First, I absolutely love the idea of LingQ. I would use this as my primary language learning tool and basically subscribe forever if it did what it says it does. But I just cannot figure out how to get it to work. I can import text and create lessons, but I have yet to be able to import a video, a song, a podcast, a movie - anything but text. And when I look at the forums and how-to’s, there’s all these work arounds and complicated looking setups…like, is this not the whole point of this application? Shouldn’t there be a straightforward, user-friendly tutorial right when you join, showing you how to do it all? Why are we just thrown into the deep end and expected to download other mysterious things and do this and that and the other thing to get it to work?
Or am I just too old? I’m 38, by the way. Steve can manage it and he’s a lot older, right? What am I missing?
I’ve tried the phone app, I’ve tried desktop, I have the plug-in. I’ve tried all kinds of files. I either get an error message or it’ll ‘create’ a lesson but all it did was copy the copyright/credits. If this isn’t a legal system then it shouldn’t be a paid product like this. If it is legal to import files into LingQ then why can’t I do it?
I suggest you take a look at our Knowledge base with all the tutorials you need to successfully use available features:
Thank you, however I have already read the getting started guide and ‘how to import’ with Safari extension and it does not work the way it says it should. When I follow the instructions it leads me to an error message or copies only the credits, not the file/media.
I feel for what you are experiencing. I only import YouTube videos. A lot of them (when I can). And it is usually an involved process. If the YouTube video has subtitles provided by the content creator, then it’s pretty easy just by using the LingQ browser extension. However, if the video has YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles, then you will get awful results with that method, so it’s a lot better to do it as a more involved process involving an audio import, where LingQ has Whisper AI transcribe it. Afterwards you add a link back to the YouTube video.
See Youtube import with ai transcript not working? - #12 by ScottTyler
One day I might write up a detailed guide on how I do it, but I just don’t have the time right now.
I must be missing something here because if it wasn’t for the ease of importing I would be lost as I know very little about technology. Provided you have the LingQ extension then click on a YT video you want to import, make sure the subtitles are on in your target language and then press on the Share button. Choose the LingQ extension and then you just have to fill in a few boxes like which folder you want the video to go into and the level. Then press save. A few seconds later press OK and it will take you into the imported file in LingQ (some larger files will take a few minutes to import). Due to a change in YT copyright you will only get the text and video but not the stand alone audio to read along with - for this you have to extract the audio file from YT and import it separately. This is, atm, beyond my scope and is on my to do list as I much prefer to read along with the text rather than watch the video as the syncing is always out which makes it difficult.
Netflix is same principal but only brings in the text - no video.
One piece of advice I would give a beginner is to set up a Miscellaneous folder and use it to download new YT videos. In the beginning I set up loads of folders before realising the videos weren’t right for me and now have a mission to clear up loads of redundant folders - this is also on my to do list. I now download at least 4 lessons from one YT site into the Misc folder and if I like them, them I will set up their own folder. If I don’t like them, I just delete them.
Don’t give up - I’m much older than you and if it works for me then it should work for anyone. It’s also a game changer for learning languages for some people - me included!
If all of the above is old news and is just not working for you then send an email to support and they will look into it for you. Best of luck.
Ah yes, that is one of the reasons I said that if the YouTube video has subtitles provided by the content creator, then it’s pretty easy just by using the LingQ browser extension. Because then the subtitles tend to also be synced a lot better, in addition to being nicely presented in good word groupings.
It’s when the subtitles are auto-generated by YouTube that I have to spend a lot more time importing. And I go through the time-consuming process of correcting all the sync problems. I’m not actually learning the way most people are, I’m learning the language by spending the time editing, correcting, and then again re-proofreading lessons for other people to do.
If you look at my lessons, the text is nicely synced with the audio. I just wish that LingQ made correcting the syncing, and splitting paragraphs, a lot easier. I proposed an easy solution to that in the thread that I referenced above.
@caivail What exactly are you trying to import? If you can share an example I can take a look.