I think LingQ could take advantage of the analytic skills of AI by implementing a pop–up grammar tool that explains to us the grammatical features of a word or sentence that we encounter in our readings. These analysis have to be brief but contextualized. For instance, we read the sentence “Juan le pidió a Marta que comprara una botella de vino para la cena.”
An intermediate Spanish learner could have various questions here: Why comprara? Why “a Marta” and not just “Marta”, why le and not la, why para and not por?
You can research all these questions but sometimes you just want the quick information that for example “comprara” is the imperfect subjunctive of comprar and that it corresponds to wishes or commands in the past.
This feature would also help a lot to understand complex cluster words in agglutinate languages like Swahili or Turkish, or to understand the sentence structure in German.
This could actually be a good idea. The problem is the reliability of AI.
Because AI can understand many things in context, but sometimes it doesn’t, or it’s just guessing. And I’ve seen this many times with grammar.
The problem is that the beginner is not able to understand if the AI is giving the right feedback or not. And this mistrust makes the entire experience useless, because if I cannot trust that the AI is giving me 100% the right feedback, I will always question if what I’m reading is correct or not.
One thing is to have the translation of a word that fits the context, and we are able to understand if the translation makes sense. Another is if we read a grammar explanation but we aren’t solid with the grammar rules.
After having added a definition, you can click the litte fox icon in the comments field to get a context-related explanation of the grammar point used. You can delete the created comment and reselect the word to create a different ai explanation, if you the first one wasn’t all too helpful. (Although it might not differ too much, as it is still the same grammar point)
It seems strange that it isn’t working for you. Lifetime premium users should have access in the language you have a lifetime plan for. It should be on both mobile and web in the Notes field.
@mark Probably it’s because I use LingQ in monolingual, meaning that I don’t translate. I don’t have the Lynx’s icon on my web app at all, and I have a blue Lynx’s icon on mobile but it doesn’t work if I click it.
