Last week we hit our 1 millionth item studied on Lingt.com! We've been absolutely blown away by how much some people are using Lingt since our launch 7 weeks ago. Today we're also releasing Lingt Leader boards where you can see the top users in various categories. This is one of the most requested features by our users on our feedback forum and we're happy to check it off. As a more formal announcement, we've put some more info here.
Being featured on TechCrunch is like dropping a boulder into a lake, creating a rippling pattern of coverage and comments throughout the blogosphere. Fortunately, we've got a great community that's sticking around and have had a fantastic time getting to know them. We've spent the last few weeks playing exterminator and hammering out all the bugs that come out of the walls when a lot of people start using a website. Now, we're extremely excited to start working on some bigger features that will take Lingt to the next level. Stay tuned!
Also, thanks to MakeUseOf.com for a great feature.
First off, welcome to all the new users! We had an article on TechCrunch and a mention in the Boston Globe that has led to growth in activity.
Today we released support for character only studying which was the most popular request on our feedback forum. We're also continuing to release other updates and improvements. If you have thoughts on Lingt, send us an email, or contribute on the feedback form!
More to come...
We just got done adding lists for most major Chinese textbooks in circulation today. If you're currently in a Chinese class using one of these textbooks, it should make getting started with Lingt a lot quicker. Also, for those of you that are looking more advanced material, you should be able to find plenty of lists to keep you happy in these textbooks' later chapters.
For all those people planning to spend some time in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau, we added support for the traditional character set. You can switch between simplified and traditional whenever you want on your Manage page.
For those that are new to Chinese and don't know, Chinese can actually be written in two entirely different character sets. One is called the "traditional" set that the Chinese have used since the 5th century. The Chinese government began officially promoting another much simpler set (which we call "simplified") in the 1950's to increase national literacy. Simplified characters are now used by the vast majority of Chinese speakers in the world, and as you might expect, most Chinese learners opt to go simplified. Taiwain, Hong Kong ,and Macau are the only refuges for traditional characters left in the world. The traditional and simplified camps like to argue which one is prettier: the complex weaving of strokes in the traditional set or the simple elegance of simplified characters. Of course, we love them both equally.
After a lot of hard work, we want the world to start using Lingt. We're only offering Chinese for now, but we've got more languages on the way soon. Everything is totally free right now, so sign up and let us know what you love, hate, and don't even care about. You'll be seeing a lot of very rapid improvements in these first weeks, so stay tuned to this blog to track changes.
