I agree, 2000 is far from enough. I’ve had few problems with performance (I’m presuming you mean glitches such as the delayed translation of highlighted phrases?), and they certainly aren’t bad enough to warrant having to read 4 lessons instead of 1.
I think that the 2,000 word limit may very well make plenty of sense for for many members studying at lower levels. There’s no reason for them to be reading texts longer than that as it is, since they should be focusing on thematic vocabulary acquisition, but once you’re reading books or listening to radio shows, 2,000 is just frustrating.
If the issue is performance, I suggest two things: a default setting of splitting the article, and the option of disabling it for specific articles; perhaps with a warning that it will decrease performance. Perhaps also with a limit of 500 or 800 UNKNOWN words per article; I presume the known words aren’t taking up any processing space?
I noticed one more inconvenience by the automatic dividing.
For example, I make some interviews with native speakers, in this case - with the American Rick about the History of Hollywood. He usually speaks about 15-17 minutes each time. By the automatic dividing I lost all paragraphs- it looks like a continuous, solid text without all breaks and remarks. That’s why I had to restore our conversation line after line.
The second questions - the audiofile was undivided, and it’s inconvenient to listen again to the beginning of this file to the second part untill the audiofile and the content can match each other.
Maybe someone can tell me how to divide the audiofile. I don’t know.
We have made it as easy as possible to move through all parts of the imported content. simply click the next button and move to the next lesson. Having said that, I’m sure there are many of you that can come up with good reasons for having a higher or lower limit. The fact is, we chose this limit because it made sense for our requirements. We had to choose a number we settled on 2000 words. We do apologize if this means you have to change the way you use the site. It shouldn’t be a major change but will improve performance for all. Thanks for your understanding.
We are looking into the issue with the line breaks and paragraph formatting being lost. This only seems to happen in certain cases and we are trying to figure out the cause. As for splitting audio files, you can either post the same audio file for all parts or you can split the audio file using a tool like Audacity.
Mark, I think the issue is that people are suggesting there is a “natural” length of around 10-20 minutes for chatting about a topic, or 30 minutes for a tv show (with less intense dialogue). These are both around 2-4000 words. For the lessons I have shared, this is true, and if you look at a lot of the lingq provided “chat lessons” this is very often the case. I think it may be worthwhile to think of this more as a kind of “natural rule for more advanced learners” rather than some quirky preference by a vocal minority.
“long lessons do suffer from poorer performance than shorter lessons just due to the larger volume of words that must be compared all the time”
What does this actually mean, in layperson’s terms? Is there any fix that could address performance – specifically, such that the allowable word count be 4000?
How performance optimization typically tends to work is you start with the low-hanging fruit, then progressively work your way up. At this point, there is certainly more that we can do, but the gains from these additional efforts will be smaller and the costs in both time and money will be much higher.
Iain, I understand what you and others are saying. However, even if we leave performance aside, the fact is that most users seem to prefer shorter lessons to longer lessons if we look at statistics of which lessons get used more. By splitting long lessons into parts, it makes these lessons more accessible to more users. I still don’t see much downside in being asked to click the next button to move to the next part of the lesson and provides longer lessons in smaller chunks. Just as news articles often have multiple pages for performance reasons, we have done the same thing.
I use lingq differently than most, I guess. For me it just makes uploading/sharing lessons, and using lessons the way I use them, an extra bit more of a pain. If there is an option to to print all text across all parts, I’ll probably come to live with it. Would this be the case? I still don’t quite understand the performance issue. Is it to do with speed of looking up a word?
Split lessons are just like any other lessons. Only what is in that lesson will print. Regarding performance, the length of the lesson is a major factor affecting the speed at which a lesson loads.
Clearly these changes affect people differently - which goes to show people use the site in many different ways. If you’re using lingq to read books, this is a great improvement. It has the best of both worlds - you can upload whole chapters (or more) all at once, and it is split into bite-sized chunks and is noticeably quicker for making LingQs. Been reading for a couple of hours this evening and it is a much easier experience than before.
Most users prefer shorter lessons because most users are beginners to intermediate. However, all advanced users prefer longer lessons because they read more quickly.
I still feel that this change and the refusal to at least make it optional is somewhat alienating, but I’d propose that, if you consider the split lesson format to be analogous to the multiple page news articles found on most newssites, then adopt their print function as well. The main annoyance for me is that I can no longer print these lessons as one document. If you would allow me to print the entire lesson with all of its vocabulary with just one click as I could before, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.
We are very sorry that our changes affect the way you are used to working. That was not our intent. We chose to make a change that will hopefully benefit many users in terms of performance. Unfortunately, this does force those like you, who are used to working with longer texts, to adjust the way you work. We hope you will understand.
We are unable to enable printing of the full text and vocabulary list since the lessons are treated as different lessons in a course by our system so they are quite separate.
You’re welcome! Yes, we recently added the stars there and fixed some other related issues. The priority stars should be working much better now on all pages.
Thanks for your feedback on this, Vera. Are you finding it difficult to move between the multiple lessons that are created when you import a longer chapter into LingQ?
Just wanted to add-- moving between lessons to read,for me, is not a problem. However, what is a bit of a pain is having to upload the audio more than once.