Development suggestion. Lessons often have words containing characters that are not in the user’s target language. They show up as blue. For example, the user is studying italian, but there is a sentence in the lesson in english. These words have to be deleted one by one. Also, the shortcut ‘x’ for deletion often doesn’t work,making this worse. Suggest that before Lingq displays a lesson it identifies words with non-target-language characters and deletes them (not remove them from the lesson, but do whatever the trash bin in the lingq dialogue box does). This would also take care of URLs appearing in lessons, which often contain garbage that has to be deleted in pieces. This would save users a tremendous amount of pointless work deleting ‘words’ that have nothing to do with what they are trying to learn.
This has been suggested before. The example given by you is quiet complex, though, as you are not talking about characters not part of the target language, but words. Even if one could relyable identify whether a word is Italian or English, to stick with your example, just because a word is English doesn’t mean it isn’t used by native Italian speakers. And you cannot simple assume the learner to know the word, because not everyone speaks English.
A better use-case would probably be languages that use a completely different writing system, like Greece, Arabic or some Asian languages. But as said, an option that allows the user to set those words to be ignored that use characters different from the ones in the target language has already been suggested.
Personally I just skip over those words and the url junk that might get fabricated. I don’t delete any of that. I read through the lessons I import once and than never again, so why bother whether they look nice?!
Thanks for your response. I’m not surprised it has been suggested before, as it would be an obvious improvement. Due to the point you raised, perhaps it could be an option in your settings for a language: ‘Ignore words with characters not in the target alphabet’. I’m learning russian and I would set this to ‘Yes’ in a heartbeat.
It sounds like you leave these scraps blue. Other users read through lessons more than once. I’m one of them. I also don’t want lessons showing up in searches with unknown words only to open them and find it’s the scraps I left. Are you deleting all the lessons you import after your single reading? What formats do you tend to import? News? Books? Videos? All of the above?
Once the lesson is finished, all blue words will automatically marked as known. So they don’t stay blue, but would be displayed white if I ever came to read it again. This obviously increases the known words count, but to be honest, I don’t care about the stats.
I am not deleting the lessons once I am finished. Why should I bother. 
When I learned Spanish in the past I mainly imported newspapers and books written for language learners. In Korean I used the latter, too, but not newspaper that much, as it is quiet hard, frankly. Besides that I mainly import transcripts of podcasts and am currently reading through an e-book aimed at teenagers, I think.
If you want to import an e-book that contains both Russian and English, for example, you can use Calibre or any similar program to tweak the e-book file first, deleting the unwanted sections. You can also make other adjustments this way. For example, asian languages perform word splitting at line breaks without marking them, so no - sign. Therefore I adjust the file layout to not perform any word splitting anymore. Even in languages that use the - sign to mark those, not having them at all before importing the text into LingQ is convenient nevertheless.
Thanks for the explanation. It’s interesting as in a way you aren’t marking words as known, you are marking them as ignore. Which makes a certain amount of sense as you already know them so you can ignore them. Do you care about a word being marked as known at all. For example, do you search vocabulary using this filter? The only stat that interests me at the moment really is the known word count. I know it is not accurate, but I use it for goal setting and a rough idea of progress. I can see that in the next phase ‘hours of listening’ might get more interesting to me. Personally, I avoid clicking the tick to end lessons, so our approaches are different.
From the perspective of someone who doesn’t need this feature, I would still hope that, if it’s implemented, users will be able to actively choose whether to enable it.
It would be unacceptable to silently change the specifications one day and leave users confused.
I was a bit unclear here. When I write I would ignore those words, that doesn’t mean I set them to ignore. I just don’t deal with them. Upon lesson completion they will be marked as known.
I create LingQ’s for new words, which are than at status 5 (orange). If the word is an anglicism or I am somewhat familiar with parts of the word (think of compound nouns of which I know one part), I set them to 3 (yellow). If I can remember orange words in a later text, I usually set them to 3 (yellow), and those that I can remember to known. I do this a bit sloppy, to be honest, as I don’t see any benefit in over-analysing this process. I also tend to ignore word variations at some point, thus not creating new LingQ’s for them.
For me this process mainly serves as an indicator for new lessons. Mainly the new word count (blue words) is relevant for me, as it serves as an indicator for how difficult a lesson will be.
~15% easy to read
~25% challenging at times, but good for learning
~50% the ebook I am currently reading, which is a bit tiresome, but as it is aimed at teens as mentioned earlier the grammar is simple
Yes, I wasn’t saying you literally mark them as ignore. What I’m suggesting is that once you mark them as known you ignore them. So, in a way you could be classifying them as ‘words to be ignored in your studying for now’. This makes sense to have your focus on words that you don’t yet know.
Another solution to the OP might be to have a button to either send all the blue words left on a page to the trash bin or a button at the end of the lesson to send all blue words in the lesson to the trash bin. This solution would probably be easier to code.
Judging by the lack of interest in the OP, I don’t think Lingq are going to do anything about this issue anytime soon. You are right that communication is important.
Would very much appreciate this feature.
War and Peace has extensive passages in French. It can be quite time consuming to delete them out one word at a time. I use the iOS mobile app, go to the “New Words” tab in vocabulary. The French words are clustered at the beginning, sometimes for multiple screens.
Not only is it time consuming to delete the French words individually, if you leave the French words in, you get a misleading estimate on the percentage of new words.
When a content has a lot of proper nouns such as person names, region names, or something, the wrongly counted known words irritate me. But I don’t think that feature is needed for the exceptional scenario, because the wrongly counted words is a little fraction of my statistics.