The days are getting longer again here in Vancouver as we near the end of winter. The sun has been out and things are good. At The Linguist we continue to make upgrades to the system. Before going into detail on recent changes in the system, I wanted to remind everyone again to tell your friends about The Linguist! We handed out a few free months this past month but we would like to give out more! Thank you to all of you who are telling your friends.
With regard to the system, we have a number of improvements to report on. I'll start with the writing system where late last month we improved the mistakes list. We think the new mistake types of verb, singular/plural, article, preposition, choice of words and other are much clearer than before. We will still use some of the previous mistake types in special situations but in those cases your tutor will explain why these terms were used and what they refer to.
In addition, to stress what we want you to do with your corrected writing, we added the following guidelines to the report: 1. Read your corrected writing aloud many times. These are your thoughts expressed in correct, natural English. 2. Accept all corrections for what they are – a chance to improve your language. 3. Make sure to save the suggested natural phrases for later review. 4. We will not correct spelling mistakes. Please use the spellchecker provided 5. As a general rule, we do not recommend using contractions in writing. 6. Please take the time to read “Steve's Tips on Writing” in the Language section of the Linguist Library. Lastly, in order to let you know how many words you have written in the present period we have added the word total to the writing list and we have indicated the words submitted this period at the top of the list. This way you can easily see how many words you are still able to submit for any given month.
The other major change we made was in displaying examples. In the Words I am Learning list, we used to show examples broken down by content item. In order to generate more of a list we are now showing ten examples at a time with the content item shown to the side. In addition, by clicking on a link you can now also see examples from the whole Linguist Library. By doing this you can see more examples and you can also see content items which contain many examples of the words you would like to learn. This allows you to choose new content which will help you focus on learning those specific words.
Of course, we think these are all valuable improvements! Let us know what you think.
