I imported my Greek text file into LingQ and accidentally had it switched to ‘known words’ at Finish Course. So all the blue words are now gone. I deleted the story and then reimported but the blue words haven’t returned. How do I get back to where I was prior to this? To be honest, I wish the ‘convert all words to known’ switch didn’t exists because this mistake has really messed with my lesson flow.
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You can’t reset a lesson, that’s not possible. Also, deleting a lesson doesn’t affect LingQs or Known words saved in that lesson.
You will need to go through a lesson, select words you don’t know and make LingQs of them. That will remove them from the Known words stats.
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Yes, out of pure frustration, that’s what I’ve had to do. However, this a real negative in terms of motivation because it’s wrecked my daily results chart. I’ve completed loads of studying today and I’m still on a negative number of coins, which then looks like I’ve been slack on my daily goal. Not impressed with this idea of reaching the end of a lesson and it switches the whole content to known. That doesn’t make sense to me!
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This functionality needs to be stopped!
It’s horrible and super demotivating when it happens!
Here is the previous conversation we had about it: Damn added random words
Here are some quotes from it:
@bbbblinq: “This will never be ok. Kill the stupid thing that adds words at the end of a lesson.”
@ScottTyler: “It should never, ever, be okay to automatically add words to a user’s list of known words unless that user wants, and has opted in, to that functionality.”
@aslemon301: “I find it a serious problem that there is no way to undo an action.”
@AJB16: “There are often words in lessons that I don’t consider useful for me to learn today, possibly because they are a bit advanced or obscure, so I don’t want to create a Lingq. They are clearly not known, and I would rather not mark them as ignored words as I may want to learn them at a later date.” … “Creating lingqs would make those words litter my vocabulary practice at the expense of words I do want to work on.”
@TomErikSmith: “To be honest the thing that worries me a bit about this, is not the issue itself, but the fact that this issue has been consistently brought up by new and old users alike, and despite this, the response is always something along the lines of “We cannot possibly fathom a reason that anyone in their right mind would ever want to do such a thing”.”
@bbbblinq: “Leaving blue words alone means you have a chance of knowing whether a text is OK for you to read. If you mark them all as yellow, the texts come up as 0% new words so you can’t tell if they are mostly yellow words or really easy. Always leave blue words.”
@jodye: “It baffles me this remains a hill Lingq want to die on.”
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Untrue. Undo is one of the essential features of good user experience (UX). This has been interface gospel since the 1970s and most commercial programs implement it.
Of course, one must program it in early, as LingQ did not, rather than try to bolt it on later.
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@jt23 What do you mean by untrue? The reset lesson feature doesn’t exist at LingQ.
It doesn’t exist because LingQ didn’t program it to exist. Though, as I say, Undo is a key feature in almost all commercial products.
It’s not an impossible feat. However, given the rot in the LingQ codebase It’s probably impractical without a massive rewrite.
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@zoran et al.:
See. This is why every 3-4 months some newcomer/paying customer posts this same sad valid complaint:
- Where did my blue words go?
- How can I get them back?
These users know intuitively that software should not change their world behind their back. And that users should always be able to Undo whatever just happened.
These users are right and these issues have been fundamental laws of good interface design since the 1970s.
Yet LingQ perseveres in its lack of concern with standards and user experience. This is a failure of management and design.
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@jt23 When new users switch pages for the first time, they do see the warning and explanation about blue words being marked as known if they proceed, as well as note that this can be disabled under the settings.
We believe our current approach is the most effective, and it’s unlikely that anything will change there.
Regarding the undo option, we’ll see if that’s something that can be added in future.
Oh well, I’m sure that makes it OK. I’m sure new users know exactly what that means and what obscure setting they should disable if they understand it.
But of course, new users are fairly boggled when encountering a new software app. They expect software will behave in accord with the sensible UX guidelines of almost all commercial software they’ve dealt with before.
So LingQ keeps getting these heartfelt complaints – Where did my blue words go? How do I undo this?
LingQ says, Tough luck, User. We gave you a warning. Suck it up.
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Don’t tell me that. Undo is a big feature that can’t easily be added years later in development.
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