Hello, I just started using lingq today and it seems interesting.
I have a question concerning the “suggested hints”. Am I correct in saying that these hints are what most people think the words mean? If that is the case, how can I be sure I’m picking the correct translation? I don’t want to learn the wrong meaning of the word and have that stick in my head from the beginning. Is it best to always verify (using Google translate), or try to determine what a word means based on context?
The “hint” is not supposed to be a definition as such. It is supposed to act as a little tidbit to help you get your brain into the lesson.
The main point of using LingQ (as I see it) is to get used to the language without, at first, worrying about accuracy too much. After some time if you keep seeing some inconsistency, it will become clear and you can go back and edit the hint. This should happen less and less as the “crowd source” slowly improves the hints.
The Hints are meanings that other members have chosen, usually from dictionaries. These are cached in our system and can be added in quickly.
A dictionary definition may or may not be appropriate to the text that you are reading. I doubt that you will remember the meaning of a word from one look at the dictionary. Rather, looking a word up in a dictionary, or using one of our members’ hints is just the start towards an understanding of the word, the scope of its meaning and how it is used. It is also a hint to help you understand what you are reading, and is sometimes more useful and sometimes less useful.
If you do not like the User Hints you can consult another dictionary, and probably should, and hopefully add this to the growing list of user hints.
You may find yourself choosing hints without really knowing whether or not they are correct. If you are doing beginner lessons, you will probably review them frequently, and as you come to understand the surrounding text better, you may come to realize (or suspect) that you choose a hint that was not accurate. You can them spend some time checking the dictionary definitions to find one that seems accurate.
But if you’re dealing with LingQ’s commonly used beginner content, then you probably don’t have to worry about it. A lot of people have gone through those lessons so I suspect the hints would be pretty reliable.
I wouldn’t worry about learning a word “wrong”. While a hint may turn out to be inappropriate for the context you are looking at, it’s bound to be a valid meaning of the word in some other context.