Hi,
I have opened a Portuguese lesson (http://tiny.cc/ob29n) from the collection “Artur de Azevedo - Contos”, but when I click on “Open collection”, the collection looks empty as if I were studying a private lesson. The same applies to other audiobooks shared by jayr: “Os Lusíadas” and “Declaração dos Direitos Humanos”.
I know that users can open lessons that are still not shared by clicking on “Next lesson”, but there is no “Next lesson” link here… Are these lessons actually private? If so, why are they shown in the library?
Thanks,
Michele
Very interesting find. The lessons are in fact shared, so there’s definitely something wrong here. We’ll add this to our list. Thanks!
Ah, I think I’ve located the problem. This user has imported lessons that contain external audio, but he has not specified the duration so we have nothing to put in the “Time” category.
In any case, I’ve now gone in and added durations to the lessons in this collection. Perhaps someone else can go into the other collections and fix the times on them.
I had never known that when you use external audio, you have to insert the duration yourself. I don’t remember if I did it when I shared my Italian collection of tales by Guido Gozzano.
It’s listed here in the Import Help: Import Help
Our system calculates the length of any uploaded file, but external files need to have their duration manually entered. If the duration is 0, it causes problems when a user increases the number of times listened in the Tasks section, not to mention this issue with the collection.
I have started to fix the collection “Os lusíadas”, but there are many problems: some scripts are too long to be saved, the average length of the audio is very long (around 40 minutes per lesson) and every line looks like a single paragraph. There is so much work to be done that I doubt it’s even worth doing it, considering that this poem is written in ancient Portuguese and that there are so few Portuguese learners at the moment (sigh).
You bring up several good points, so I would suggest you not worry about the lessons in this collection. Overall these lessons are almost worthless since they’re far too long and the formatting doesn’t fit into LingQ very well. In this regard, I’ve removed them from the Library, since there were only about 10 uses per lesson over the course of more than a year.
Ok, good to know, Alex. I could upload them with a better formatting after dividing each file into several parts, but I don’t know if these lessons would be useful to anyone (considering how little they have been used so far). Anyway, I have a lot of other, more important things to care about before the Lusíadas.
By the way, I have fixed the lesson “Declaração dos Direitos Humanos”.