Monday, March 27, 2006

Start playing a demo lesson game

Being baffled for a while why there are so many people who come to Internet Polyglot leave it very quickly - without even browsing lessons. I guessed that is because the front page is just a plain text with nothing eye-catching.

So I introduced a new block on the front page where a new user can select the language that he or she is learning at the moment and start a demo lesson game. In fact it wasn't that simple - the cool thing about this block is that it reads the locale of the user and finds most suitable lesson. For example for a user from Russian who learns English it will be a Russian-English lesson. And so on.

Currently it is working with a minor glitch - the menu list gets confused on the languages during playing the game but I have already fixed it in the development environment, so it will go away as soon as I do the next deployment.

Here is this snippet - you can start playing a demo lesson game right now:




Start Demo Lesson Game
What language do you learn?





Another thing - zhukant pointed out that it's not entirely correct to ask "What language do you learn?", it should be "What language are you learning?".
I am not quite sure about it - American English tends to overuse continuous tense. What's your opinion?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As an English anglophone, I can confirm that the continuous present is appropriate here.

Michael Gavry said...

Thanks a lot for the comment. I am going to change the wording on the page to present continuous.