I am very busy redesigning the main menu to allow the display of documents. For each lesson, you will soon be able to see and print the following documents:

• PDF Textbook
• PDF Flashcards
• PDF Grammar Notes

Many of you requested the grammar notes in particular, so I wanted to let you know that and we are in full swing preparing these grammar notes.

In order to display the PDF files, I came across a great piece of software called FlexPaper that I am just now integrating into L-Lingo. I am very thankful to Eric, who is the developer who is letting me use this great feature in L-Lingo.

If you haven’t yet experienced FlexPaper, please have a look at Eric’s Blog Devaldi which has a demonstration. The speed and fluidity of FlexPaper is just amazing!

Also, have a look below at a preview screen shot showing this exciting new function in L-Lingo. As we do not yet have the PDF notes complete, this screen shot comes from our development version; the FlexPaper feature has not yet gone live on L-Lingo.

L-Lingo is now only 6 weeks old and we have already received a lot of feedback from you. Some of you have contacted us directly and others have posted in forums. Thank you very much!

User Interface

The majority of people are very happy with our user interface and the appearance of the application. Users seem to be able to navigate and use the app very quickly. The only complaint we got was about the annoying wow sounds (fixed a long time ago).One user also asked for more help on the main menu, so we may add a help button soon.

Content

Most of the people were quite happy with the pictures and the audio. They also liked the structure of the script (repetition and combination of words/sentences).  Overall, the content was considered quite useful. Our images were mostly shot in South East Asia, and obviously, people in Japan or Korea look slightly different. In the future, we might localize the images more, but as most people are quite happy with the images, this is not currently a priority.

Performance

We had a short server downtime at the beginning of November, but since then, it seems the app is running fast and smooth. We haven’t had any complaints here.

In the past few weeks, the application has seemed to be quite stable. We had a few bugs that we resolved, and lately, I have not gotten anymore feedback about things not working properly. (By the way, a big thank you to all of you who reported bugs).

It seems that people in general are pretty happy with L-Lingo. However there was one thing that many people requested:

Grammar Notes

Many people have asked us to provide explanations for the grammar of the languages. Especially because our application is suitable for beginners, we need to add notes on the logic and system of each language.

I want to reassure you all that we are already working on this. We plan to align the grammar notes to the lessons, so that the learner can first read about the important grammar elements taught in the lesson, and then be able to apply this knowledge. As this takes a great deal of work, we will need some weeks before we can make the grammar notes live…I will keep you posted.

As it is the holiday season now, I will be spending some time with my family, so there won’t be any major updates coming soon. But, I will keep you informed in this blog.

Please continue to send along any thoughts you have on L-Lingo, and, if you like our application, please spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, or on your blog. Thank You!

Since the application seems to run quite smoothly now, I thought it might be the right time to put some more languages online. We have now nine Asian languages available at www.l-lingo.com.

For some of the languages (e.g. Mandarin, Japanese, Korean), please note that you need to load large fonts, and therefore, it will take some time when loading. Please be patient.

I really appreciate all the feedback that I have received. It would be great if you could let me know how you like the program. Please also spread the news about this application to your friends and colleagues. Thank You!

Since a few days ago, I have a new version online.

So, what’s new?

You now have the whole user interface in the following languages of choice: English, German, French, or Spanish. You can select your language setting when launching L-Lingo. By the way, I used Google translation for the French and Spanish user interface, so if you find errors, please let me know so that I can correct them.

The application also now remembers your last lesson and some of the selections you made about your native language and phonetics use. So next time you launch the application, you should find yourself within the lesson that you last used.

As always, if there is anything not working, please let me know. Any other feedback is also highly appreciated.

Many people have approached me to ask whether L-Lingo will remain free after it has completed the beta test.

Yes, Yes, Yes!

I am also planning to keep the content roughly the same (i.e. number of lessons, features, etc.). But obviously, as this is work in progress, it will probably change in appearance over time.

We might also add a Premium (i.e. paid) wersion in future with more lessons and features which would be similar to our PC/Mac/Linux Desktop Software L-Ceps Personaltrainer. If you like L-Lingo and would like to have more lessons and features, than please have a look at www.l-ceps.com. We have a free trial for download there as well.

I just made another update live with the following additions:

- I corrected a mistake in the phonetics (it was displayed incorrectly).
- You can switch between standard script and phonetic script within each quiz.
- The slideshow now shows both standard script and phonetic script.
- The design of the explorer mode has been improved.

I see from my web stats that quite a number of people are using the app and it would be great to get more ideas from your side on how to improve even further!

By the way, when you load the language files you will have to wait a few moments until the progress bar shows 95% (because it is not properly updated). We will fix that sometime soon.