Are you a LingQ wiz? Want to help me get the hang of this software?

Hi. I am a native English speaker seeking someone really fluent in English who would be willing to chat with me about how LingQ works.

I have watched all the LingQ academy videos. I have tried all the features. I have sent messages to support.

However, I am still stuck on getting some things to work the way I would like.

I want to get on with learning instead of being frustrated because I don’t know how to make the software work.

Can someone out there take pity on me and give me some time? I can certainly reward you with some points for your assistance. Maybe we can arrange a skype session or I could call you? At the very least, chat in some way where I can ask questions and get answers.

I would be ever so grateful.

Thanks. Julia

These are my biggest problems:

  1. I have been unable to upload a csv file which contains both Korean and English
  2. I just can’t get the hang of LingQ’s. There are MANY MANY words I want to learn in Korean. I am a novice. However, I haven’t been able to get this functionality working right. I even wiped the whole language and started over from scratch. It just keeps telling me one word. An uninteresting word. I am bored with this word.
  3. Emails. Phew, LingQ sends WAY too many emails. I haven’t got it set correctly to stop spamming me. It seems if I ever answer one post, I will hear about anyone else who answers that post FOREVER.
  4. I also can’t quite figure out who “following” a person means.
  5. How do you actually DO the flashcards. I get to the flashcard. OK. So I see you. Now what? I play the audio. OK. How do I go to the next one?
  6. I would like some way to review what words are going to end up on the flashcards and adjust it. I have figured out that setting it to 4 makes it a known word.
  7. I can’t figure out how many LingQ’s I have. I use to think it was the number on the lesson, but that is only the LingQ’s associated with that particular lesson.
  8. I can’t figure out how to see the list of words I know. In my frustration and misunderstanding as I learned, I am pretty sure I marked a bunch of words I don’t know as known.

I dream of the day when LingQ knows which words I know and the Foreign Language Reader in the lesson highlights words appropriately. It is that pie in the sky promise. Yet I can’t get there. I am stuck. It is probably issues that could be resolved easily if I could just talk to someone who understands how the system works.

Frankly, there is too big a learning curve for the casual learner. If you are deeply dedicated to learning a language and have made LingQ your platform, then you will put in the effort no matter how confusing or time consuming it is to learn. But I bet they lose a lot of people who just give up because it is too hard to get the system to work they way they want.

Where is your problem ?
You can entertain yourself by reading and hearing the excercise lessons.
You can contribute to the LingQ-project by correcting and commenting on other people’s texts, like I do.
But if you really want to make any progress in language learning, then you have to collect some known words, called - you know what, do you ? - and invest some points to have your own written and spoken exercises corrected.

And you can create some lessons by yourself and release them to the ever hungry L-crowd.

That’s all there is.

smile

Pretty much all I do on LingQ is correct and comment on people learning English. It has been weeks of trying to master the system and I have yet to actually learn a single word from LingQ. Not one. So I look at all those hours and wonder if they could have been better spent just turning off the computer and reading a book or doing my flashcards.

I know I am venting my frustration. But I really want to make this work for me.

I have created some lessons. Because of copyright issues, most are private. Feel free to try “Wake up song” if you are looking for a beginning Korean lesson. Another shared lesson is “North Wind and Sun”.

I am not sure how many native Koreans use this system. As Steve knows, there are many excellent resources for learning Korean on sites like Talk To Me In Korean and Korean Class 101. Those sites have a vibrant community of Korean learners. Here, I put out a request for Korean translation, something very simple, and it took more than a week before someone answered (in Korean).

Frankly, there are so many software options out there for learning. I am looking for one that will work for me to do spaced repetition of flashcards and learn my vocabulary as I study. Visit my site at http://jreidy17.wordpress.com/ if you want to laugh at how lost I am as a novice learner trying to figure out what tools to use for self-study.

I’d love it if someone could help save me some of the pain of learning it on my own through mistakes. But perhaps it is not to be. Perhaps I have to waste time and try a lot of different things before I find what works.

I can’t tell you anything decent about learning Korean,
only thing I know is that its script, hangul, is renowned for its efficiency.

But, having chosen to learn Chinese, I have to blaze my trail through the Character-charts.
Only to see the trail getting closed again right after I have passed through.

Soon after my start here I noticed that this site did not support my language learning efforts
But it is good for commenting on others’ efforts. :wink:

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I cannot say a word about learning Korean, but I try to answer some of your other questions:

  1. I just can’t get the hang of LingQ’s. There are MANY MANY words I want to learn in Korean. I am a novice. However, I haven’t been able to get this functionality working right. I even wiped the whole language and started over from scratch. It just keeps telling me one word. An uninteresting word. I am bored with this word.

LingQ means working with texts, not with words. You read texts and LingQ shows which words you already know (white), already have lingqed (yellow) or which are new (blue) - all regarding what you have done before on LingQ. Simply read and LingQ new words.

  1. Emails. Phew, LingQ sends WAY too many emails. I haven’t got it set correctly to stop spamming me. It seems if I ever answer one post, I will hear about anyone else who answers that post FOREVER.

Check your settings: http://www.lingq.com/accounts/settings/
On the forum: Check the tick box on the top left corner: “Watch thread”. Whenever you partizipate on a thread it is ticked. But you can untick it if you don’t want to receive email notifications for new posts to a thread.

  1. I also can’t quite figure out who “following” a person means.

On the exchange page you can select “Friends”. If you share something, you can select from your friends. Unfortunately that’s all as far as I know.

  1. How do you actually DO the flashcards. I get to the flashcard. OK. So I see you. Now what? I play the audio. OK. How do I go to the next one?

Select some LingQs on the vocabulary page. There are different possibilities to select words. You can use a kind of SRS by clicking on “Due to review” and select some. Than at the top you can choose to do Flashcards, Cloze tests, dictate or Multiple choice. Have you tried this?

  1. I would like some way to review what words are going to end up on the flashcards and adjust it. I have figured out that setting it to 4 makes it a known word.

If you do the Flashcards, after going two times through a set of them and two correct answers, the status increases by one.
Read more here: Vocabulary Help

  1. I can’t figure out how many LingQ’s I have. I use to think it was the number on the lesson, but that is only the LingQ’s associated with that particular lesson.

Look on your profile by clicking on your profile photo in the top right corner or the LingQ symbol on the top left corner: Login - LingQ
On the right side panel scroll down to the statistic and select what you are interested in.

  1. I can’t figure out how to see the list of words I know. In my frustration and misunderstanding as I learned, I am pretty sure I marked a bunch of words I don’t know as known.

Unfortunately you cannot see this list. You can only have a list of the words you’ve created LingQs for. And then you can select the LingQs with status 4 (Learned) that belongs to your known words list.

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I made a change to my post above. I’ve added to point 3:
On the forum: Check the tick box on the top left corner: “Watch thread”. Whenever you partizipate on a thread it is ticked. But you can untick it if you don’t want to receive email notifications for new posts to a thread.

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Frustration is not conducive to learning! I hope that Vera’s reply has already helped.

Although members are not obliged to take part in the forum, most will try to help if they can. I don’t know how many Korean speakers there are here, but there are certainly some very dedicated learners. The turnaround of question/reply depends on so many factors: availability, knowledge, patience are among them.

Have you tried posting your requests on the Exchange? When you request translations or recordings etc, Korean members can earn points.

As to what does Following mean? It used to be called “Friends” and allows members to see each others’ Skype name (if you’ve ticked the box in your Settings that you’d allow Friends to see it) if you follow someone and are followed back [and vice versa].

If you are still completely stuck, do leave me a private message on my wall (click my profile, wait till it has loaded, set the button from ‘Public’ to ‘Private’ and type in your contact details into the ‘chat’ box. Send.)

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