How do I get my blue words back?

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Brand new user here, just signed up for my first month, and am experimenting with importing some texts.

My text was paginated into what appeared to be 3 pages, but the third page turned out to be just a page exulting about all the new words I’ve just learned. Except I haven’t learned any of them yet. But now the’ve all been marked as known, and they’re indistinguishable from the words I marked as ignorable. In the iPhone app I can’t even tap them.

“Paging moves to known” is already set to off, but this extra “Contrats” page apparently overrides that setting.

I tried deleting the imported text and re-uploading it, but the spuriously “known” words are apparently stored separately. They’re even been marked white in my other texts.

How do I un-“know” them so I can learn them?

Thanks!

2

Yes, words that are set to known in one text are stored by your account and are set to known everywhere else too. This means that as you progress and read more and more texts, each new text that you open will only have the words marked blue that you have never seen before. The words that you do not know should be marked yellow.

I don’t know what the best solution is for your case. On the website, you can select ‘known’ words and save them but it is a bit tedious to go through every word in the text and mark them as known. Since you have only just started, you can just reset Korean on your account by going to the drop down menu at the top right and clicking ‘Settings’, and then ‘Languages’ on the left menu. This will reset all statistics to zero. I would not suggest doing this later on when you have built up a large number of known and saved words.

2 Likes
3

Thanks Colin, it makes sense that the learned words are stored globally.

Being new to LingQ I’m just not yet seeing the value in ever taking the words that I haven’t learned yet, and removing all indication that they’re new to me. Much less having LingQ do it automatically for me. Wouldn’t that gradually litter my texts with more and more unmarked words that I have no clue about?

It’s likely I’m just not yet grasping what LingQ is trying to do for me with this feature. If I have it right, blue words are words I haven’t studied yet, yellow are ones I’m studying, and white/unmarked are the ones I no longer need to study. Having blue words jump directly to white words seems really strange to me.

For example, I’m fairly early into studying Korean. There are verb and adjective forms that are still beyond me, so those are going to remain unstudied until I get to the point where I have the background knowledge of how to disassemble them and understand what they’re doing. I don’t see why I’d want any of them suddenly marked as “known.”

Is there a FAQ that explains this more clearly somewhere?

4

Any word you don’t know, “lingq” it, you do that by selecting it and choosing one of the proposed translations or entering your own. Lingq’ed words turn yellow and will remain so until you choose to declare them “known” because you’ve got to memorize them.
In the default configuration, blue words you don’t Lingq, get immediately turned to “known”. If you find that default behavior inconvenient, do change the settings by clicking the gear button on top of the lesson.
My advice in your case is the same as Colin’s: because you’re just beginning go reset your stats and begin again, maybe change the settings and from now on, lingq everyword you don’t understand. Change the status of the lingqed words as you get familiar with them. Remember: the more you read, listen and lingq words, the more you’ll learn.
I wish you success in your learning

5

Hi Pres,
Make sure to watch our Lesson Page Tutorial Video, it should help: Lesson Page Tutorial and review of the new LingQ reader. - YouTube
The general idea is that you want to get rid of the blue words on the lesson page and create LingQs (yellow words) for the words you don’t understand or want to learn better. When you click on a blue word you see different hints for that word in the dashboard on the right-hand side of the page. Choose one of the hints or check the dictionary to create your own hint. You can also tell us if you know the word already or you may sometimes want to ignore the word and not include it in your stats.

6

Please can you explain why there are different sign around the numbers of the hints.
Example in the video at 4:25 is “Voulez”.
The hints are:
want 247
(vous voulez) you want (21)
vous you want 10
Why are there stars with the first and last hint and brackets with the second hint?

7

@ Pres

There are different ways to use the system, but the way it was intended is that you do not really study words. Instead, you simply read lots of texts and save every word that you come across. When you do not know a word, you save it as a LingQ, and it is therefore marked yellow. If you do know a word, you save it as known. If you follow the standard LingQ method, you won’t differentiate between words you don’t know and want to learn and words you don’t know and don’t care about. As you read, you will learn words by coming across them in texts, and the more important words you will learn faster because you see them more often.

However, this might not be your preferred method, and more important than following a prescribed method is to do what you want to do and learn how you want to learn. If you want to differentiate between unknown words that you want to concentrate on and those that you don’t care about, there are many ways. For example, you can add tags to words you find important, and then you can go study them in the vocabulary page. This is a bit tedious though and when you are reading a text, you won’t really see the difference between these unknown words and other unknown words. What I do is I set unknown words that I think are important to status 2 and leave the other unknown words at status 1. This makes them a little more lightly shaded than the other words. Maybe you can try that.

In general though, it is better not to leave any blue words in texts that you are reading. I hope this helps.

8

Zoran, and other developers, I think something to take from this is that people don’t like having words turned automatically to blue. In the previous software, this would never happen.

4 Likes
9

Several people mentioned it and complained about this during the Beta test. The option to fix it in the settings was created. Again several people suggested that the default should be, letting the blue words blue. But this was neglected. I knew that this would cause trouble.

2 Likes
10

The stars appear around words or phrases that have been flagged by a member in the past.

11

@Pres - Some good tips have already been shared. The thing to remember is that blue words are not words you haven’t studied, they are words that are new. Once you see them they are no longer new. You need to tell the system whether you know the word, or it’s a word you want to learn (the vast majority of words) or you want to ignore it. By default, we assume you know any words you don’t create LingQs for.

You should create LingQs, lots and lots of LingQs. You don’t need to review and “learn” these using the review tools. You can use the review tools to help but you will learn these words best as you read them again and as you see them in future lessons in different contexts.

Don’t feel like you need to nail down all words right away. It’s a process and happens over time as you move on to new lessons.

In your example, you should LingQ all the verb and adjective forms you mention. You will see these every time you re-read this lesson and in future lessons when they re-occur.

Regarding words that have been made known already, just click on the words you want to LingQ as you read the lesson. If you know the word skip by it. If you want to ignore it, click and ignore it. When you make a white word blue you can see if it is known or ignored because the corresponding button will be greyed out.

On the app, you can tap and hold to make white words blue again.

12

Thanks everybody, I’m understanding what it’s all about a lot more, have watched more of the videos and have been enjoying myself making more and more LingQs, getting a better feel for the whole process. This is a very nifty way to study!

Apologies for the giant post here, but just I want to make sure I’m explaining myself clearly. Then I can relax and just go study some more texts! Feel free to skim.

I’m liking LingQ enough that it’s essentially a done deal that I’ll be purchasing a year’s worth once my first month comes close to expiring, so don’t take this as one of those “You’ll never get my money until you change this!!1!” rants. There’s more than enough that I like about LingQ, that makes this one thing stand out as an anomaly that blocks my smooth language study: Those dang blue words keep being stolen from me.

I know that I can hunt them down after the fact and add LingQs to them, but that’s still a lot of extra work for me each time I mess up, so I’ve been avoiding the terrifying “Complete lesson” button on the web and “Move all blue words to known” button on my phone, as well as the unmarked landmine of the horizontal scroll bar suddenly taking me to the Congrats Page of Doom. But somehow I’ve still managed to de-blue-ify several of my lessons. (Fortunately I’m importing mostly short texts to use while familiarizing myself with the system so the “damage” is minimized each time.) Currently I have about 150 words marked as known, perhaps 10 of which were marked deliberately.

I still don’t get why auto-marking is considered a good feature to have, but be that as it may. Presumably there are people who find this to be such a no-brainer useful feature that it was designed as the default for everybody. Fair enough.

All I’m asking is that something be implemented that lets me not live in fear of borking the lesson I’m working on. Trying to focus on the language while I MUST NOT TOUCH THAT BUTTON!! is rather distracting.

Any and all of the following suggestions would really help, in approximate order of difficulty of implementation:
• Near the “I know this word” and “Ignore word” buttons, add a third button “Mark word as new.” Then I can at least feel secure that I can manually go back and re-mark every word I’ve lost, one by one. This one feature would be a godsend.
• Add a prominent “Are you sure? All new words will be marked as known!” confirmation dialog in any circumstance where blue words are threatened with mass destruction.
• Add a check box to the settings gear menu saying essentially “Under no circumstances change any blue words to known unless I manually do it word by word.” Kind of like what we already have with disabling the “Paging moves to known” checkbox, but even more useful. This would have to override what happens when you go to the Complete Lesson page.
• It would be nice to have a robust Undo function that reliably works in every circumstance where blue words are moved to known. Buuut actually I have no idea how you’d implement that in the UI, so maybe this last one is a bit unrealistic.

Please consider implementing at least the “Mark word as new” function. Everything else would just be an inconvenience if that one thing were available.

Would this be useful to anyone besides me?

2 Likes
13

“I’ve been avoiding the terrifying “Complete lesson” button on the web and “Move all blue words to known” button on my phone, as well as the unmarked landmine of the horizontal scroll bar suddenly taking me to the Congrats Page of Doom.”

Well said!

2 Likes
14

I think the big issue here is to not think of getting rid of blues as breaking the lesson. Blue words are “new” words. That means they are words you have not encountered before. Once you meet them, you need to decide what to do with them. You can make them known or ignore them, or you can create a LingQ. Use the different status levels to differentiate your LingQs. ie. status 1 words can be words you want to learn later, status 2 words to learn now.

You can even ignore words you don’t want to learn now. Then, when you encounter them in future lessons, just click on them to make them blue again at any time.

With regard to “mark as new”, I don’t really understand this request. Clicking on known or ignored word makes it blue. Then, you can do whatever you want with it.

15

Why can I not write something that doesn’t become a wall of text? Hmm…

Here’s the sequence of events that keeps happening to me (with bonus emojis!):

  1. I’m happily in the middle of creating LingQs.:heart_eyes::notes:
  2. I click the wrong thing (generally something innocuous that I’ve already been clicking, like a next-page button or a scroll bar) and my blue words are gone forever.:flushed::broken_heart:
  3. No longer knowing which (formerly blue) words still need LingQs, creating LingQs has now become an arduous process.:sweat::clock1::clock2::clock3:
  4. Run off to complain on the forum.:sob:

There are multiple issues here, I think.

  1. The value of blue words remaining blue until I make LingQs out of them.
  2. The ease with which blue words can accidentally be marked as known.
  3. The difficulty of then hunting down the “words that should still be blue.”
  4. The feeling that control over my own study process is being taken out of my hands.

The LingQ view with blue words marked is a very useful view, while the same view after having the blue words stripped away is far less useful for me. This is because the words that I actually know (“real” white words) are now mixed together with words that I don’t know (“fake” white words) and there’s no longer a clear way to differentiate the two. (The words “in the middle” that have already been LingQed are fine of course.)

The beauty of the LingQ system is that you can see at a glance which words you need to focus upon. Until they disappear.

—quote:

I think the big issue here is to not think of getting rid of blues as breaking the lesson. Blue words are “new” words. That means they are words you have not encountered before. Once you meet them, you need to decide what to do with them. You can make them known or ignore them, or you can create a LingQ.

And I want to make that choice. That’s where the problem is: the current system is inadvertently taking that decision away from me.

If it were to instead, say, automatically create LingQs for all remaining blue words using the first available community translation (accurate or not), I could at least see that it was attempting in its own shaky way to help me learn those words. Because LingQs would remain, and I focus on those.

Instead it inexplicably defaults to assuming that I don’t need to learn them; that everything it’s sure I’ve never encountered before has somehow already been studied (just apparently not in LingQ). It’s too eager to mark my least known words identically to my best known words. So I no longer know which is which. Completely illogical.

—quote:

Use the different status levels to differentiate your LingQs. ie. status 1 words can be words you want to learn later, status 2 words to learn now.

You can even ignore words you don’t want to learn now. Then, when you encounter them in future lessons, just click on them to make them blue again at any time.

With regard to “mark as new”, I don’t really understand this request. Clicking on known or ignored word makes it blue. Then, you can do whatever you want with it.
—

When you click on a word it’s blue for the moment. But when you then click the next word, the previous word returns to anonymous white; it hasn’t actually been returned to its old blue status. I’m not saying you can’t edit words; I’m saying that in a block of text, knowing which words to create LingQs for has suddenly become difficult because they’re not marked in any way anymore.

A huge part of the “value of the blue words” is in the view of an entire page with the blue words mixed into it, so I can see at a glance where I need to create more LingQs. How much I know vs. don’t know. Clicking on words one by one to edit them is of course useful, but doesn’t help with that at all.

Metaphorically, it’s like being handed a (paper) list of new vocabulary words that you start to learn, then partway through studying, suddenly having that pulled out of your hands and replaced with a (paper) page of text while being told “Your new words are buried in here somewhere, good luck!” So now you have to switch strategies to manually walking your way through it word by word. And you scratch your head and wonder why the instructor just did that.

As long as words are still marked blue, I’m happily creating LingQs. But when I click the wrong thing, suddenly they’re all anonymized, I gain a bunch of coins that I didn’t earn, and I’ve lost all my landmarks in the text. Then have to go back and click on every single white word in every page of the lesson until I’m pretty sure (but never completely confident) that I’ve relocated all of the words that used to be so conveniently marked. It’s extra work for me, for no apparent benefit.

I’m just wondering why those words can’t either stay conveniently marked, or easily be returned to their conveniently-marked state.

Maybe we’re looking at this from differing perspectives. When do you use the mark-everything-as-known feature? When you have words you’ve never seen before, in what circumstance would you want them pulled out of your “study loop?” My default intention is to study (make LingQs, see what the words mean, gain more exposure to) everything that I don’t know. When do you want that to not happen?

Is it a beginner vs veteran difference, where what to learn and what can be ignored are easy calls to make?

Right now only a couple of months into Korean, reading anything is a very deliberate process for me, and I utterly lack the ability to skim. So when unknown words are inadvertently shuffled into a text, it’s a painstaking process to hunt them down in order to create LingQs. If they’d just remained blue like they were a minute ago, I’d be able to instantly identify them and get back to making LingQs much more easily.

1 Like
16

I guess what I don’t understand is why you don’t just make LingQs as you go. Presumably you are reading the lesson, so you will encounter blue words as you read. Then, either LingQ them or make them known and move on to the next word. When I use LingQ I use the keyboard and the left/right arrow keys to navigate to the next highlighted word.

Likewise if you ever do move blue words to known (happens to me sometimes when I accidentally page before removing all blue words), you can just read the next page and click on any words you don’t understand. If you understand the word, then you know it. It’s really not that big a deal. If you don’t understand, click and make a LingQ.

The thing is not to get too hung up on blue words or known words. The idea is to read the lesson and create LingQs for any words you don’t understand. Blue words let you know how many words are new for you in a lesson. That is why we want you to get rid of blues. That way we can mark your progress in a lesson and we can show how many new words are in other lessons.

17

“And I want to make that choice. That’s where the problem is: the current system is inadvertently taking that decision away from me.”

Well Stated…

I also like to skim my new texts that I have and some words I find that the Google or user definitions are just not up to it or do not exist at all, and I need to do further research on the word and the context within a sentence . I can then at my own pace come back to the blue word and put an appropriate translation or a variety of translations.

This imposed default in my opinion is absurd, and I agree with VeraI that this is causing me and others trouble and it is preventing me from embracing the new LingQ reader…

18

We aren’t going to remove the functionality to remove blues by paging. If you want to keep your blues, turn this function off. I don’t understand what point you are trying to make here.

19

Mark, I thought my point was pretty obvious.

I am not asking you to “remove” this functionality, some people may prefer to have it set up in that way.

I am suggesting that in my opinion, the decision to have that functionality “enabled” by default was the incorrect one, due to the consequences that this setting can have and the issues a user faces to try and undo those consequences.

“The art of good program design”

Please re-read Initial post by Pres…

I am also showing support to fellow users who also seem to be of the same opinion. If I do not speak out and agree or show support for their opinions and comments, other users and also LingQ may feel that they are the only ones with the issue.

It is a lot easier to ignore perfectly valid comments or criticisms from one person, not so much when there is a number of like minded individuals willing to speak out about an issue.

20

When do you use the mark-everything-as-known feature? When you have words you’ve never seen before, in what circumstance would you want them pulled out of your “study loop?” My default intention is to study (make LingQs, see what the words mean, gain more exposure to) everything that I don’t know. When do you want that to not happen?

Here’s how I use LingQ as pertains to blue words (and I believe this is the way you’re ‘supposed’ to do it).

As I’m reading, I come across blue words. Either I know the word already even though I’ve never encountered it in LingQ before, in which case I do nothing, or I don’t know it, in which case I create a LingQ. At the end of the lesson (classic reader) or page (new reader), all the ‘known’ blue words remain. I then click mark all remaining blue words as known (or ‘page’ in the new reader). The purpose of this is that you don’t have to mark each ‘known’ blue word as known individually. For example, I am currently studying Portuguese on LingQ but I already studied it pre-LingQ, so many of the blue words are not actually new words for me. So once I create LingQs out of the words that are actually new to me, the feature to mark all blue words as known is extremely useful. Does this help?