Calling all LingQ users for your thoughts

Open Forum
21

@Cohen - LingQ works smoothly most of the time. I don’t know that your feedback is that relevant since you have only really used LingQ for one month last year, as far as I can tell. Yes, there are issues that come up that we try to fix as quickly as we can. There are different reasons for these issues some within our control, others not. Our platform operates on two mobile platforms and multiple operating systems and browsers. To expect there to be no issues ever is unrealistic, especially for a platform that actual users use a lot.

In fact, a small handful of users report issues on the support forum which can be due to any number of reasons. Everyone else just happily uses the system and learns languages.

22

@cheska99 and others - We do appreciate the positive tone and understand that it is frustrating when things don’t work the way you want them to. We all rely on LingQ and when something goes wrong, it upsets our flow. We do understand that, we are users too and we try to resolve any issues as quickly as we can. The nature of software is that issues come up. They may be due to changes that we make that have unintended consequences. They may be due to changes in components that we use or changes in operating systems or in browsers, all of which we can’t control but have to respond to. Or, as in the case of your email issue, this seems to be an issue with your email system.

The fact is that the more you use any software, the more chance you have of encountering bugs. And, you spend a lot of time using LingQ, a lot of you and we want you to continue to do so. And, for the most part, everything works well. If an issue does come up, let us know and we will get to it as soon as we can. If you don’t hear from us, pester us again, we may have missed it. We don’t ignore issues.

23

“I don’t know that your feedback is that relevant…”

There in a nutshell is why this site will never take off into something massive.

I was only a user for a month BECAUSE it kept breaking. Is that hard to understand ? Clearly, seeing as the plethora of complaints about broken features and bugs on your forum backs up everything i say. Not relevant indeed.

Your tag line should be: “LingQ, where you pay $10 a month to unlock great features, such as the ability to spend most of your time nagging a programming team and gently prodding them into doing their jobs properly.”

No site i’ve ever used has as many frequent bug issues as this site. Even free ones. I’ve used sites made by kids in their bedrooms that have less bugs than this place.

And you NEVER acknowledge this fact. And you NEVER will. You simply brush it off like a greasy salesman. Simply sitting there, trotting out the ‘We remain committed to bringing our customers great value…’ nonsense.

24

There are FREE alternatives that are pretty much exactly like LingQ that have no programmers working for them which remain stable and bug-free year round.

25

If you are referring to Learning With Texts, that’s absolutely nowhere near LingQ’s capabilities in terms of the user interface (including keyboard shortcuts and the possibility of selecting entire phrases), community translations, built-in dictionaries, and lots of other stuff. Of course it’s easier to keep an interface bug-free if it can’t even do now what LingQ could do 10 years ago.

And, of course, Learning With Texts does not have content created by the community. Being able to find lessons dealing with topics you find interesting and listening to recordings made by native speakers is one of the best things about LingQ that would make it worth using even if its user interface were terrible (and it’s not; it’s actually pretty good).

26

Once when I got frustrated at LingQ i looked extensively for an alternative and I didn’t find anything that was even remotely as useful. Nothing was even close. This is a complicated site that may well take more than a month to get used to. In fact, I’m still getting used to it and I have been using it everyday for years!

27

I’m sorry you aren’t happy here. We try our best, we think we put out a great product. If you don’t feel that way, please move on.

28

The way you describe your issues makes it sound like I have been using a completely different product. I rarely ever encounter any issues. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had any issue with the core functionality of the website. The android app is still a little bit buggy, but it is just a few months old, so that’s understandable.

Whenever I encounter problems like lingqs not creating, lessons not loading, error messages, etc., it always turns out to be a problem with my internet connection (or, much less commonly, the LingQ servers being down, but that happens quite rarely).

29

Hi Mark, this issue hasn’t been fixed for me yet. I tried importing again today, both as text paste, and text and pdf ebook import. I’m only getting the first lesson, the others don’t end up showing up.

30

@t_harangi - It can seem this way but the other chapters should load after the fact. If you go to the Course view, you should see them appearing. If this isn’t happening, you will have to submit your file to support so that we can try importing that file ourselves to figure out why it isn’t working for that file. We can try both the file and copy/pasting. Both of those approaches are working fine for me in Chrome so it must be something in that file itself.

31

@mark. I work as a web developer and I can tell you this site has so many bugs that it’s pretty embarrassing. I still think this is a great language learning resource and I love the concept but it is really strange to me that you think there are no major bugs.

Here are a few I have seen:

-If your lingq definition is too long then you get a message saying to check twitter… lol

-Most of the time I have problems editing lessons, lots of times when i try to edit a lesson I will get some strange error

-Sometimes when I successfully edit a lesson and return to the lesson, it will stop displaying some of the text of lesson even though that text is still there when I go back to the edit screen.

32

Yes, the system has problems but I think this guy’s exaggerating.

33

@Swift256 - Yes, there are some bugs. If the bugs get reported and are reproducible, we fix them. Thanks for letting us know about those bugs. We will look into them. Most of the time editing lessons works fine. If there is an issue, it relates to your text and you need to let us know and share the text so we can figure out what it is going wrong. The vast majority of texts and lessons including imports work fine.

34

The features it has are exactly the same. All the other stuff you mentioned comes from the internet anyway. It is no different, at all, in terms of functionality. And it’s free. And it doesn’t break. Ever.

35

How am i exaggerating ? Are you just going to ignore the problems people report daily in the issues forum ? Am i making those up ?

36
  • I was only a user for a month BECAUSE it kept breaking. Is that hard to understand ? *

There’s no way that using LingQ is downright impossible due to those bags. Of course, lags occure from time to time but the system works fine overall.

37

The features it has are exactly the same.

How do you select a phrase consisting of several words in Learning With Texts? How do you move between words using keyboard only? Where do you get top translations suggested by other people that you can use just by pressing enter without having to leave the website or even put your hands away from the keyboard?

All the other stuff you mentioned comes from the internet anyway.

First of all, that’s not true. There are lots of lessons here created by users specifically for LingQ. Second, just the ability to have everything so easily accessible is worth the money for me. When I’m on the bus, I can just use my phone and find a lesson in a language I feel like learning at the moment in just a few seconds. I don’t have to spend time in advance importing, uploading audio, etc.

And it doesn’t break.

Neither does LingQ. Whenever I notice that something in the core functionality broke (e.g. in keyboard shortcuts, dictionaries, user interface), I report it in the forums. I just checked, and the last time this happened to me was in 2014…

I’ve just quickly scanned the support forum, and it seems that pretty much the only bugs that are reported now are related to importing large files and editing lessons (the rest of the posts are people not knowing about certain settings), and they usually get fixed pretty fast after being reported.

I have personally not encountered these bugs, but for me, LingQ would be 100% worth it even if there were no custom imports at all. It is primarily a language-learning tool, after all, not a custom ebook library.

38

Nobody said it was ‘downright impossible’ to use, please stop putting words in my mouth.

Do things have to be ‘downright impossible’ for them to be not worth paying for ? Or can they just be ‘a little bit annoying’ ? Is that a good enough justification for someone to not want to pay for a service ? Or can people have other opinions which may render a service poor value for money TO THEM ?

Or you could try responding to my actual query:

How am i exaggerating ? Are you just going to ignore the problems people report daily in the issues forum ? Am i making those up ?

39

How do you select a phrase consisting of several words in Learning With Texts? Click word, click ‘Expr’, choose number of words up to 30. Make any phrase up to 30 words.

How do you move between words using keyboard only? Arrow keys.

Where do you get top translations suggested by other people that you can use just by pressing enter without having to leave the website or even put your hands away from the keyboard? Click word, wordreference dictionary comes up. Simple.

And your sycophantic posturing about ‘ease of use’ is irrelevant to users who find LingQ mostly unreliable. I’d rather have to shock horror click the mouse one time and have it work than spend my time reporting bugs.

This conversation is irrelevant. You’re clearly a LingQ devotee and so my words will fall on deaf ears. You are making basic errors in your judgements and arguments. Just because YOU don’t report or see problems, it doesn’t mean this isn’t the case for many users.

Again, by using the argument that you report bugs, and you haven’t reported bugs for ages, which must mean the system is perfect, you are pusposefully ignoring the plethora of users who DO report problems.

Again - are these people lying ? Am i making up that these people exist ? Are you not seeing these on the forum ?

I think we all know the answers.

LingQ is unreliable. This is a fact based in reality - with actual evidence - and doesn’t depend on fanboyish anecdotal rhetoric like the stuff you’ve posted in this thread.

I think LingQ is the best way to learn a language outside of immersion, period. But for me it does not and has not ever worked correctly for sustained periods of time. And so i save my $10 a month and my French learning has not suffered ONE BIT because of that.

If i go to a restaurant and pay $10 for a pizza, i don’t expect to have to go to the kitchen several times to help the chef. I don’t see why online services should be any different - instead the expectation here is that you’re expected to pay, report bugs and errors, and be happy that the service works sometimes. I don’t expect that. I expect bugs and errors infrequently or not at all. I use youtube and i’ve had about 5 or 6 errors in the last 10 years. The same on facebook. The same on any other service i use regularly.

Maybe the answer is to use Chrome as it is more stable ? If so, why isn’t this being made clear ?

40

Do you work for LingQ ? Your brushing off of issues as if they are alien because they never happen to you is what the ‘support’ staff say when a problem is brought up.

One last time - are you IGNORING THE MASSIVELY DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF ERROR REPORTING ON THE FORUMS ?

You must be.

Many, many people encounter errors on this site. This is a FACT. A fact that can be verified by actually looking at the forum posts. A websites ‘general’ section is always its most active. The issues section on here is almost as big, and much bigger than all the other forums.

What YOU find here is IRRELEVANT because tonnes of other people are reporting problems. Go and look at the bugs and issues forum. For THEM there are problems here. Numerous. Frequent. That was my experience too.

But, hey, you find LingQ swell, so let’s ignore it.

Well played.

I’ll ask Orange fr to update my ultra-fast broadband that never ever EVER prevents another site from working properly. That must be the issue. Oh, Mark doesn’t have problems on his admin account ? How strange, it must be me. Or my internet. Or my up-to-date top spec macbook running software and browsers which run every other site on the planet without issue.

Please.

The reality of the situation - and you might want to hold on to something here because you don’t seem to live in reality so this may be a wild ride for you - is that the nuts and bolts, the skeleton, the guts of the site are poorly implemented and/or managed by the team which deals with it.

It’s that simple.

Swift256 above, who works as a web developer, agrees with me. Does he exist ? Or did i make him up too ? Stuff similar to what he has mentioned happened to me ALL THE TIME.