I understand I can sort my flashcards by creation date, but is there anywhere I can actually see what date/time each lingq was created? This would be very helpful.
We do not show this information now. We are not going to make any changes to the basic functionality until we get through a number of other issues on the site. However, if there is interest in showing this in some way we can look at it. All suggestions are welcome.
In my view, it is more important to meet these LingQs again and again i your listening and reading. You will learn them and forget them and finally learn them. I am not sure if seeing the creation date is that useful, but that is just me.
As you use the system more and more, you will accumulate many examples of where you have encountered your LingQs. You can search these by clicking on “examples” in the LingQ box… When you do that you can check for the example that corresponds to the example in your LingQ box. Then you can click on the little arrows to go back to that item. That is a lot of work and I think your time is best spent listening and reading and reviewing words and phrases.
Happy LingQing!
It would certainly be helpful for me to be able to search by creation date, because I’m following a university Spanish course and using lingq as a note-taking tool (in addition to taking advantage of the additional learning opportunities on the site). Folks like me might be a market you want to exploit in the future, since there doesn’t seem to be any other online language-learning resource that integrates referencing and flashcard functionality so successfully. But if you do so, the creation date will definitely be important.
Otherwise, keep up the good work. I’m enjoying using the site.
Please do not get me wrong. We definitely want to offer lots of functions and meet the needs of various users. We have a mountain of tasks in front of our programmers, and have to resist the urge to improve things that basically work, until some major additional changes are successfully done.
If you are importing your college course content you have the date when you imported the content.
In any case your request is noted but for the time being any changes to the functionality and, therefore to the way the information displays, is on hold.
I would be interested to know if others are also interested in this feature, and how important it is to others.
jamminalley,
what a great idea to use Lingq for revising college notes. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I already have my classes recorded and I have loads of notes to go with the recordings. I think it would probably be more pleasant to listen and read at the same time. I’ll try it in the upcoming semester.
I thought of the same thing a while ago. Since the creation dates must be stored somewhere in the database already, it shouldn’t be hard to show them on the vocab list.
If there is no time for it now, I would suggest to throw it in when LingQ adds the export feature. It is only an extra field to export.
A few questions to anyone
- Where would you display the creation date?
- What is the purpose of displaying the creation date? How does this help a person learn?
- How would you use LingQ together with your University courses? Would you Import your own notes? Would you import course material? review them in Flash Cards? What kind of LingQs would you save?
- Is this useful only for courses that are not in your own language, or for courses in your own language as well?
- If (and that’s a big IF) I would find the information useful at all, I think I’d prefer the info next to “Hints” in the vocabulary list (i.e. to the far right) - nowhere else would I see it beneficial. In my opinion the ability to sort by creation date is good enough. I pretty much know which items I studied first.
- I don’t have answer for this one. If one needs the exact date for each word saved, one could probably enter it in a spreadsheet along with suitable tags for further documentation/statistical analysis… No, I fail to see any particular benefits.
- I regulary import lessons from my university course, keep track of my listening, save LingQs et.c.
- I could always import stuff in my own language if I wanted, but I still can’t see why I want to know when I saved this or that LingQ.
One could always tag the words with the actual date.
I never thought of that and I don’t think I would use it myself this way, but it could be an interesting idea. Even better if one uses the tool for learning a language together with some other subject…
Uau, I liked it. As a teacher I could read some texts so my students would listen to then while commuting. I could share them with a written version at LingQ. My students could then make lingQs both to unknown words AND to important concepts, in order to use the flashcards to study them.
Huummm… this could be an interesting way to address a lot of problems at the same time. The students would study my subject more frequently, while learning some related English and more interesting, they would learn the LingQ way of studying languages (or should I say the LingQ way of learning?) Finally, I would have a concrete motivation to produce a lot of good quality English material.
An interesting idea to be worked on, don’t you think?
It will be useful to those, like me, who always fall short with our SRS schedules. Sometimes we just want to restart the whole scheduling, but then I might want to rerun my stack of LingQ I created, say, 2 months ago up to a month ago, but want to skip those I have created in the past month.
I don’t think it is a “must have”, but it will take virtually no extra effort to include the field while working on the vocab export feature.
My assignments in lingq consist of homework from my Spanish course, combined with any reading or listening texts assigned for the subsequent class period. These assignments are organized according to the date of the lesson. I think it might be useful to have access to the creation date 1) in order to prepare for quizzes on vocabulary from specific lessons, which my instructor says she plans to give; 2) to be able to revisit the full context of an item beyond what’s stored in the flashcard in case I can’t remember what it was; and 3) in the case of difficult-to-learn items, to have information about how long they’ve been in the database.
If you were to include the creation date in a lingq, I would suggest listing it next to the status and tags info, or underneath the word or item itself.
I originally suggested this because clearly the information is already being saved in the lingq database and so I didn’t think it would be a difficult thing to display this information to the user.
Hi Steve,
I don’t know about the creation date, it doesn’t seem useful to me yet. On the other hand, at first many of the features of lingQ that I was not familiar with did not seem very useful and have turned out to be of great help.
As for your question about University courses: I study Dutch at a University in Amsterdam and I generally record the lectures as well as create a transcript. If I were to import these into lingq then that would stimulate me to find explanations for words used in the lecture that I am unfamiliar with and then the LingQs of the day would urge me to review a bit more often than I normally would.
Usually teachers use powerpoint presentations of which they provide us with a text document after class so this I could also import and read.
In addition there is course material, mostly already in word or pdf format, which should be read before the class starts. In the classes I attended thus far, these materials have been in English, German, French, Latin and Dutch.
(You have to love studying literature, don’t you?)
You can see how very useful LingQ can be in deciphering all this in time for class…
Sometimes we also have workgroups. The purpose of these is usually to do some research as a group of three or four and present the results of this research to a group of peers. If the research has been on for instance English literature of a certain period we will be expected to present result in English and speaking English as well. Should all members of the workgroup study at LingQ there would be opportunities to have assignments corrected and have meetings about the presentation on skype with a tutor, so as to have our pronounciation corrected.
Oh, there is just so much that could be done!
The funny thing is that we thought this would be an excellent study tool just as you describe using it and even approached some universities about trying it but, we never had much luck convincing anyone. Part of the problem is that until they have used the system they really don’t get what we’re talking about.
That’s great that you’re doing this. Do you find it’s helping you with your studies as well as with your languages?
jamminalley
You can achieve most of what you need right now.
1)You can find your previous assignments and review the list of words from that assignment. Granted the word lists includes words saved earlier, but it includes the ones you saved from that lesson. Just make sure to enter the date in the title of the item. You can search your workdesk to find what you need.
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When you review a LingQ you can click on examples and find the one the is the same as the one the system captured. Then click on the little arrows and you will be in that original text item.
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As to how long words have been in the data base I would suggest that the exact date is not that meaningful. If you review your words in the “Creation Date” view, just start at the back and see how many words that were saved early on are still not known. I sometimes do this. What it usually shows me is that the words I have learned recently are easier to remember. Often words that were introduced earlier on were not that useful, have not come up again and are not important.
Nicole,
I am very interested in the use of LingQ by university students and want to start another thread on this subject.
I am not in favour of introducing the date, not just because it will take a small amount of programming time, nor just because I do not think there is a widespread need for it. A bigger reason is that to some extent, the more information we display and the more functions we have, the more confused people get. We already are concerned about over complication and have to move in the direction of simplicity, in our view.
In the far distant future we may allow elite learners to customize some features, but not in the short term. Sorry but I do appreciate the many suggestions we receive, all of which will influence the direction of our development.
Mark,
Yes, even the normal use of Lingq helps my general university studies. When I have a class and come home and read at Lingq I notice words in texts in other languages that have a meaning similar to words that have been used in class. I save these words as LingQs and have had better results at my written exams ever since.
(By the way to all of you who recorded these texts: thank you so much for frequently discussing grammar and the usefulness of learning it. Some of my classes are on grammar theory and you all managed to use a great deal of technical terms which I really have to learn.)
I was of course very pleased when I noticed the Dutch-English dictionary was already functional. I can now get a word defined in my own cd-rom Dutch dictionary and have an English explanation of the word to compare it to. Sometimes when something is explained to me twice, but slightly differently each time, I start to grasp the idea, whereas otherwise I would have to learn the definition by heart.
Of course when I import material from class to study in LingQ this helps me learn languages even faster because then the learning at University reinforces the learning at LingQ.
O.k., off to find this other thread Steve mentioned…
Oh, perhaps I should mention that I was told about your website in a newsletter that many students of Dutch and of comparative language subscribe to.
Jamminalley - in my opinion you can get what you want if you tag each word according to the lesson, e.g. lesson 1= “lesson 1”. Doesn’t it seem good enough? It works that way in other SRS programs, so why not borrow the idea…
Thanks, Jeff. Yes, I understand that I can use tags for that purpose, though it does add an incremental amount of work to creating each lingq that adds up over time. As I mentioned, I originally posted this thread just because it was clear the database was already collecting this information and I thought I was just being a bit thick and couldn’t locate where the creation date was supposed to be visible.
And Steve, I understand where you’re coming from. You no doubt have a lot of requests for new features and you need to sort through them to find the ones that will be of value to the greatest number of users while taking care to see your original vision for the site doesn’t get morphed into something different and muddled.
As for Mark’s observation about universities, I think that’s right – many people probably don’t get it. I think most foreign-language programs and instructors (at least in the U.S.) still undervalue and underteach lexis. And they certainly have very little understanding of the benefits of spaced repetition. Plus, there’s always the inherent conservatism of teachers. Get this - I had to make a special plea to my Spanish instructor to allow me to use my laptop during class, to the point of demonstrating to her what the lingq site was and how I could use it to keep track of the lookups I did during class. Instead of giving me points for my innovation and initiative, she was skeptical; I’m sure she thinks I’m really just checking Facebook or playing solitaire.