First of all the new 5.0 looks terrific. I really like the functionality.
Let me preface this by saying I use LingQ daily to read books in Chinese and this has been an issue for me for a while.
Is it possible to have to the 5.0 system keep the space/paragraphs of an imported epub book? This has always been my biggest complaint when reading books on LingQ as you end up with a massive wall of text for the entire book.
It’s not impossible to read but it can be confusing at times when there aren’t paragraph breaks and new lines for certain dialogues as you would see in the printed version of the book.
I know the Pleco Reader tool keeps the ePub source Formatting when you important a book to that system. Is it possible to keep that source formatting in LingQ?
Thank you for any guidance you can share on this topic!!
The quality and consistency (both in content and presentation) of available lessons
The inability to import your own lessons without then spending 2 hours trying to format them properly.
If LingQ can’t get these two things right, then there’s really no reason to pay being £15 per month.
It would be more efficient just to create a free blog (or even just use an offline html page), paste text in there, and use the Google Translate add-on for translation
I’ve found that if you copy the text from an epub to MS Word and then copy that text over to LingQ, it will have the paragraph formatting. In 5.0, you have to import the Word document because I can’t see a way to past and have it accept the formatting properly - it just makes a giant paragraph.
You’re right, but I’ve always had to use Word as a go-between in order to get the paragraph formatting to work properly. Perhaps they are trying to stick to the same procedures for v5.0 and then they’ll improve it later? Since they haven’t addressed any of the importing issues, we simply don’t know.
It would be much better if they could just make the editor act and perform like the viewer, or even just allow us to edit in the viewer. I don’t really understand why there has to be 2 different formats.
And the current method of being able to edit 1 paragraph at a time is ridiculously slow and painful.
You’re right that using Word makes it easier, but I’m also at the stage in my learning where I’m beginning to realise how much time I’ve wasted organising materials instead of learning the language.
The new reader is a big improvement for me, but it just feels like LingQ are unwilling or unable to fix some fundamental problems. I doubt their development team is anywhere near big enough, so they either need some big investment, or they need to find a buyer. I don’t know how profitable they are but there needs to be a way for them to appeal to new learners with ready-made courses, with images and short videos, or even take inspiration from something like Glossika and have some SSR for single-sentence learning
My favorite feature of LingQ is highlighting words and being able to call attention later when they show up again. It allows me to decide that a word keeps showing up and perhaps I need to apply more effort at learning it.
That said, like you, I’m starting to think that I would get a lot more reading in via Kindle with the fast word/phrase look-up that it has.
I use it mostly to highlight interesting phrases, that I can then export to Anki. But I find I never spend much time on Anki, so perhaps I can get 90% of the benefits of LingQ with just a basic ebook reader, or even just a regular book.
LingQ is convenient for me because of the mix of audio and text, but I’m beginning to think I should just consume material from source rather than trying to import and organise it.
I just found out: All feedback and comments on the beta must be entered in the current application update thread. The beta team are NOT responding to separate threads - only the primary.
Yeah, seeing where 5.0 is and how long it was in development has made me take the decision to leave lingQ, I’ll just use my kindle and spend the money on books.