So I’m very new to LingQ, but I’ve already found something that is slightly confusing. I’m learnging japanese, but one of the parts that is confusing is the hints. I’m taking a Japanese class currently, but I’m noticing that many of the words such as ikimasu, are separated and therefore confusing. When you hover over iki, it gives you a completely different defination of the word then when you hovered over iku. I suppose it’s just me being new, but wouldn’t it be more correct to have ikimasu highlighted instead of iki and masu? Perhaps I just need some more help on how to make LingQ work for me.
You can highlight both “iku” and “masu” so your hint will be “iki masu”. Then, click on the pencil next to the hint and then delete the space so you have “ikumasu”.
As you know, Japanese does not naturally have any spaces between the words, so we had to create an algorithm that split words up to make it possible to LingQ them. The algorithm works very well at doing this, but naturally there are still a few situations in which problems arise.
The hints that you see are User Hints, meaning they are hints that other users have attached to this specific term. The 3 most popular (if there are previous hints) will be shown in the LingQ widget, but you are free to click “+ New Hint” to search the dictionary yourself and find a hint that you prefer.
Regarding creating LingQs out of these words, there is the option of, as James123 notes, highlighting these two “words” and creating one LingQ out of them. However, since “masu” is simply a grammatical particle/pattern you can also mark it as “Known” and just save the stem of the verb. In this case it is completely up to you how you choose to approach it.