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What's New at ITS4Thai

Posted by Stuart at 11:52 AM on September 19, 2008

It has been a few months since I have said anything here about the Learn Thai Language website we have been working on for the past couple of years. We continue to work behind the scenes to improve the technology that is running the site, as well as creating new Thai language content and improving the user interface.

I am excited about some of the big user interface improvements we have made over the past couple of months, and thought I'd share a little bit about them here. Our goal is to build a site that keeps track of the Thai words and sentences that you have learned and be able to personalize the site content to teach you what you need to learn next. Many of these new features take us one step closer to realizing that goal.

Here are some of the features we have released in the last couple of months:

My Thai Dashboard: This page is customized for each ITS4Thai student, and answers questions such as "How many words have I learned?" as well as "What words am I struggling with?"
Flagged Words List: As students go through the lessons, they can "flag" words that they want to study later. These flagged words show up on the My Thai Dashboard. They can also take a print out of these words to study when they are away from the computer.
Sometimes you can guess the right answer to a word in our exercises, but that doesn't mean that you know the word. Now you can tell the website that you "just guessed". This helps the site figure out which words you have learned and which you are still working on.
Up to this point, all of our multiple choice games have had 4 choices. Now, you can choose to have 4, 6, or 8 choices on the "Word Practice" games. This makes the exercises a little more challenging.
And today, we released PDF flashcards for all lessons. You can now print out a page that lists the vocabulary for that lesson in flashcard size (English on the front, Thai script and Thai phonetic on the back) to help you study. Take ITS4Thai along with you where ever you go!

Whenever we release a new feature on the ITS4Thai site, we make a note of it at our What's New at ITS4Thai page. Feel free to check it out to get more information about the features I briefly mentioned above (as well as some screen shots).

Comments

Posted by: Kathleen Adams on September 23, 2008 1:12 PM

When will the "Thai Script Course 2" be available? I think all the sizzle you are adding to the site is fine and good, but let's not forget the steak.

Posted by: Stuart on October 1, 2008 9:36 PM

Hi Kathleen. That's a great question :) We should have some additional steak, errr.... courses coming out very soon. (Hopefully this month.)

Creating new content is definitely the most time-consuming part of building our site -- getting the lessons organized and written, building the games, recording the audio, creating the animations... But rest assured our small team is working on them. And in any case, I am very glad you are looking forward to seeing it released!

Posted by: Chandra on October 25, 2008 8:42 PM

Thanks for leaving a comment on our blog and posting info about your Thai language website. I'm going to definitely try it. I can use all the help I can get. I'm older learning Thai than I was when I learned Japanese. Thankfully, our teenage daughter we are adopting will be able to teach us, as well.