Upon reviewing some our beginner content, such as the Who is She series in Italian, it is obvious to me that a lot of key grammar points are covered in these lessons. For example, there is a lot of use of the subjunctive. I wonder what the best way is to go back and add in some grammatical explanations of some of the key structural issues that appear in each lesson?
Is this something that we should do at LingQ headquarters or can we organize this within the community. And how to we create Notes for the different languages of the learners? Or do we just make English a default Notes language?
I think this should be available in all languages. The more you relay on English the more the impressions come to new users that it is a must to speak English if you want to use LingQ.
Users should be able to add notes. What prevents me from adding notes is that I cannot change notes that I put on the forum. I would love to have grammar notes at the same place as translations. Or just to add grammar notes to the translation?
We do have plans to add a Notes field in this manner. I agree that it makes sense to split Notes up by language if possible. Obviously, in our current Notes setup any language can be used although it tends to be English most of the time on the communal forums.
In a sense, in the present set up we are talking here, if I understand you correctly, about two sections, one which is really the tutors Forum for that language, ( the present Notes section), and one that would be an expanded Translations and Explanations resource tab and which would be more easily edited and would be tied to the language of the learner. Or should we separate Translations and Explanations?
I think a few notes on simple grammar issues and expressions can be helpful and comforting in the beginning. I remember that when I started to study Portuguese, I wondered about quite a few things, and I either looked them up elsewhere, or left them unattended. I thought that when I understood more I could go back to the first lessons and add the notes with the things that I struggled with, but I never did. It will be difficult to have the right level of details, you could test a kind of wiki system, where people can edit the comments on a text. However people should realize, that most things will become clearer with time, the more input, the more easy things get, so notes is may be barely a comforting thing for more traditional learners.
I think that we all agree that grammar notes can help other users.
The question is where to put them up.
Another concern of mine is if people will find the additional information (As I wrote in this post before: Suggestion: Please Point Out That There Are Additional Re...) I suggest that additional resources should be better pointed out. Maybe in the right side bar, or a special color of the card, or …? (Better ideas?)
I dislike to have the notes on the forum because I cannot edit the posts.
@Hape: Access should be given to Editors for this language, too. I added some translations to Irene’s content for example.
This might be slightly off topic, but it would be nice if phrases, idioms and common words that should be learned together, were more obvious to LingQ. The Quick LingQ tool only shows each individual word. So for example in, one of the earlier Spanish lessons of ‘Who is She’, it’s not obvious that ‘tal vez’ is really something that should be learned as one LingQ meaning ‘perhaps / maybe’, rather than learning ‘tal’ and ‘vez’ separately. There are other small 3-4 word phrases that I’ve found help, when the hint comes up with something that makes sense, but I’ve only found them by trial and error.
If it’s not easy to do this in Quick LingQ, would the notes or grammar page be a good place to bring attention to these kind of things for the earlier lessons?
Personally I’m not so much fussed about grammar in terms of genders and conjugations etc yet, but I’m only up to Part 7 and I assume that will come later naturally. Plus the translation really helps in that regards. I wouldn’t want to be overwhelmed with grammar points - the only thing I’ve looked up so far is what the difference between ‘estoy’ and ‘yo soy’ is, and that was when I was attempting some writing.
So far, it just gets a little harder when I get stuck trying to make sense of a sentence, and the words themselves don’t seem to add up to what the meaning is meant to be.