A few needed improvements

Open Forum
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  1. prononuciation for extracted words
  2. schedule of repetitions (based on solid algorithm (supermemo))
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Hi Greg,

This is a common request and we have some ideas to implement this in the future. For now, follow the Answers.com link in the Additional Dictionaries to get the pronunciation for English. Some of the other optional dictionaries have pronunciation for other languages.

The LingQs of the Day emails are sent out on an SRS model. LingQs that you created 1, 4 and 11 days ago that are Status 1-3 and all LingQs created 29 and 64 days ago that are Status 1-4. Status 4 (Known) LingQs older than 64 days will no longer be sent.

Check out this thread discussing the issue, http://www.lingq.com/learn/en/forum/3/930/?page=1#post-6244

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Mark –
You probably know about this already, but if not, you might want to take a look at this free tool for webmasters:
http://text-to-speech.imtranslator.net/
(click on the “for webmasters” button)

Greg –
regarding item #1 – I some interim solutions to suggest, though a few require additional software on your computer.

WEB-BASED

The @prompt web speech tool (Recommended)

Use the NeoSpeech text to speech tool

The NaturalReader speaking demo:

PC-BASED

TextAloud (http://www.nextup.com) a text-to-speech tool. TextAloud has plugins for both Firefox and Internet explorer, as well as being able to configure a global hotkey to speak a word, sentence, or full text. In addition to TextAloud, you would need a “voice” in the language you are learning.

The second PC solution is the translation program Babylon, along with a compatible voice. (LingQ uses the Babylon web engine.)

NextUp is where I buy voices, but there are other vendors on the web. However, it should be noted that some voices from the nextup site work with multiple applications via a standard interface and others are limited to working only with TextAloud.

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Thanks for the suggestions Paul.

I personally do not use text to speech. I find it unnatural. I am not that concerned about individual words that I come across and cannot pronounce. I am more interested in the whole text that I am listening to, and which, especially at the beginning, I am listening to many times. I am confident that the rhythm of the language is stimulating my brain. I also expect that if the word is important I will come across it again and again, while listening to different content.

In other words, I think it is sometimes counterproductive to try to nail down some of the details of the language. It is better to spend time with the full experience of the language.

On the other hand there are many pronouncing dictionaries out there, and we do connect to some of them at LingQ, and will do so even more in the future ( when we have time).

Meanwhile, other people have different tastes and it is very useful to make information about other options available. Thank you.

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I’ve used TTS once or twice (when I don’t have any audio) to get some kind of idea of how a Chinese text could sound like. For short sentences and isolated words it’s pretty OK, but longer sentences tend to get strange prosody.

I would never base my own pronunciation on the produced audio.

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