I subscribed to Le Figaro this morning & now have access to all the articles on its website. However, when I try to import them into LingQ to read them I am only allowed to import the portion of the article that is available to subscribers & non-subscribers alike. I can see the full article on Le Figaro’s website, but I can’t import that full version into LingQ. I only get the same version I got yesterday, as a non-subscriber.
Why might that be? Has anyone had this problem with subscription materials imported from the web?
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I had the same problem with the Norwegian paper, Aftenposten. Never got import to work so I had to copy-paste manually. Eventually got tired of that an unsubscribed. Wish I could offer a solution to you.
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I’ve not tried with subscribed materials…I agree with Ryanaissance, you should be able to copy and paste into a lesson. Doesn’t seem all that cumbersome…I’ve done far more to get content into LingQ =).
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Thanks both. I can copy & paste … but it’s a faff, & the less of those in my life, the better. On a practical level, I can’t use the translate function in Sentence View if I copy over the article, so it’s all just that little bit harder to work with.
Hmmm, why can’t you use translate in sentence view?
Because when I copy over a large chunk of content & post it into LingQ, it stays in single-sentence form. Unless I very laboriously go through it, line by line, to separate out all the sentences. That would allow me to use sentence view, certainly, but I can’t do that every time I cut’n’paste a newspaper article. Too time consuming.
Unless I’m using the copy-into-LingQ functionality incorrectly … which I may be, given your query!
Hi davidc411…when you go to study the lesson and go into sentence mode, it puts the whole article on the sentence mode page??
I just tried myself by copying a German wikipedia article page and pasting it into a new lesson. It, of course, shows it as one paragraph in “Edit Lesson” mode. (you may be expecting each sentence in its own paragraph based on import from web extension). Nevertheless, if I go to the lesson to read and go into sentence mode, it has every sentence separated.
In sentence mode, It translates the sentence just fine, and it will keep the translation…You can also click the 3 dots and “edit sentence” if you want to change or save a different translation for the sentence. It will keep all these. (Although the only way I could figure out how to look at them was from editing sentence).
I think if it still isn’t working correctly in the reader, you might paste first into a text editor and then copy that out and paste it into LingQ.
Just on a technical basis, I may be doing this the wrong way. Here’s what I do.
From the newspaper I copy the approx 80% of the article which hasn’t been automatically decanted into LingQ via the import function, & I add that 80% to the end of the 20% that has already been imported into LingQ. I click “Edit Lesson”. There are, say, 4 paragraphs containing the 20%. I add the 80% that I’ve copied to the end of the last paragraph, and then I hit a ‘v’ shaped symbol on the right, which saves the newly inserted words. When I click “View Lesson” all the article has now been imported but the 80% bit is just one long piece. All the structure has gone. It’s effectively one sentence (visually, there are full stops, but LingQ doesn’t recognise them for translation purposes). I can scroll down to the end, click “Translate Sentence”, and the 80% is now set out in one long English translation. Which is better than nothing, but it’s not the kind of sentence translation that I get with the first 20% of the article.
Is that what you’re doing too, or is there some secret sauce that I’m not applying to the mix, to separate out each copied-over sentence and hence, its “Translate Sentence” functionality?
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I see what you’re saying. So I tried this…I imported an article from Nachrichten & Analysen: der globale Blick auf Schlagzeilen – DW (german news source). I then copied a portion of the article and pasted at the bottom similar to you (click plus at the bottom to allow for a new line of text). Pasted it. It saved. I see then like you said it is just grouped as one block.
You may have to play around with the following a bit. I’m still a little confused at what I’m seeing as I didn’t pay attention to the numbers…
Note the last paragraph number and it’s contents (for reference).
Click “Regenerate Lesson” button on the left hand side. It doesn’t give an indication of much…you’ll see the lesson as a straight plain selection of text. I think clicking on sentences didn’t bring up the typical entries to enter or change the translations, so I’m not sure if it was still “thinking” or there’s just a bug.
I went to reader mode than back to edit lesson. It seemed to have disappeared (the additional text), but I hadn’t checked the paragraph numbers, which were all back now.
I decided to paste again and pay more attention. Re-pasted at the end of the document like before. Clicked Regenerate Lesson. I also clicked the “Saved button” (not sure if it did anything). Then I went back out to reader mode and back into edit lesson. This time for sure it had added the new paragraphs. Jumped from 21 to 28. And you could now click on the individual sentences as you should.
Long story short…on your lesson try clicking “Regenerate Lesson” on lefthand side of “edit lesson” view and then go to reader mode and see if it’s all working for you. Again, I feel like I saw some quirks and maybe Lingq is just being slow but in the end it seemed to work.
Hi ericb100. For some reason I can’t reply directly to your message beginning “I see what you’re saying” so I’ll reply to it here.
Thank you for looking at this, first of all.
Secondly, I hate the technical obstacles that this site throws up! LingQ is such a good idea, but the technical implementation of it is so flawed & clunky in places. Why Is the functionality so non-intuitive?
I have just laboriously imported an article & split it all into Sentence View chunks, so it works … but I am not sure I could do it again (it’s so confusing) and it was time consuming. The “Regenerate Lesson” button seems to be, I agree with you, an important tool, but I don’t know how to use it properly yet. I’ve googled & found a comment by Mark on (I think) the Spanish section of the Community forum where he says, in relation to the LingQ5 upgrade: “The system splits content into sentences. Line breaks are turned into paragraphs. If you don’t like the formatting of your import, or want to make big changes, you can click the “Regenerate lesson” to edit the text and regenerate the lesson again. Long lessons have always been split into parts. Version 4 did the same.” Why is there not how-to guidance on this somewhere?
Anyway, I will keep experimenting. I may become quite skilled at importing the full text of articles which have only partially imported into LingQ using the ‘LingQ importer’. Who knows?
Anyway. Thanks again. D
Hi david.
I think if you did what I suggested…either:
Option a:
import the article as you’ve done, copy and paste the missing part of the article and click “regenerate lesson” it’ll work.
Option b:
Copy and paste the entire article into a “manually” created lesson. Manually fill in the title, etc.
It’ll just work with either of those. If not quite right, “regenerate lesson” will just do it for you.
You may have to exit the “edit” mode and re-enter to see the affects of the “regenerate lesson” as it appears to not refresh the display with what it ACTUALLY just did.
In regards to things not working here and there. It’s a new version. They’re trying to satisfy a lot of different people’s tastes and requests. Some people will be dissatisfied with certain directions. Not to say some things can’t be fixed that satisfy all users (like a true bug). I think the “edit mode” is still a bit of a work in progress. It’s better in some ways than the old way, a little worse in some other ways.
Also I think some things get blamed on LingQ when it’s really the content source’s “issue”. LingQ has to solve any time a particular source changes something (youtube and/or netflix have often tweaked something that causes LingQ some issues that they have to sort out). So you have to live with some of these kind of issues, but the benefit is there is a whole world of content that no other tools out there can do what LingQ is doing across so many diverse sources. So my viewpoint is always to have a little patience. If there’s a better tool out there, have at it =).
You’re running into a similar issue with subscription content…LingQ doesn’t have the permissions that your login for the subscription has so I’m assuming the extension is just getting cut off from accessing the “subscribed parts”. That’s why it might be easier just to copy and paste the whole article and then regenerate lesson if you have to. A bit of a pain in the butt, any other similar tool to lingq likely would have the same issue and or not even be able to import the article at all.
Of course, relay any feedback to LingQ if you find issues and they’ll take a look at things. (They just may have quite a backlog right now with the Lingq 5.0 rollout)
Hi ericb100,
Thanks a lot for getting involved with this. You have been helpful to me. I appreciate it.
On LingQ, though, I’ll cleave to my own view. I don’t blame it because there are problems importing content from subscription sites & I know it’s early days In the life of a new release of the platform software. And I repeat, the overall concept is great. I love it.
But I remain critical all the same. There is a fundamental problem with LingQ. It is much harder to use that it ought to be. It is not intuitive. I’m not demanding that extra features be added. Instead, I’m saying that there is a lot of hidden functionality on the site. Not deliberately hidden. Just very poorly designed or signposted. Or not signposted at all. You’re just supposed to know it’s there & if you don’t, the administrators don’t care. Some people - the administrators, site veterans & geeks - can find their way around easily enough. To everyone else, this place is a maze sometimes. The ‘Regenerate Lesson’ functionality is a case in point. That it can be used - perhaps is designed solely to be used - to sort out manually imported material is not obvious. Nor is the way to use it obvious either. If I eventually become proficient at using it it will only be because you & I fumbled around experimentally trying to figure out how to make it work.
The mindset of the administrators here seems to be that if it’s obvious to them, it must be obvious to the subscribers. And that’s just not the case. That is my criticism.
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SOLUTION: here is a brief update, just in case anyone else with this problem finds this thread. The way to import a full article from a newspaper or magazine you’ve subscribed to, when the LingQ import extension doesn’t seem to work, is this. Save the full newspaper article as a PDF (easily done on a Mac, at least), then use the “Import Ebook” function (currently found at the top right corner of the Library homepage) to import the PDF via drag’n’drop. Give it a title & you’re done. This imports the full article which, on LingQ, can now be read in its entirety in Sentence View.
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