I have made a few small usability enhancements to the lesson pages which I'll go through here.  Each one of them is very small, almost unnoticable, but for Lingopolo to be really easy-to-use, it is the attention to such details which can make all the difference between a user saying "I really like using Lingopolo.com..." and them thinking the opposite because it becomes difficult to use.  The user usually won't know what makes a site difficult or easy to use; the answer is usually the cumulative effect of all the design decisions small and large.

I was doing work getting the literal breakdown of words like younger brother, older brother correct when I realised that a useful group would be family.

I've just added a new page which shows the recent additions.  This is a handy way to see the most recent words or phrases which have been added to the site, and also is a good view on how much work I have been doing recently.  Or not been doing recently.

Now I have begun to add the Thai script to each word, I have now added a "Thai" column to the Thai dictionary.  What you will notice from the screenshot below is that at the moment many of the words (in fact most of the words) do not currently have the Thai added.  That's my next job, to add the Thai script to each word.  Every word has got a recording of the Thai, but now I need to add the Thai script to each word...

Now that I'm starting to display words with the Thai script I have added a column with the Thai script version of the words to the words shown when viewing a lesson.  This should be great if you are able to read Thai a little (which I am starting to).  The Thai version of the word links of course directly to the page for that word.

After six months of learning Thai using only a listening and speaking approach (aural-oral), I decided that it was more and more necessary to learn to read Thai.  My principal aim is still to learn to understand and speak Thai (rather than to read it and write it), but I was beginning to feel frustration sometimes that I could not read some of the material that might help me to understand and speak.  So, this week, I made the decision that I would now make the effort to learn to read Thai.

In the Index of Thai dialogues I have now added a "Literal breakdown" column, similar to the one I have just added for the index of Thai phrases.  Here the phrases in the breakdown have been arranged in an unordered list for clarity, rather than in a single row.  The adding of the dialogue breakdown makes this index much more easy to use, since it is clear at a glance what each dialogue contains.

I'm pleased to have now added in the Dictionary of Thai phrases a column which shows the literal breakdown on a given phrase.  This was already available when you went into the phrase, but it is a lot more convenient to be able to see it at a glance in the table.  It also helps me to see  more clearly which phrases still need to have the literal breakdown added or finished!