Hello, my name is Hugh, and I am the founder and original creator of Lingopolo.
I was working as a software developer of websites, but also I was a student of Thai; this website began as the combination of those two things. Many of the Thai recordings are taken simply from my real lessons with my teachers. I am still a large user of the website, using it for my own language study, and changing the website to be the language website that I want.
I have been doing software development for most of my working life. I have worked for many of the worlds biggest companies including IBM, Microsoft, Sony and AIG. I worked at the European Commission as an IT consultant on probably the biggest website development in Europe, the merge of literally hundreds of diverse European Commission websites into one coherent site.
I also trained in linguistics. Not just at a regular University course, but with SIL, the world's elite linguists. These are the people who wrote the Ethnologue, the definitive guide to the world's languages. The linguistics training course taught us how to be linguistic special forces. We learnt how to go into any language area in the world, and without any classes, language books, dictionary or anything, to learn to speak the language just by talking with native speakers. It was this one-on-one method I was using to learn Thai, and it was this one-on-one language experience which I thought I would like to automate. This was the beginning of Lingopolo.
I now work as the full-time Founder of Lingopolo, seeking to bring about the vision that everyone should have access to quality language education, the ability to learn any language, from any language, for free.
The picture shows me in 2013 in an actual lesson with my Thai teacher Khruu Aun.