Understand spoken language

New Summary section

Submitted by Hugh on 10 June 2013

I am pleased to announce the addition of a new "Summary" section to each word, phrase or dialogue. This presents, what I think to be, a beautiful summary of what the recording is all about. Strictly speaking it doesn't add any information which isn't already available on the page (with the tiny exception of actually stating how many parts the literal breakdown contains); the page already contains the English, the Thai, and the Literal Breakdown. However, it does add a subtle but important usability aspect to the pages. If you use Lingopolo a lot (like I do), you will know that most of the content pages contain a single Thai word, phrase or dialogue. If you are familiar with these pages you will also be familar with the format: first the Thai word is displayed, then a recording, then, if one exists, a literal breakdown. However, for newer users to the site, it would I think take a little while to understand exactly how these pages were structured. Now, with the new Summary section, it should be a lot clearer to everyone exactly what the pages are all about.

I give 3 examples below: for a Thai word, for a Thai phrase and finally for one of the Thai dialogues.

Example of summary for the Thai word for calculator:

Summary for a word

Example of summary for the Thai phrase for "The husband has a big room":

Summary for Thai phrase

Example of summary for Thai Housework dialogue:

Summary for a Thai dialogue

One of the other problems was that Google was having a hard time figuring out what all these pages without any 'real' content, except links to other words was all about. All Google sees is something with play buttons and links to other pages, but without having any 'real' content. You, the intelligent user, can figure out what the page is about and how it all goes together, but not poor old Google. In the picture below, you see that although Google has managed to figure out correctly that the page http://lingopolo.com/thai/word/keep-the-change is somehow relevant to a person looking for "keep the change in Thai", it's not really got a clue what the main point of the page is, so what it puts in its own summary is pretty random. Phrases like "Skip to main content", "Home", "play; pause; stop; mute; unmute" are not really going to help someone using Google to know that Lingopolo is really the best place to find what they're looking for.

Searching Google for "keep the change in thai"

This new Summary section will help the poor search engine. Bless him.

I'm hoping that Google will display something like the sentence(s) in the Summary text. We'll have to wait and see.