This was all brought up in beta testing and ignored by the powers that be. They prefer it. They think it’s better. Doesn’t matter what we think 
Just beginning to get a first “feel” for the new look - and tried to work through one (short) lesson.
First thing I turned OFF “Paging moves to known” and “Auto LingQ creation”.
I then proceeded to create 3 LingQs but the yellow “Review LingQs” thing says 4 LingQs.
There is absolutely no way to find out what the fourth LingQ is, at least I can’t find it.
So the only way is clicking through the lesson from page to page to the end, using the progress bar. I did so. Now ALL blue words are marked as known; this is reproducible and I have just lost all blue words of two lessons (16 and 35) and will now have to work through each lesson word for word to figure out which they might have been.
“Paging moves to known” is still turned OFF but apparently is ignored when you reach the last page?!???
I would much prefer the old view made bug-free rather than having to spend a lot of time again running into new bugs, figuring out how to deal with them and, if not already happened by someone else, report them.
Update: When I’m in lesson mode and click on the notifications badge, the notifications open on the right handside of the window. There’s a pin (for what?) and a red cross. If I click on the red cross, which I assumed is for deleting, nothing happens. If I choose “mulitple choice” to review the Daily LingQs it goes to the vocab page and does - exactly nothing.
Once you have turned off “paging turns to known” you can page using the arrows. There is no reason to page using the progress bar. Yes, going to the last page completes the lesson. If you had done this by clicking the arrows, you would have seen the lesson complete bar on the right side of the final page and would have known what was coming. Sorry about that. We will need to figure out a way of warning or preventing this action for those who have the paging to known feature turned off and navigate to the last page using the progress bar.
With regard to making the blue words known, there is no great harm. You can just read the lesson and click on any white words that you don’t know to create LingQs for them. If you understand the words when you read them, you can just carry on.
With regard to the old mode, it simply became too difficult to maintain. That is why we started from scratch. I think if you just try the new way of using LingQ, you will get used to it and like it more than Classic mode in the long run. That has been the experience so far for us even though initially we all felt a little lost without our trusty classic mode and scrolling.
I did. TTS works great now.
Such as?
A list of the actual improvements that you feel helps us learn another language would be appreciated.
Ignoring the eye candy of course…
So far I have found little improvement.
This should not be enabled by default…
“Paging moves to known” and “Auto LingQ creation”. Holy shite…How to screw up a perfectly decent (The use of the phrase “perfectly decent” is artistic licence on my part for the old software") piece of software and aggravate so many users at the same time is just poor. I have uninstalled software for less…I´m just glad the classic view is still there.
I had my setting sorted to how I liked them and this update just decided that I did not know what was best for me and changed them. outrageous!!!
Loving the new look and features. The old version was getting a bit tired and, in my mind, this extensive work that you detail shows commitment to the site. I particularly like the automatic speech on new words. Evolution is important. Bravo folks.
Good work.
With the flashcards, the X button show a tips saying “Press L if you were wrong”, but pressing ‘l’ or ‘L’ on the keyboard doesn’t do anything for me. Is it only happening to me?
Hi SJPotter,
A lot of us all use LingQ in different ways and like different things about it. But here’s a few improvements that I really like:
- Ability to bookmark location in lessons
- Paging. As someone who is at an intermediate level, seeing so much text on the screen can sometimes be a bit much. Paging is also something I’m used to since I read a lot on my kindle and ipad (which both use paging). What’s great is the ability to switch back to scrolling if paging isn’t what’s preferred.
- Selecting phrases. This wasn’t clear for the first while I used the previous LingQ version and speaking with a lot of other users, the phrasing feature isn’t used enough. The new phrasing works a lot better for me and I’ve seen more of an improvement in my learning!
- Progress bar in the lesson. This is similar to a lot of e-readers. It’s a feature I’m familiar with and use a lot!
There’s a lot of little things I love, but these main points have helped my learning journey.
Thanks for letting us know. We’ll get that fixed. In the meantime, you can use left arrow and then enter to select incorrect with your keyboard on the back of the flashcard.
Oh, I see now. Thank you very much for the advice of using “View all Lingqs”, I forgot about it. I usually use it once a week, when the words I studied up to 4 are going back to 3-2-1 level. Will use it now if need to control the reviewing lingqs as I used, too. Thank you.
Thank you for explaining the system of making lots of Lingqs and then learning them by meeting in the other lessons. Now I understand the purpose of the changes in the reviewing section. Will try to slowly start learning with that new (for me) method. But again, I’m glad there is “View all Lingqs” where I can learn words as I used to, too. Thank you for leaving it so far.
If you don’t want people to click on the progress bar, don’t make it clickable in the first place and don’t place it in a much more prominent position with a much more prominent colour and size than the comparatively tiny arrows for paging.
I will certainly get used to the new mode, people do. But for liking it more than classic view: What’s the use of paging if a lesson of 315 words being split over 5 (five!!!) pages with a lot of white space underneath - and at the same time getting rid of helpful features like being able to view all LingQs created in a given lesson (and this surely means I can’t export them any longer either, right)?
I’m not at all saying that you shouldn’t click on the progress bar to navigate. That is why we made it work that way. All I’m telling you is that had you used the arrows you would’ve seen the final button and probably not done that. But, we realize we have to fix that problem and that it is a bug.
You you can increase the amount of text that shows on each page using the setting on the lesson page. Just click the gear icon to view your settings.
If you click the yellow LingQs button to open the activities you will see a link to view all LingQs. Click on that and you will be able to see all your LingQs on the vocabulary page. And, export them from there.
I’m a little confused by this answer. How can their appearance be a bug, i mean in the settings there is this section “Asian script settings” with the options “Pinyin”, “Traditional” and “Off” and when i choose “Traditional”, the traditional characters show up very small above the simplified in the text. I tried it for different lessons and it seems to work fine. So obviously, someone implemented this functionality!?
So do I understand correctly, that this functionality should be removed again? That would be really disappointing, since I have been asking and waiting for traditional character support for 1.5 years now.
And right now, it is basically already working, I just think it would be even more helpful, if the traditional characters are not shown above the simplified characters, but instead of them.
Just to add to what i posted. What i said originally said still applies. However…
the the new LingQ keeps crashing-- after about 4 crashes i gave up and am now only reading/lingqing in the classic mode.
M
Bravo guys. Fantastic job all around. Really shows your commitment to the site and offering a quality product. At the very least, the sleeker more modern interface has been long overdue.
A few thoughts:
Love pagination, new keyboard shortcuts, integrated review system. As an intermediate-level learner of German, this re-design was timely because I was starting to lose motivation having to read longer texts.
Please re-design the rest of the site to match the reader. The exchange and other pages could benefit from re-design as well, so that the site has a uniform sleek modern interface all over.
mobile app: I hope that there is a re-design in the works as well to make it more intuitive, more engaging, more sleek etc.
user attraction: I was thinking that, if you would like to grow your product customer base, it might help to offer a more hold-your-hand approach with packaged courses, sleekly produced and marketed toward your average language learner, that can get them to 1000 known words (or other arbitrary levels) if completed. I think its what makes programs like Rosetta Stone successful (even if they are way less effective). Just a thought.
Lastly, one suggestion for the re-design. I always ignore my 25 daily lingqs. it would be helpful if the 25 daily lings review was implemented in the same way as the End-of-Lesson Review integrated between all the different modes. Additionally when i log into the site, maybe a pop-up asking me to review my daily lings, instead of a notification (you can easily hit X if you don’t wish to review your daily lings). Again, just a thought.
In summary, good job on the re-design. I travel a lot, and I’m a huge evangelist for the app. I think bringing the design into the 21st century will only help grow your user base.
Thanks,
Tope.
There are many things in the new beta I love - and I work more intensive with the new version!
But, there are some “sites”, too.
You are working hard - and - first and foremost, you have an open ear if there are problems or we “want to have” (like the spacebar 
I know, patience is not my favorite attribute
That functionality existed and was used before. But one day they decided to support simplified characters only and converted …
Oh, I didn’t notice this feature before the LingQ 4.0 and I just checked again: In the classic view, I cannot find the option to display traditional characters, there is only an option for Pinyin. So to me it seems like this was added in the new update.
But converting is a fine solution in my opinion. I don’t see any nice and clean way to support both simplified and traditional characters, so saving the lessons internally in simplified and converting to traditional just for reading is the best I would expect.
My point is solely about the visual presentation of this feature: If I choose traditional characters, then please replace the simplified text with the traditional characters and don’t just show the traditional characters as a tiny super script.
I have tested the new reader a bit, and so far I have to say it’s great. It’s a significant improvement on the previous reader. Well done guys.
This post will be my review, starting with the things I like, following with a few things I think could be improved. These will include things that I didn’t like about the previous version of the system as well.
I use Lingq for Japanese, and the introduction of phrases has made handling the language much better.
Japanese does not use spaces between words, which is a problem for Lingq, because words are what the system works with. So when importing Japanese texts, Lingq rather artificially splits them into words and inserts spaces inbetween. This is an imperfect process, because in Japanese it’s not always clear what should be considered a word, and what is a grammatical construct consisting of several words. Also, the characters themselves sometimes represent words by themselves, but also make words when combined with characters next to them. Sometimes you really need a human reader to discern what was intended from the context. As a result, there would sometimes be splits where there shouldn’t be, and vice versa. I’ll give you an example:
I’ve encountered the word 清楚, an adjective meaning “neat and clean; tidy; trim”. Lingq has put a space between the characters, resulting in two words: 清 and 楚. With the old reader I’d have to select both words and then edit the entry, deleting the space. Not only was this tedious, but it also meant I couldn’t turn the characters themselves (which in similar cases could also be words on their own) into Lingqs. But now I can make “清楚” a phrase, while “清” and “楚” will be words. Brilliant!
What’s more, I’m using the Rikaichan Firefox plugin that shows a dictinary tooltip when I hover over a word. Previously, when Lingq incorrectly split the word, Rikaichan could not cope with it. “清 楚” would never register as “清楚”. But now that problem is gone! Rikaichan can actually read the words even if Lingq put spaces in them. I don’t know if this was intended, or if it’s a side effect of changes in implementation, but it’s awesome! Definitely something to keep.
I also like the paging of lessons. Great idea! It makes long lessons seem much less daunting, while it seems to improve overall performance of the system. The new cleaner and simpler user interface is a nice touch.
As a software developer, I would also like to say the following: It was apparent to me that the old Lingq reader was developed gradually over the years, with new featuers being stuck onto the old ones as the need arose, leading to a mish-mash of a system that was glitchy, hard to maintain, where adding new things would often unexpectedly break old functionality. Sadly, this is a fairly common sight in software developement. I can’t say this for sure, because I’ve only used the new reader for a day, and I haven’t seen the actual code. But from the way the new reader looks and feels I’d say it was developed with a clean slate, applying the lessons learned from the previous versions, but unburdened by any legacy code. If that’s the case, this is perhaps the most important improvement.
Things I think could be improved:
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The custom settings still seem to be stored browser-side using cookies. The disadvantage is that you have to set those same settings on every machine you’re using. Also, cookies are unreliable in long term - they exipre, or they can be purged. The settings are actually not working properly for me - the site keeps forgetting that I switched “Asian Script Settings” to “Off” and switches it to “Hiragana” regularly. Also, sometimes it switches “Paging moves to known” back on after I’ve specifically turned it off. This is especially annoying, because it causes the page to turn when I remove the last blue word, even if the blue word is in the middle of the page and I still haven’t read the rest. Why you’d turn this on by default is beyond me. Guys, I’m not just making Lingqs here, I’m reading the text in the first place! I’ve talked about these settings with Lingq staff before, my understanding was that the plan was to store the settings server-side. It’s a shame this hasn’t been done yet.
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All the dictionaries open in a popup. Popups are annoying, they take time to close, especially when you didn’t want a dictionary in the first place. With Lingq the hints are community-generated, so at times they are incorrect. In those cases I supply my own hints, but the UI forces me to launch a dictionary search whenever I do that. I don’t need a dictionary, I can just copy the Rikaichan translation. There needs to be an option to “Create your own translation” without launching a dictionary. Or at the very least, there should be an option to have the dictionaries embedded in the page. But they should load asynchronously, so they don’t hold up the whole page.
Also, currently the system doesn’t remember that I’ve added another dictionary to my list of dictionaries, so I have to re-add it every time. -
This is something that’s specific to Japanese, and has been in the previous version of the reader as well. Japanese language doesn’t have spaces between individual words. Lingq inserts these spaces because they are necessary to its core functionality. But the user should not see them if he chooses not to. However, even if I uncheck “Show spaces between words”, the spaces are still there. They get really tiny, but I can still see them. This one’s really just my pet peeve.
Those are my two cents worth. I hope pointing out some of the glitches was helpful. No new release of a software is ever perfect, and I have no doubt the Lingq team will continue to improve the reader. As I said, version 4 is a major step in the right direction. Keep it up.
I also have one question: Way back when I started using Lingq, I downloaded the android app, and found it lacking. Has there been any progress with the app? Is it worth giving it another try?
Thank you.