Coming back to Lingq after a long break

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This is mainly for Steve, but I’ll put it here for everyone to see and comment on.

I used to use Lingq a lot, but took a break from it for a while because some of the features of the website were kind of annoying (long loading times for new pages / saving words, etc). Then, a few days ago, I was watching some of Steve’s youtube videos, and noticed that he said the site had been renewed and the loading times were faster, so I came back here to give it a go. I must say that I’m really amazed at the progress the site has made! It had fantastic potential before, but now it’s so user-friendly, it’s great!

Actually, because of the gap I took, I unfortunately forgot a bit of the languages I was studying. I also feel like I studied too little of far too many languages (a vocabulary of less than 500 words in 15 languages…). So, I decided to reset all of my statistics and start again from scratch. I’m going to try to make a personal rule to work on the languages I’m doing now until I reach at least a vocabulary of 10,000 words according to Lingq, before starting up a new language. I used to have around 15,000 in French and Japanese, and I felt the number of blue words on the page was extremely small, which I why I picked that number.

I’d like to share some ideas of the features of the new site that I like, as well as those that I think could still be improved.

I like that only the languages you’re learning show up in the language bar at the top. Before, showing all languages was too much of a temptation for me to start something I wasn’t ready for. The speed of the site is much better. The database of hints has grown tremendously. The number of lessons is fantastic. Even the quality of the audio seems to have improved.

Now for any improvements. Maybe I’m overlooking something, but has the feature to sort lessons by number of unknown words been removed? I think that’s really helpful for choosing a new lesson. Perhaps in the “sort by” dropdown box, if there was that feature, it would be great.

When I Lingq a word, if I click the hint, then move my mouse before it has saved, it sometimes saves the hint for a different word which I was hovering over. I’m using Firefox, by the way.

Some of the lessons have English words in them. It would be good to have an “ignore this word” button, so it doesn’t go into your statistics (again, maybe there is, but I’m missing it?)

I think that’s all. Anyway, I just want to thank you for making such a great site, Steve. It’s really a great resource, and I hope you have a lot of customers!

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@robg: “It would be good to have an ‘ignore this word’ button.”

First off, welcome back. As for the “Ignore this word” button. There are two ways that I know of to ignore a word.

  1. If the cursor is on the word, press the letter x on your keyboard. That will cause the word to be ignored.
  2. if the cursor is on the word and the Information Pane is open on the right, click on “Ignore this word.”
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Welcome back robg and thanks for the kind words.

“has the feature to sort lessons by number of unknown words been removed?”

You will notice that the filters on the left in the library include different ranges of % new words. I think there is also a plan to reintroduce a search by absolute number of new words, but I am not sure.

‘When I Lingq a word, if I click the hint, then move my mouse before it has saved, it sometimes saves the hint for a different word which I was hovering over. I’m using Firefox, by the way.’

I presume you are using the minimized view where you hover and then click. In the full view, you click on a word and then press Enter or click on Save in the Hint field, and the LingQ widget appears in the right hand pane. In either case I have not as a general rule experienced this problem. However, we do have the problem of occasionally “sticky LingQs” that don’t LingQ properly and this is a known issue. They are not that frequent but something we will fix.

“Some of the lessons have English words in them. It would be good to have an “ignore this word” button, so it doesn’t go into your statistics (again, maybe there is, but I’m missing it?)”

We still have the ignore button, or you can use the keyboard shortcut “X” to ignore words.

I recommend using the full view and using the keyboard, including the arrow keys as the most convenient way of LingQing.

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Thank you for the reply. I guess I missed the ignore button, thanks for that. Also, I saw the 1-5%, 5-10% etc. new words buttons, but I guess my current number of words is so small that only the “more than 25%” button works for now. Ok, I’ll get on with increasing my words stats!

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I just wanted to say that I too came back after having been away a pretty long time. I am still exploring the new design and am finding it to be absolutely wonderful. Thanks for all you do to make LingQ amazing.

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Welcome back Robg!

I like the select by bands of new words checkboxes, but I also liked that the old lessons page gave the absolute number and exact percentage of new words for each lesson. I still use the old lesson page view (which still works) for that.

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