How many people use the search features? If in the Library, go to the Advanced Search view. Search for a word, phrase or category. Then search again based on another criteria like “percent of new words”. I can usually find something of interest at my level.
The same is true in My Lessons where I often import many articles from a web site all at once. I sometimes study some and do not get to the others. As I import more and more articles I lose track of the articles that I imported. If I can remember a key word of the name of the Collection I can search by that word. Then I search again by “percent of new words” and I can see the lessons that I have not done yet. When I finish one, I use the back arrow on my browser to get back to my list and choose another lesson to study.
If I want to review my imported Conversation Reports I just search using the word “conversation”.
Steve I find it very painful and pretty useless to search anything in the library or on My Lessons page.
In the library I search for provider and if I like a collection then I import the first lesson and keep opening “next lesson in the collection” until I’m finished with that collection. But that I can only do with 3 collections at the same time. Once a lesson leaves the first page of My Lessons I feel it’s lost forever.
I see My Lessons page as a black hole, once I take a lesson and it leaves the first page, it’s dead in my heart, even if I find it useful to study that lesson again I know I won’t because it’s gone forever.
I see the Library as a big handbag, I can dive my hand in and pick things inside, but if I want to search for a specific item I know it’s going to take lots of time, energy and effort so I don’t even bother.
I used to delete the lessons once I’d studied them so in My Lessons page I only had the lessons I wanted to study, but then the system will see that delete action as if I hadn’t studied those lessons before and when I saw those lessons again in the library I risked taking them again, so I’ve just assumed that I can’t delete any lesson. So chaos may reign in My Black Hole page! (I mean “My Lessons page”)
That would be pushing the chaos to the “Archive”, besides now I use the Archive to mark collections I’m half way in and want to keep studying in the future (because I can get tired of a collection and I want to study new collections for a while). Does that make any sense?
@Berta
Yes, it makes sense.
I archive lessons as Peter suggests, and I now have well over 300 archived lessons in French.
When I want to find a specific lesson in my archive, I don’t need Stephen Hawkin’s help. I set the order to A-Z and search for a word that I know is in the title. The “bonjour” of “Bonjour tristesse,” for example. I type in “bonjour,” press Enter, and voilà. The search results come up very fast.
Give it a try, why don’t you?
donha I can’t always remember the keywords to search for, and when I do the results that come up, most of the time, are huge. I feel depressed!. I’d like to be able to tag lessons, to be able to restudy specific lessons by its grammar or topic or whatever tag I may find useful. And I’m not always able to type the keyword correctly and that makes things difficult too.
I have dozens of pages on my Lessons page and that’s only because I used to delete old lessons.
Once you “I know all the words” of a Lesson, that the system counts it as already taken, so we don’t need to keep on "My lesson page! all the lessons we take and we’re able to delete them, not risking of opening them again because you can’t remember you already took it (in case you’ve deleted them).
Steve, the search by number of unknown words works for you? I wish it would work for me, but it takes forever, and does the opposite of what I want – I get pages and pages of lessons with 1 or 2 words unknown (even if I go to the last page of the search), and I can’t find lessons with larger numbers of unknown words. This happens searching in the Library or in My Lessons.
I agree with Berta. I never really understood what the purpose of Archiving a lesson was.
I always archive the first lesson (only) of a collection I want to study (or re-study) in the future. Like Berta, I also archive my ‘next lesson’ in a collection I’ve temporarily abandoned. From memory, I think I have about three pages worth of archives in both French and Spanish. I treat my archives as being all the collections I am studying or want to study. I hardly ever use the ‘actual’ library.
One benefit of archiving is that it speeds up searches. You can search for active lessons and for archived lessons. I tend to archive lessons once I am done with them. Then I can always go back and do them again later if I search for archived lessons.
We could make the “percent new words” sort go from the lowest to the highest. This helps the learner who wants to study the next easiest item of content.
We could then make the “number of new words” sort give you the highest result first. This would help the learner who is looking for lessons that he needs to complete. How would that be. We don’t really want to have to many options along the lines of “ascending” and “descending” for every sort. We think it adds confusion.
The thought of tagging lessons is interesting. What would you tag for? Just completed? Any other views out there. The problem is that we all use these things differently.
I think it would be useful if we had the option to personally place the lessons in the My Lesson area. If I’m sampling around, I get a lot of different lesson that I might not want to study. Also, I think it would be cool if we could download the entire collection as a group (still individual tracks) instead of clicking download for each lesson.
Most new words
Fewest new words
Highest percentage new words
Lowest percentage new words
Pretty simple. I’m trying to understand how that could be confusing but I can’t work it out. You’re confusing me with that assumption Steve! haha If someone can understand alphabetic and reverse alphabetic order, then this shouldn’t be beyond their reach. Give your users a bit of credit.
Of course, I’d never use any of these features and the only one I would find to be of any use would be collections view. We have expanded and archives, so a collection view would be good. Concerning a collection which has both archived and active lessons, just make it sensitive to that status. If you’re in the active view, then only show active lessons of the collection and vice versa. The current way to do it through the import section is ok but it’s really a something which should stay in the background and it doesn’t help with non-imported lessons.
I’m pretty happy more or less with how the Lesson page is working now.
HOWEVER a few things:
Like some other others, I dont get the “archive lesson” feature. I know its simple and I understand what you do with it, Steve, but after trying to use it the way its intended i decided not to use it as it’s not not useful at all. Now, I just keep everything in my “black hole” ( as berta puts it). Although, I do like the search function and can find most things very easily. My lesson page + working search function = WIN! That’s why I’m more or less satisfied with it.
If I could have my way , I would love having the ability to organize the lesson page in my own way with “FOLDERS” or in lingq terms “collections”. Theres already a system in place that seems to be working great on the IMport page and Iwould LOVE it if the lesson page would merge some of the import pages functionalities ( if thats even a word ). Tags would solve this problem too but I’m partial to being able to organize things the way you want in a folder like hierarchy. For example allow people to create a folder/set/collection in the my lesson page for “In progress lessons” and allow the user to put what they want in there… allow the user to create whatever folder or subfolders they want within their My lesson page…
I always liked how online email allows you to organize emails. I wouldnt mind if it would work a similar way on lingq. Being able to create folders and dragging and dropping as you please. Much like how Hotmail.com works… Perhaps too “complicated” for lingq? Most people have email accounts and know how to work them soo I’m pretty sure it would be easier for people to pick up that kind of system as opposed to how lingq works at the moment…
Like I said, If i could have my way =). I doubt that would ever be implemented but I certainly would love being able to organize things the way I want on “my lessons page”.
Either way , like i said , I’m more or less satisfied with the lesson page at the moment. For the longest time I was using the Import page as my lesson page because I import all my stuff anyways and was the Easiest fastest and best way to find what i needed. i’ve been using the my lesson page alot more these days though , ever since they fixed the search function…
kero maybe it takes time to get used to tagging, but since I got used to it with my gmail account I find it far more useful than folders.
The main advantage is that you can use more than 1 tag for each lesson (or email), so you could have #family#to-do#phone over an email. Tags are just like folders but I find they’re a bit of a 3D feature compared to folders that could be 2D feature.
Berta, I totally understand Tags. I use them daily for my work. I wouldn’t complain if they added tags though. I would use them but I would still prefer folders in this case. why? No paticular reason really other than personal preference. admittingly , tags would probably be the easiest thing to implement and overall most flexible method…
I have both gmail and Hotmail and overall i just prefer the folder method. I dont think folders are superior in anyway… quite the contrary. They are a crude and simple way to oraginize things in a fairly straight forward method… I can also think of dozen of reasons why Tags are probably better =)… BUT overall I personally prefer folders. They just work for me. to each their own i guess…
One way or an other I’ll be happy to see any improvements done to lingq…
