Out of interest, how are you importing audio for epubs? AFAIK, they get divided into individual lessons that you would have to assign different parts of the audio for…
Yes, certainly. But the point is that the large companies have the resources to fix issues. Whether they choose to do so or not is a matter of policy or a commercial decision or whatever. Whereas my guess is that smaller businesses like LingQ are forced to ration resources strictly between fixing existing issues; coping with the fact that external resources like YouTube keep changing the rules; and trying at the same time to innovate. So they are forced to make hard decisions about how much resource can be spared for issue X or to provide new feature Y. And the result is constant firefighting.
This was my point.
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I had intended this thread to be about the history of LingQ, but as others have speculated on underlying reasons, I will comment.
None of us know what the reason is for the flaky state of LingQ. We can only speculate.
I’ve seen a couple of consistent issues.
The first issue is show stoppers. The worst I have seen was when the iOS app crashed immediately after opening meaning that it was completely unusable for over a week. I figured out a fix which was to remove and reinstall the app, it would then run for twenty minutes of so before the bug reappeared. That sort of bug just does not appear in other applications. At present when I use the iOS app, it regularly hangs and crashes. Again I’ve never experienced that with other applications. And if I am in video mode and switch to the mail app to check incoming mail, then switch back to LingQ, it rewinds to the start of the video, and it can be very difficult to refind the current position. That was reported many months ago.
The second issue is bugs that appear in existing functionality. Thus for weeks the title of imported videos was nonsense. The pop up dictionary dialog used to work well, now it can take ages to appear, and often I cannot get it to display all definitions, it only displays the AI one. The UI regularly hangs for several seconds until it becomes responsive again. When bugs regularly appear in existing functionality, it suggests highly coupled code.
Although I am not privy to the internals of LingQ, the above indicates that they have massively inadequate testing, or they simply don’t care. My guess is that someone designs the UI, then someone farms out the tasks to developers, they complete the fixes, which are integrated and then released. Releases are frequent. Testing by individual developers is inadequate, and there is no integration testing. Supposition yes, but it would explain what we see.
Is this due to a lack of staff? Not necessarily. They should work to a quality rather than a quantity, and if progress is too slow, then hire more staff. Alternatively allow a beta release. Some users will have the beta release and report back bugs, which can then be fixed. The benefit for them could be free access to LingQ. Only when the release is stable does it move to a general release,
This year LingQ advertised two marketing jobs. So funds are not scarce. Clearly marketing is a higher priority than a stable product.
On a side issue, I’ve been testing Language Reactor. The difference in usability is dramatic. I can copy a line of text with one key press. In LingQ I have to do far more key presses. In LR a dictionary pops up instantaneously, in LingQ it can take tens of seconds. In LR I can play the video, and read the transcript and the translation at the same time. In LingQ I have to switch modes, and do several key presses, then switch back.
Is LR better? No. I believe they only have two developers which limits their capacity to add features. It does not support importing videos, hence it does not keep a record of the users progress. You can watch any YouTube video in YouTube using the LR plugin as long you are not on iOS, so that’s tough for me and others. iOS users can only view a limited selection of videos with LR. On iOS LingQ has advantages. LR is a more limited alternative with IMO a significantly better UI.
Finally, why do I think I have something relevant to say? Because I worked in software development for 40 years, in numerous companies, on numerous products, some excellent, some poor. I’ve seen what can go right, and what can go wrong. The two key causes of problems are inadequate testing, and strongly coupled (spaghetti) code. Lack of staff means slow progress, rather than lots of bugs.
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I had a good laugh when I first read that. On reflection I think you were not joking, and there is much truth in your suggestion.
Yep. I think you’re right about testing only being done on short texts. I tend to use quite long newspaper articles. Once you get near the end, Lingqs take ages and you can’t even turn the page. Clearing the audio cache is working so far, but I might just have been lucky.
Importing lessons, meanwhile, has various bugs, but there are all kinds of workarounds. Lessons freezing is by far the biggest issue. I think they should use a few of us serious users as a consultation group. The software does things nothing else gets close to. I’m really keen to get it working better.
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Ah! I too have worked in software development - though over a much shorter time, after retiring as a teacher. I couldn’t bear to have bugs messing up my product. We tried to fix bugs in hours. Lingq seems to be happy to leave major bugs there for months. Why?
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My solution of clearing the audio cache doesn’t seem to work all the time. Choosing Google Translate as the default translation software seems to make a difference. Lingq doesn’t seem to slow down as much as it does with ChatGPT. Lessons-Settings-Reader.
Fixing the bugs would be a better solution!!
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It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.
If you attract a large number of people to a product and the product doesn’t function well for them, they leave. The solution is not always attracting more people.
Language learning is a lot like going to the gym, though. Every gym sees a rush in January, and most of those never return in February for reasons that have nothing to do with the gym.
LingQ would have to compare itself to “normal” behavior to see how well it is doing at retention. It’s complicated.
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Where are you unable to select more than one word? Phrase selection should be working on all apps.
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Selecting more than one word for a Lingq doesn’t work on Google Chrome on iOS
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I might have unintentionally mislead you here. For Epub text only I use the built in epub import function.
For timestamped audio and text for reading-while-listening I use the audio import first and then pull in the epub text using the following steps:
- Acquire the audio files ( typically 1 file per chapter basis)
- Split that audio into 30 min maximum segments*
- Import the audio files and use LingQ transcription as a first pass.
- Using the transcription text as a guide for start and stop points, copy and paste chapter by chapter from the ebook, replacing the transcription text.
- Regenerate the timestamps automatically with LingQ for each lesson
It is tedious, but the matching text and audio are really nice.
For some books, I just import the epub and audio into separate courses, and use one course for reading and one for audio to play in a playlist. Currently I’m doing that with the Hobbit. It would be nice if there was a way to match these automatically, but this is how I make do.
*The 30 minutes splits may not be technically necessary, but I find it avoids the uncertainty of word count limits, audio time limits, and transcription issues.
As an former software quality manager, I know most of the procedures how to design and release software. I have worked with small systems and big government systems.
About testing, you are never “done”. You can keep testing for as long you want, and there will always be some bugs left. In every software produced and will be produced. And long testing periods, means lot of work, and in the end there are still bugs you didn’t find.
How many here are prepared to pay a higher annual fee to LingQ, so they can hire more testers, in exchange getting a more bug free software?
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I’d distinguish between bugs and better usability. Minor bugs I can live with, albeit I would hope that they are squashed reasonably quickly once identified. (And I wouldn’t necessarily count eg YouTube issues as bugs if YT keep changing the rules and maintaining compatibility for import becomes a moving target. But speed of resolution, where possible, for such issues is highly desirable of course, which I guess means more developer resource.)
But TBH the user interface has several shortcomings and yes I would pay more for a thoroughly overhauled version. For example:
- Why is there a separate audio playback control for sentence view vs page view (and in a completely different place on the screen)? Surely it’s within the developers’ skills to combine them into a single control in the same screen position with the same shortcut and that uses the same mechanism to set the playback speed.
- Why is it so difficult to navigate between sentences in sentence view, eg going to a specific sentence or returning to the initial sentence?
- The menu structure could do with a review. eg why isn’t Help on the main top-level menu rather than buried in the user’s account dropdown? And is Tutors really used so often that it deserves a place in the top-level menu?
- A redesign of the options by which lessons and courses are presented as outlined in another current thread.
- And there would be other personal preferences for changes. For me, the whole gamification angle is a total distraction and I welcome a setting to completely turn off coins, challenges etc and thereby clean up the UI. The only motivation I need is to improve my known words score (though I would welcome a metric that also factored in the progress of words from 1 to 4 before becoming fully known).
- Etc etc. This is a totally non-exhaustive list, just things that occur to me on the spur of the moment.
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Indeed. However, LingQ don’t have any release standards, the app currently crashes every ten minutes, and hangs regularly. It has in the past been completely unusable for extended periods.
Regarding your experience, do you know what dependency injection is?
Of course, but whilst bugs are an inescapable feature of software, software architecture and development practices have a huge impact on the frequency and nature of bugs, and the speed of development. In other words, it is posible to have less bugs and more rapid development.
I worked on a large government project that employed huge teams of engineers and testers. The architecture was such that the cost to add features and fix bugs was huge. I worked on another similar product developed by a small team of 6 engineers, and the cost to add features and fix bugs was much lower, certainly by a factor of ten, and maybe even as high as 100.
I’m no longer prepared to pay the existing annual fee to LingQ. LingQ is unstable and sometimes unusable.
They advertised two marketing roles this year. That tells us their priorities.
There are alternative products already on the market, such as Language Reactor, a product created by a small team - two developers I think - with a better and more stable UI design. Competion will become even more intense.
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Interesting. I have found out that you can “trick” LingQ into making lessons longer by regenerating lessons. If the chapter is split, regenerate with the full chapter text, rename the lesson as appropriate and then delete the redundant lesson(s) (part 2, 3, …)
With that, you can then import the full chapter audio and generate timestamps.
(I don’t know if making the lessons longer than intended has a deleterious effect, though…)
Woah! Your app is crashing currently? Mine is stable across multiple platformsm thankfully. No wonder you’re reconsidering 
Last night it crashed many times. It also hung several times, and I killed it rather than wait. Sometimes if I wait 20 seconds it will respond again, or not.
I watch longer videos, and I suspect they just don’t care about this use case.
@sfoxall We don’t really support the full user experience on the mobile browser. Touch screen devices operate differently. If you want the proper experience you should download the iOS app.
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Yep, I’d always prefer the iOS app. I only try the browser when the bugs in the app get me down.
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Is this the iOS app? Do you have the latest version? We are aware of the freezing issue and are trying to identify the cause. But, it does seem better for me at the moment.
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