Today, we got a nice email from Dennis who is one of our customers.
Dennis raises some good points on how you can learn with L-Lingo and L-Ceps effectively and he gave me permission to publish his email here:
“I have been using L-Ceps & L-Lingo Chinese Mandarin for about one month, and it has been a successful experience for me. I am on lessons 6 and 7 as I type this note. My retention of the vocabulary has been 100%. I am getting a clear understanding of the grammar as well. And, my Chinese friends have already been impressed with the quality of my tones.
My process is as follows:
1) I study each lesson for about 30 minutes each on the PC through the Guided Training option.
2) I use the MP3 files to work on my pronunciation and tones. I listen to the MP3 while I am driving to and from work, so I get about 50 minutes of practice speaking each day. I typically run through the lessons over and over.
3) I will work on two lessons at one time, finishing up on one while starting up on the other.
4) I have printed the textbook — I study it in the evening for 20 minutes or so per day to learn the Chinese characters.
5) While I am finishing up on a lesson, I come back to the PC and take all the quizzes.
I have been able to use a lot of captured time (such as when I drive to work) to do some of the learning, so the time I have to set aside for this effort is minimized (we all have busy schedules, do we not)?
I see that L-Lingo has some updates. Will these be incorporated into L-Ceps at some point?
An earlier e-mail from you had mentioned some grammar tools that you were working on. What would be the status on those? I have noticed many ‘connecting’ characters in the Mandarin text — will the tools discuss those characters, at least in part? I am making intuitive guesses on what those characters do; perhaps a small note would contribute to my understanding.
Thank you for a well made product. I am still surprised how inexpensive it is compared to some of the competitive products I have reviewed.”
I really do like the way Dennis has integrated the ‘offline’ features like textbook and mp3 files together with the online and PC versions of our software. By the way, you can also print-out flashcards to use on the road (but please don’t use them when behind the wheel ;).
Now. Dennis raised some important questions:
Feature set of L-Lingo and L-Ceps
Normally we use L-Lingo to implement new features first because in the online version it is more easy to deploy new features (no setup required etc) and being an online application it is easier to get feedback from our learners on how to fine tune these features. From time to time we then update our Desktop Version L-Ceps and incorporate these features there.
Grammar Notes
We are working very hard on the grammar notes, because we know many of you would like to see this. We need a little more time because we want to ensure the notes are really good and we have to align them with our lessons. But stay tuned, grammar notes are on its way!
Let us know how YOU use L-Lingo!
It is really great to get such detailed feedback from our customers and it helps us tremendously to really design L-Lingo in a way that benefits you in learning an Asian language. So we would like to invite all of you to share your learning experiences and how you use L-Lingo here on our Blog or on our Facebook Fan Page.
