I’m attempting to highlight a few kanji I’m not familiar with a Japanese conversation, but the site keeps highlight other sentences randomly, and then tells me that there’s no dictionary definition for the sentence.
I know there’s no dictionary definition for a sentence, but it then refuses to un-highlight the phrase, and keeps insisting that I want to know the entire sentence. Its very difficult to learn a language when all I can be told is that there are no translations, definitions, or any way to find them.
In Japanese and Chinese highlighting terms can be a little tricky. You can’t just double click on them. This is because there are no spaces between words in these languages. You have to drag your cursor along the characters you want to select. It shouldn’t be too difficult however to get the characters you’re after.
Unfortunately, when you highlight a section of a sentance, lingQ will find the right definition of the word, but it is not saved as a lingQ, and will not highlight at a later time. The main functionality of lingQ is useless for Japanese at this point.
There is plenty of vary useful functionality available in Japanese and we have many users happily using it. Yes, the words don’t highlight but you can have the Vocabulary section open in another tab and see all your saved LingQs there.
Ah, I see. I thought that since it didn’t highlight it wasn’t creating lingQs. That helps! I do think the concept is good, and obviously the Japonese is in beta. Being able to see the word boundaries would be a great feature, although technically quite difficult. Barring that, two things would really help:
Highlighted lingQs inside what lingQ (incorrectly) determines is a word.
Automatic deletion of selections that return no dictionary results (which happens a lot when one is clicking around trying to find the word boundaries).
Another idea would be some specialized beginner material that is formatted in such a way as to already have word boundaries.
Anyway, thanks for letting me know it was still saving the words mark. This is a great service, I think it can go far.
While spaces aren’t used in normally in the written Japanese language, I’ve never seen a textbook that does not used spaces for the first designated year of learning. It helps separate words, and makes the language a lot easier to understand.