Been using LingQ on and off for several months now, but now realising that there is something fundamental to LingQ that i don’t properly understand. This concerns how LingQ words are categorised/numbered.
Well, 2/3/4/known are clear enough but score = 1 is a bit of a mystery. What happens for me currently is this:
A word that i have not encountered before is not highlighted at all. If I identify the word manually as unfamiliar, click on it and accept a definition then a score of 1 (New) and gold colour is assigned. Ok, fine so far, except i am not seeing any initial blue highlighting.
But score = 2 is ‘recognised’. But I may need to encounter an unfamiliar word multiple times before I start to recognise it. So I guess a score = 1 is not really New (in the sense of never encountered before) but actually ‘seen previously at least once, but not yet routinely recognisable’.
This with Vietnamese on iPad running v6.0.9. Any comments welcome. Probably making things more difficult for myself because sometimes i use Windows PC and sometimes iPad, dependond on where I am.
There is no fixed way of how you have to use those numbers, and the naming is purely to give you an impression of what the basic idea behind them is. Especially that lower numbers mean you know the word worse, which might not be intuitive to everyone.
That beeing said, you can use them as you like. I have moved to a three-state approach a while ago, only using 1/3/known. What those numbers mean differs however depending on the language.
In Korean, 1 means I don’t know the word, so I cannot remember its meaning. 3 means I either have a rough idea what the word means or at least recognice it as a word that I have seen very often and therefore think I should be knowing, and for loan words as initial state.
In Japanese, as I have to distinguish between the meaning and the pronounciation in words written with Kanji, I use 1 if I know neither of them somewhat surely and 3 if I know at least one of them (so either pronounciation or meaning, although in most cases it is the latter). For words written without Kanji I use the same approach as in Korean.
That’s on possible approach. But in the end you have to work with it, so experiment a bit and see what works for you.
Thanks for taking the time to reply in detail - much appreciated.
And yes I understand what you’re saying, that we can use the numbers effectively as we wish. I do seem to be on a long and somewhat daunting journey with LingQ. It’s not so much that there is one single issue that is a roadblock, but that there are many minor issues which can seem to compound together to frustrate me and hinder progress. The numbering issue was one such, but compounded by a mysterious lack (at least sometimes) of automatic identifying of potential new lingQs. My scenario is:
Using both PC and iPad at different times. The apps are sufficiently different that it’s easy to get confused sometimes. eg I just has a message that a newer version of my current lesson was available. I guess I had been editing the lesson on one device, and expecting that it would update automatically on a different device.
Having Vietnamese as my target language, which is perhaps still a beta language and so still has certain wrinkles of its own.
The absence (AFAIK) of a good reference book for LingQ. Personally, I still prefer and love books for learning new software. I can sit and stare at and reread a page about a topic until understanding finally dawns. Whereas on a video, a key point just flashes by.
LingQ still seems rather creaky in places. I still can’t work out how to navigate quickly to a target sentence somewhere at random in a lesson and then have the audio play back cleanly. Or the import process being imperfect. The last lesson I imported has the audio lagging by a second or so from its text so in sentence mode the audio starts mid-word, but you also hear the start of the next sentence. Yes, I can go through and edit all the sentence audio, but it’s a really tedious process. And even then some of the edits don’t seem to stick for reasons unknown. And the UI inconsistency still jars sometimes. For example, why are the playback controls at the bottom in page mode but at the top in sentence mode??? It’s these little things that cumulatively cause disorientation and user fatigue.
I could go on, but hopefully the point is made. All that said, I do still have the sense that LingQ is a really valuable tool, which is why I persevere with it of course. But I just wish it didn’t feel like the software was in perpetual beta.
I use the numbers simply to keep track of how many times I recognized or understood the word in context. If a yellow/green word comes up and I recognize it, +1. If it comes up and I don’t recognize it, -1.
To me it depends on how strict you are with words. Some people move a word to stage “4” or even “known” if they recognise it when reading. I would never do that. My criteria is:
No clue at all
I have read it before, I might deduce its meaning thanks to the context
I know the meaning of the word when I read it.
4/K) when I am able to produce the word by my own. If I can create a sentence in a random moment of the day, without any help, then it is on this stage. If I have doubts about its spelling, then it stays at 4. If I know how to write it perfectly, then it goes to known.
This is, once again, my criteria. I do not care if people are obsessed about the number of known words to show off. Hope it helped!
TBH I think my small moan was prompted by a combination of two factors. First, it seems that automatic identification of potential new lingQs was behaving erratically, working apparently sometimes and then not others. This is annoying but may well be due to recent changes in the way that LingQ tries to parse Vietnamese text. Maybe i need to try it on a brand new lesson import.
Second factor is my own psychological quirk I think. I do find that I am very sensitive to terminology. If something new that I’m learning uses terms that make immediate sense to me then I can learn fast. But conversely the ‘wrong’ terms really block my progress. Calling new words ‘new’ is an example. They are not necessarily new but may well have been seen before but not immediately recognised yet. So ‘Seen 1+’ would be a better label for me. It’s a shame that I can’t edit the score labels to suit my own preferences (perhaps along with the colour to be used for each score value).
You may well wonder why I am making such a mountain out of this pretty trivial molehill, but it really does make a difference to me.
@johnd2 : Hi, maybe it helps when you think of it as
0 = never seen this word
1 = first encounter: I created a lingQ
2 = I recognized the linqed word.
…
I shouldn’t continue to beat a dead horse (don’t worry non-native English speakers, just a figure of speech ) but my ‘ issue’ is the non-sequitur between 1 and 2 in your definitions. What about words that you have encountered previously but don’t recognise yet. I may need to see a word perhaps 3 or 6 times before it even starts to become familiar.
I think you have a bit too narrow of a defintion for ‘new’ here. If I move to a new town, would I only be new on the first day, or the first time I met someone? Surely people could still call me “the new guy” weeks or months after having met me?
If you don’t recognize the word, you don’t move it to level 2.
(But you still look up the meaning you saved when you created the lingq (level 1) and try to learn it.)
Then maybe you recognize the word the next time you see it in a text.
And if you still don’t recognize the word as already looked up the 4th/5th/6th time you read over it in a text, you still try to learn the word each time, but you still don’t change the level, until you think you recognized the word. Then, the time you recognize it, but you are still not sure about the meaning, you switch the lingq to level 2. If you know the meaning, you jump to level 3.
This is one way to use the levels. BUT: The levels 1 - 5 are just markers for yourself to see how well you know a word!
(And using the vocabulary review funktion should help you with recognizing words faster.)
I use the “word learning levels” in a different way… as long as it works, who cares? And I guess that a lot of users just use levels 1, 4 and 5.
How many knives do they usually use when cutting vegetables? Do they fear the carrot could feel unrecogniced if the knive it gets cut with has been in use before?
And “beating a dead president” isn’t really animal friendly, unless said president is carrot.
@Fer.weh I understand completely what you are saying but I cannot really explain myself much more. Words have different shades of meaning to each of us. For me, a ‘new’ word is one that I have not encountered previously. That’s my immediate gut reaction and I can’t change it. I appreciate that your brain may be more flexible or interpret the word differently.
But like I say, all this could easily be solved if the terms for 1/2/3 etc were editable by the user - quite a simple tweak to add I would have thought. And even more so if the shading colours could be assigned by the user from a palette much like you can colour a cell in Excel say. I do find the gradations of the default gold not very clear in an isolated word.
I am one of those rebel, who use 2 levels. Either I know a word (k) or don’t (1). I used to procrastinate reading because I haven’t decided on the right system for the ranking. I was even going back to the vocab list to adjust the ranks whenever I change to a different approach, The pause at every sentence trying to decide and rank up words was starting to get annoying.
In the end I settle on rank ‘1’ and ‘K’ only, less to think about and I can focus more on reading, it is also more closer to how I would read on Kindle or normal books.
My thought on word grading/scoring/ranking.
I want to get good at reading/listening not giving score to words.
Any additional layer (scoring) added to the language that slow down my reading is bad.
I am not here to do data entry other than word meaning.
Only think of “what does this word mean?” “ what does this sentence mean? “ “What is this story about“ “Who did what to who when how ?“. I stay away from thoughts like “what level should I rank this word/phrase“ today.
I am not here to grade word ‘quality’. Words are not a online purchase that I need to decide to give 1-5 stars.
Ranking a word is not part of the language.
Natives don’t read on LingQ but read physical books/kindle/web and etc. I need to work towards removing “training wheels like grading/scoring” so as to eventually read like a native.
“Training wheels” are supposed to help/protect me without making thing more complicated or get in the way.
Nobody is going to ask me what rank are my words.
No official exam is going to show me a word and ask me to rank it based on how well I think I know it.
I can read fine even without the highlighting/ranking.
IMO, Ranking of word should be done automatically by the system (optional manual adjustment should be just to fix/tweak things).
Auto ranking should be done either by :
Testing user (LingQ does this in the review system) and ranking up/down accordingly.
Auto rank up based on X no of times user has seen the word without clicking on it. So if a user click on a yellow/known word to look up meaning X no of times it will rank down but if the user has seen that yellow word 10 times without clicking on it, the word will ranks up automatically.
In my case learning a language is sufficient if I can read it fluently. Because this is then my starting point from which I begin to also learn to talk and listen. Yes I know, you should listen and talk right from the beginning. But I learned English this way. Now I do the same with Russian. And in my personal case …
1 = unknown
2 = I have seen this word and I know the sound and maybe I have seen it in similar contexts
3 = Yes, I was able to identify the word, but still feel I need more practice
4 = learned … but I would love to see it more time until ….
LEARNED … now it is anchored in my brain forever!
But always feel free to go and set a “already learned” word back to a lower number, because you will forget some of them with time. It is not a shame if you mark them again as unknown or 2, 3 and so on.
) but my ‘ issue’ is the non-sequitur between 1 and 2 in your definitions. What about words that you have encountered previously but don’t recognise yet. I may need to see a word perhaps 3 or 6 times before it even starts to become familiar.
