Lingq/Vietnamese beginner here. Apologies if my terminology is inaccurate as yet. I’m hitting a problem using Lingq and wonder if anyone can advise?
Vietnamese seems to be a largely monosyllabic language, ie single syllable = single short word. More complex nouns/verbs etc seem often to be created by using 2 simple but separate words in a specific combination. So I want to create a lingq for the combination, like a 2-word phrase. This is easy enough to do.
But the problem is that when i look at sentence mode, I still see both the individual words and the combinations listed, which gets pretty messy. I could trash the meaning of the individual words, but there will often be other contexts where the individual words still have meaning.
What I really want to do is to suppress the individual word meaning from the sentence-mode listing, but only when it appears in a known (ie Lingq’d) combination.
Have I explained clearly enough? I guess there’s no such feature currently in Lingq to do this? Or can anyone suggest an alternative approach? It’s not as if this is uncommon in Vietnamese - even short sentences seem often to have 2 or 3 such occurrences of 2-word ‘phrases’. So the sentence list can be twice as long as necessary.
Yup this is exactly what I was telling Zoran. If you use LingQ on mobile it gives you a better idea of what words should be lingqed together because it recommends phrases. But we don’t have that on website version. He said he would let the team now about it, but I haven’t heard anything since. this was maybe 2 months ago.
The very first mini story lesson 1a begins with the words ‘câu chuyện’. Remember I’m pretty much a complete beginner, but AIUI câu can have several meanings but eg sentence; and chuyện can have a generic meaning like stuff. So literally the words in conjunction maybe mean sentence stuff or, more simply, a story.
So i don’t want links for the individual words câu and chuyện at all, these just muddy the water, add complexity and make comprehension more difficult. I just need a single link for câu chuyện as a combination.
The word detection algorithm seems to need a look-ahead function to factor in the next word also. (Actually, the essence of AI, isn’t it?) And if the word pair is a recognised ‘compound word’ then that should be the sole link provided.
Forgive me if I extrapolate too much here coming from the Sinitic language family, but I think I understand your problem. It’s something which any learner of Chinese gets acquainted with early on.
The thing with Chinese is that words are usually two characters long. That’s the average for example: 朋友 means friend. It’s made up of two smaller characters I can’t tell you the meaning of.
Earlier, the way LingQ parsed individual words and characters was messy so sometimes LingQ would write it as: “朋 友” (mind you Chinese doesn’t have any spaces between words, so AI has to guess where one word ends and begins in a sentence.)
The solution to this was always to add whatever random definition showed up for the individual characters. Then mark the LingQs together as a phrase.
The outcome looks like this. With story and the First being marked as a phrase. LingQ allows you to do this by highlighting up to 9 words with your cursor.
I understand that this is far from ideal, but it’s the only solution I’m aware of so far, so it does work on LingQ. Even if it feels cumbersome or confusing, this is just the way the Vietnamese language operates.
Vietnamese in my mind would be served better by actually removing the space between compound words like us Germanic speakers do, but I guess that’s what happens when the French colonize you. That said, as frustrating as it might feel, you can flip it and choose to appreciate the fact that you get to be exposed to A) much rarer words more frequently, and can enrich your vocabulary in a way other languages aren’t able to. B) appreciate that whilst this is more long-winded, you are also getting insight into Vietnamese culture, linguistic history and free mnemonics. For story it’s “spoken phrase” which to me sounds rather poetic and beautiful, very post modern in a way too.
My best advice here is to assume that almost all words you will encounter are at least a two word pair. If the translation makes sense then save it as a lingq. Recommend translating a phrase based on the lingq capability (10 word max scan) and try to find each word from the translation and start highlighting. If the highlighted pair of 2’s matches the words of the translation then lingq it.
In other words, just assume 90% of the words are a two word pair as they are more common. The more words you know, the less you have to hunt and guess and know instantly if it’s a two worded or not.
For Vietnamese in Lingq, your true known words are based on how many lingqs that you have learned. it’s backwards but that is the case at this moment
