I’ve just started learning a new language and I don’t have any known words - I have highlighted all of them - yet today as I highlighted more words it has put the amount of words I know into negative i.e. negative words known and negative coins, decreasing evermore. I’ve never come across this before in the languages I’ve been learning on here, and it’s incredibly unhelpful. What can I do about this? Thanks in advance.
Edit: it also says I didn’t do anything yesterday. I logged into it today and it says zero days in a row, even though I spent at least half an hour on it last night and I linked about 40 words.
It happened regularly for me with German, so I stopped creating LingQs. Today I created some, and the lesson gave negative known words. LingQs are not worth bothering with.
I’m using Lingqs the way Steve uses them: I highlight every word since it’s a brand new language with a different alphabet system. I also highlight phrases then I put it into sentence mode so that I can review the words before moving to the next page. I will still use the Lingqs for this purpose but I’m hoping it’s only a glitch.
I saw on another old post that having negative coins was for when you highlight known words. I hope that’s not the case as I think is demoralising. Since it’s a language in s completely different alphabet, I have to keep reading the same page over and over again and it doesn’t register that I’m putting the effort in. Last night I spent a half hour on the same page and I’ve been on the same lesson for three days in a row but it says I have 0 streaks.
Ah, I see what’s happening. Yes, you gain coins from LingQing new words, and you lose the coins you gained if you re-LingQ the same words, or if you decrease them in status. If you’re going over the same page over and over again, I can see how you might be losing more coins than you are gaining.
Moving on isn’t possible yet and I can’t move onto the next page since there’s just one page in the lesson. It’s a completely new alphabet so I have to spend time on the page so I can understand what is being said and to allow me to recognise the letters. I also haven’t linked the same words over again. I have just linked the words on the page I didn’t know (all of them) and I can’t re-link them as I haven’t learned them.
These negative numbers will happen when you create LingQs from Known words.
When marking words known, you get coins, but if you later click on that same Known word, and create a LingQ of it, your coins get removed, and that is why the number can be negative.
Hm. I guess I see the idea and it’s a valid approach. But as you can see, I guess LingQ’s streak system isn’t set up for it…
I have rarely if ever bothered to try and learn a single page (or even a lesson) over and over until I understand it all. (Although I think Steve Kaufmann does do that sometimes, if I remember his videos right…) I just go through it and move on once I feel I’ve understood it in the moment. (That is an approach that LingQ’s system rewards, too. As you’ve seen, it prioritizes novelty over repetition. Whether it should or not is a different question…)
For what it’s worth, I successfully basic Persian that way, starting from not even knowing where one letter ends and the next begins (since it’s a cursive script) - nevermind knowing what the letters mean. Admittedly, I used Google (with copy+paste) and the Wikipedia page about the script with a list of the letters to help me figure it out, not just LingQ’s tools. Still, it didn’t take me very long to get the hang of the script!
I tried to make them unknown after I accidentally swiped past but I couldn’t see a way to make them blue again, so I could highlight each word individually.
It makes sense. However, it’s frustrating to have spent so long on a page after highlighting at the words so I can review them and have no progress to show for it. The coin count and therefore, the streak count, doesn’t reflect that I spent an hour on a page.
For instance, one day I highlighted all the blue text, then the next day I went back as I couldn’t recognise anything because the script is alien to me. I spent an hour reading and listening over and over to that one page. However, it wasn’t counted as part of my daily streak count, and it’s as if I did nothing. It’s rather disheartening. I don’t mind not have the streak count there at all but as it is there, psychologically it has a negative effect. This is, of course, the point of putting a streak count in the first place but it’s not helpful when you’re actually doing the work.
I’ve never tried to learn a language with a different alphabet from scratch on Lingq, but I couldn’t figure any other way to do it other than listening repeatedly to the it and reading it over and over repeatedly.
I could definitely use advice on reading a new language with a new alphabet from scratch in Lingq. I definitely couldn’t use the same approach as I’ve done with Norwegian and Italian, which has been really easy because of the Latin alphabet.
Edit: I have since tried to use some Hebrew script from online and in some ways it has helped but in others that just made it more confusing!
