What's New at the Linguist, System Update: January 2005

Happy New Year! I hope 2005 finds you well and looking forward to making an English breakthrough this year! Personally I plan to try and make a breakthrough in my Japanese in 2005. Unfortunately, I can't use The Linguist to learn Japanese yet. Hopefully sometime this year we will add other languages! In the meantime I will try to mimic our methodology as best I can.

This past month many of you will have noticed the addition of "my archives". The archiving feature allows you to move content you are no longer interested in learning, out of your my files area. This way you will be able to keep an active list of content on which to concentrate. Also by removing items you aren't interested in you won't receive the warning about having 5 items which have not been updated yet. We do realize this warning can be irritating but it is there to make sure you complete each item and click "update known words" so that your statistics can be up to date and accurate. We have also further refined our review testing system so that now recently saved words and phrases will appear more often on the Review page than words and phrases you have tested correctly a few times. Again I remind you that a word or phrase becomes Known when it has been tested correctly 7 times in a row. It then is removed from your word or phrase review and words or phrases I am learning lists. Now a word that you have tested correctly 5 times in a row will take a while to appear again thus testing your long term memory of the word.

Finally very keen observers will have noticed that we now calculate the writing mistake frequency in mistakes per hundred words instead of words per mistake as we did previously. Take a look in your achievement section or on your writing correction reports to see this statistic. Also I would like to welcome Keith to our online Discussion lineup. Keith has been working with us for quite a while on developing content for high school students and is now going to be tutoring as well.

We are looking at another busy month ahead of us here. Once again I ask all of you to provide us with feedback. Let us know what you like and what you don't like. The Forum is a great place to do this.

Happy 2005!