I’ve got two very frustrating problems, where the system seems to be actively working against what I want to do. The most important one I think is that when I select a word, the system is not letting me make a lingq from it. It will increase the number of words over on the right side of the page, and sometimes it will add the selected characters to some nearby characters and think that that is a word.
for example, with 我一定能 the system thinks that 我一 goes together and 定能 goes together, but when I try to select 一定 and make a lingq out of it, the system decides that I must want to make 我一定能 into a lingq.
also whenever I try to make a lingq the dictionary doesn’t come up. I’ve tried changing the dictionaries and I get nothing. google dictionary will pop up a new window if I use firefox, but that’s not very convenient.
I’m using chrome, but I also checked on things a little in IE and firefox… and it seemed to act the same way, but I’ve already had enough frustration for the day, which was supposed to be dedicated to studying, but has turned into me fighting to try to use your website.
I might mention that it’s imported stuff that was having this problem, and I opened the ChineseLingQ, #17 Wolf & Huahua – A Rainy Day lesson and it seemed that it did a better job of determining which characters went together. But still if I try to select characters by themselves or in some arrangement the system doesn’t agree with it will select other surrounding it. like it thinks that 一天 goes together, so if I select 天 by itself the system selects 一 as well, and it simply refuses to let me select the one character as I want…
In situations when this happens, I open my vocabulary page in a separate tab and view the lesson in print mode where I’m able to highlight and copy whatever I want.
Thanks for the tips Jeff… I hope there’s some fix, I find that going back and forth out of what I’m reading breaks the flow and ruins my enjoyment of what I’m reading.
reminds me of something Douglas Adams said about computers, to the effect that you spend so much time getting them to do what you want them to do, that when you finally do get them to do something you feel a great sense of accomplisment.
@bobafruit - When selecting characters, are you doing this after you have clicked the I Know All button. It can be easier to select words this way without interference from the blue words. Also, if you are hiding spaces in the text, unhiding the spaces can help the selection mechanism from grabbing adjoining characters. Unfortunately, the highlighting accuracy is not 100% with Asian languages. We are aware of this and do intend to improve it. It is unfortunately, a tricky issue, given our need to identify words.
regarding the dictionary, only words with previous User Hints will display these in the blue popup. Otherwise, you must click the “New Hint” button to see the dictionary definition. The default dictionary Babylon appears in the the LingQ widget. All other dictionaries like Google Translate appear in another window as you describe. You can then copy and paste from the dictionary to your Hint field.
If you are having problems with imported content, it can often be some strange code within your text. If you go to your lesson editor page and select the text, then click the paintbrush button in the editor controls, this will often remove strange characters from the text and improve performance.
alright I’ll give your suggestions a try.
I think the paintbrush thing might work since I did import from MS word and that has a habit of doing strange things to text.
I made sure that the babylon dictionary was selected and it seems to work alright.
I am certainly not worried about the inaccurate blue highlighting, I can deal with that.
are you saying I should click the “I know all button” and then it will be more likely to allow me to select the characters as I wish and not select the adjoining ones?
All it needs to do is highlight the characters I select. Why does it automatically highlight additional characters other than the ones I explicitly selected? This does not seem to me like a useful “feature”.
So, I’m curious about why the system automatically selects more characters than I wanted it to select?
Is this a feature that’s useful in other languages or something?
I’m curious of whether this can be fixed, and I’m also a little curious because it seems simple to fix, yet as a part-time programmer I understand things aren’t always that simple.
@bobafruit - It is a bug and not a feature unfortunately. We are unable to accurately select text in some situations in Asian languages because it is unclear where spacing should go. We are aware of the issue and something that we hope to resolve in time.
I was feeling a little confused because you keep talking about spacing, and I’m talking about using my cursor to select a word.
So to check I switched over to english lingq opened up a lesson and started selecting at random and sure enough when I select a few letters the system automatically selects the whole word.
So actually in English that could be considered a good thing. But in Chinese it’s not.
No offense, but I don’t think you really understand what I’m trying to tell you here. I think the “spacing” you’ve been talking about is the wrong solution to the problem. I think it’s completely impossible to teach a computer to be 100% correct in putting spacing between Chinese characters.
So what you need to do is make the system flexible enough that people who know better than the computer where spaces ought to go could just select a word. Do you understand what I mean?
@Dillemme thanks for your efforts, but 一天 was just an example that I was trying to use to explain my problem with the system (I’ve already finished with creating lingqs for that lesson). perhaps if I want to solve the same problem in other dialogs I could put in space like that. Thanks!
I tried several lessons. I found that all the new content items worked fine, with most words recognized as words.
ON the other hand the first chapter of my book had many incorrect compound words and missed many. I tried copying the print version and reimporting it and it was still not good. It would be useful to identify those content items which seem to have the problem.
We use spacing or segmentation in order to identify words for the purposes of our statistics. This seems to inhibit the functioning of certain dictionaries. We are looking for solutions. I know that it has been improved, and that may account for why more recent content items seem to be basically OK. But then I do not understand why re-entering the chapter from my book would not solve the problem.
Firstly, the best thing is, I think, to put a space between each character in order that every one have right to select them.
For example, there are many possibilities.
I want to put a space like that.
有一天， 老师 让 我们 看 看 书 上 的 一 幅 写 作文。
The other person likes the following one to look up each character.
有 一 天， 老 师 让 我 们 看 看 书 上 的 一 幅 写 作 文。
But the second one is more flexible than the first one, we can choose any words, any character combinations we like.
Secondly, as the system does not work well, it is content providers (me too) that put a space in order that every one look up meaningful words.
As for me, I always share contents, especially chinese ones, after lingQing every meaningful words.
In my experiance, I am sure that there are grammatical characters we should learn a little in books and many idiomatic expressions we should learn by heart without looking for too many reasons.
Sorry for repeating same expressions many times. And I will delete the following address immediately unless anybody uses it. Actually, this content is not my level, there are so many books I have to learn. I will learn it later.
From a viewpoint of Chinese grammar, there are some problem of selecting characters or of a character.
As far as I know, there the following ones.
Clutch verbs 睡觉
For example, we can save this word in the following phrase without problem.
我 睡觉
But we can not save the same word. Generally, the complements of frequency and duration must be inserted between the two parts of a clutch verb.
我 睡 了 七 个 小时 觉。
So we have to save 睡 and 觉 as new words, but there is no meaning.
The reduplicated form for certain words
游游泳(Basically, this form is 游泳)
聊聊天(Basically, this form is 聊天)
So we have to save 游游泳, 聊聊天 as new words.
Other little problems also exist. I will report them later.
I forgot to say an important thing.
For example,
有一天， 老师让我们看看书上的一幅写作文。
有 一 天， 老 师 让 我 们 看 看 书 上 的 一 幅 写 作 文。
The second one is more flexible than the first one, we can choose any words, any character combinations we like. After we lingQ appropriate words, we refresh the lesson page. Then, the character combination is changed just like we saved words.
But unless we have certain knowledge of this language, we will have to try to look up many times the appropriate words, of which we can find the meaning in dictionaries.
And as for me, I use dictionary, Youdao, which you can find on the dictionary setting page. It is very useful. If I cannot find words in Babyon, Google dictionary, etc, I can find some words, some examples in this dictionary.