those per address, and moving the app would have split every learner in two. Pages people read moved freely: a 301 sends each old URL to its new home, and zitou.app on its own sends a visitor to their language, or to zitou.uz if that language is Uzbek.

The .uz is on purpose. Google treats a country domain as a signal for that country, and a teacher in Tashkent can say "zitou nuqta uz" in class without spelling anything.

Each address has its own sitemaps, robots file, Search Console and Bing Webmaster properties. zitou.uz/feed.xml is one full feed: release notes, articles, guides and the latest news together.

A teacher shows a six-digit code. Students type zitou.uz/ and the code. The Worker checks whether a live lesson or a live game has that code and sends them in.

Lesson 6, with open voices

The HSK 1 course now has all six lessons: slides for the big screen, 162 words to learn five a day, and a word notebook. Lesson 6 is the telephone, shopping, food and the taxi.

The textbook's own recordings are copyrighted, so I did not use them. The words are spoken by native speakers from audio-cmn (CC BY-SA), and the sentences by an open speech model, Kokoro.

The small things

Questions now go to salom@zitou.uz. The footer on every page is sorted into columns: learn, the HSK 1 course, read, info. The Telegram bot's Uzbek profile and the A4 classroom posters point to zitou.uz.

The long version, with screenshots of every part and how it is built, is on my build log: Zitou: Chinese in Uzbek, at zitou.uz and zitou.app.

Two numbers to watch over the next month: how Uzbek searches move in Search Console, and, once the posters are up, how many visits come from their QR codes.

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