Understand spoken language

New words now get announced

Submitted by Hugh on 2 April 2013

Now, whenever you are doing a quiz and see a Thai word for the first time, it gets announced as shown below.  Before, when doing a quiz, you could get tossed a new Thai word and not know whether or not it was new, or whether it was just something which you had forgotten.  This was not very satisfying.  Now, with the new system, whenever you are shown a new word, it is made absolutely clear that the word really is new.

In my actual classroom lessons, my teacher will show me a picture of a new word and tell me what the Thai for that word is.  Then they will ask me to pick out the correct picture which matches a word that they say.  I wanted to try and mimic this behaviour in Lingopolo.  I tried to add a "This is a new word" page for when new words were shown, with the full details of the word and just an OK button (not a "Show answer" button), but when I tried it, it just felt very unnatural and strange.  I was supposed to be in the middle of a quiz, and all of a sudden the website was showing me a new word.  So, in the end, I decided to keep the user fully in the quiz mode, showing exactly the same screen as for the words which have already been shown (which is how it was before), but to add this big hard-to-miss announcement box.

You also now get told how many words you now know, so for example you will see from the example below that I now know 641 Thai words.  This I think is a great feature for encouraging you (and me) in the learning as you see your progress gradually increase.  

Adding a new word message