Understand spoken language

Housekeeping tab

Submitted by admin on 2 December 2015

When you add a new phrase, it is necessary to go to the "Housekeeping" tab and click on the "Perform housekeeping" button in order to tell Lingopolo to create the required lessons for that phrase:

Housekeeping tab

If we first look back at the "View" tab for the "the policeman" page, we see that the "Breakdown Lessons" section has a heading, but does not yet have any lesson listed. Running the housekeeping creates this lesson.

Breakdown lesson missing

When you run the housekeeping you will see after it has run that it has created the various required lessons:

Housekeeping complete

Now, when you look at the "View" tab for the phrase, the "Breakdown" lesson will appear:

Breakdown lesson built

Keep an eye on the number of words and phrases

It is important to have a basic understanding what a "Practice" lesson and a "Breakdown" lesson are. This will help you to have a good idea of whether or not the lesson needs further housekeeping.

The Breakdown lesson

The "Breakdown" lesson contains: all the words in the breakdown + any words in their breakdown + the phrase itself.

This means that a Breakdown lesson for the phrase "the policeman" would be expected to have 3 items in it:

  • the
  • policeman
  • the policeman

Why do we need a Breakdown lesson? It is used to be able to teach someone a phrase. If they click on the word "Learn" next to a phrase, they will be given practice in the words in that phrase, plus the phrase itself.

Sometimes you will see things like this lesson only has 2 items in it. This might be where things were not all published when the lesson was created. In that case you would need to run "Housekeeping" again.

You can of course go into any lesson and check what words or phrase are part of that lesson, e.g.

http://lingopolo.com/french/online-lessons/the-policeman-breakdown/content

The easy to remember rule is this: The Breakdown lesson will always have at least the number of items in the breakdown plus one for the phrase.

The Practice lesson

The "Practice" lesson contains: everything in the "Breakdown" lesson + all of the phrases that use this word/phrase. In the case of "the policeman" they are the same. In some instances they are not.

This lesson is basically used for practising a word. Obviously a word like "dog" has no breakdown, but it does have a lot of example phrases. When a student clicks "Learn" next to a word, then it is the Practice lesson which will train them in all the phrases which use that word.