I’ve been having a terrible experience with this. I don’t want to always 100% a lesson, and I have already turned off the setting to “move words to known when scroll page”, but when I finish the lesson on the last page, it turns all the words in that lesson to known, even though I don’t want it to. Is there a way to change that?
It’s not just “don’t move words to known when I scroll the page”. I just went back to review some things on a lesson, and when I finished it, everything went to known, totally making useless the other configuration I have changed.
Unfortunately, no. Many people have raised the issue over the years, but the team hasn’t moved an inch on that, and I don’t believe they ever will. They say that there is absolutely no logic in completing a lesson and letting blue words as they are, saying that they should either be moved to known, ignored, or in the process of being learnt.
LingQ is intended as an app for those who want to track known words, unknown words, and words that have never been encountered before, in order to help people learn vocabulary fast. To do this in the most efficient way possible, LingQ has to designate words we ignore (i.e. those we don’t mark as unknown) as known automatically, either at the end of each page, or at the end of each lesson. This saves a huge amount of time that otherwise would have to be spent by the user marking words as known. I know of no better way to do it.
If your concern is that you miss words, or that you don’t really “know” the words you leave unmarked, LingQ is self-correcting - you can always mark them as unknown when you next encounter them.
If you want an app that never marks words as known, there are a number of e-readers available - before I bought myself a Kindle, I used to use Amazon’s free Kindle app for PC and for iphone.
That may be your rationale and LingQ’s. But most users, I daresay, understand LingQ as a tool for learning language in our way, not a program for how we MUST learn.
That’s the beauty of LingQ as a tool … or ought to be. It certainly seemed to be implicit in Steve Kaufmann’s podcasts.
What LingQ is missing is that it is violating a fundamental rule of User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience (UX) – don’t surprise the user by changing his/her data behind his/her back.
This is why LingQ continually gets this complaint. This is one of many reasons I consider the LingQ team ignorant, incompetent and stubbornly so.
Which is impolite, I know. LingQ is a brilliant concept, but its execution is the worst I’ve ever seen as a user and a professional.
But most users, I daresay, understand LingQ as a tool for learning language in our way, not a program for how we MUST learn.
And this is precisely what the problem is according to their team. They cannot adapt the tool to cater for the many different ways people intend to use it, so they have to go with the majority and what they think is right.
I think they go more with what they think is right, and they think it is the majority because they think it is right. They never ask anyway, so they are sure they are right.
However, I also understand what @Pr0metheus is saying when he defends the other side of the coin, because I was there years ago. The problem with this position is that if we always have a ton of people asking for a different solution, it is because this problem is real. What this position means is that all these people over the years don’t understand how LingQ works and how it should be used. It also means that the tutorial is bad, and many people come here asking what they should do.
But their answer is that they’ve tried to think of ways to explain how to use the software, but they don’t really know how to do it because it can be used in many different ways. Imagine that!
This is also because they are trying to catch too many fish. They want to give more freedom so they can get more paying customers to use the app in different ways, but they don’t want to change what they don’t like or what they can’t do.
Remember that they added a cancel subscription button after years of people asking for it! And it doesn’t even work all the time!
Again, as I said in another discussion, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have premium customers and treat them like beta testers. You can’t avoid explaining very well how to use the software because you want people to use it in many different ways, and at the same time not give them a feature when they’ve been asking for it forever.
Lingq does not have to impose anything on us that is not inherently tied to the core business of the tool itself: reading, editing, listening and vocab.
Anything concerning the flow of learning should be a choice of the user, not of Lingq.
For example, when you choose to declare a lesson as learnt, some might want all unknown words gone, many do not. That is the basis for a choice, an option, or a toggle.
That is not the basis for pushing their opinion on all learners. It should have been rectified a long time ago.
That statement is misleading at best and untrue in many cases.
I see it rather simplistically. An unknown word (blue) should, by default, remain that way, i.e., blue, until the user, I repeat, the user decides otherwise. By all means provide a toggle to set ‘move all words to known at the end of a lesson’. Someone starting off with a good level of whatever language would certainly want something like that. I’m a beginner in Spanish and I certainly do NOT want that.
Can’t be that hard just to leave things blue until they’re marked otherwise. I do find this aspect of LingQ a frustrating annoyance.
However, I do want to learn Spanish so I just try to ignore this appalling feature.
Saying that this is “the most efficient way possible” doesn’t even make sense. Do you really think everyone, every single person on this platform, every single user, will want to learn all the words from a lesson before going forward?
This 100% completion rate for every lesson not only would be tedious, but it also goes against steve’s own philosophy, where he states that “you don’t need to look up every single word you encounter.”
I’m a frontend software engineer myself, and seeing that the developers of the platform simply CHOOSE to not create a configuration to turn this setting off, makes me think that they are simply being lazy.
Not only they’re imposing on us how we should learn, but they’re also making a terrible user experience that could just be a choice from the user.
As many people have said here in the comments, if a lot of users are constantly bringing the same issue up, it is certainly a problem.
It also doesn’t even make sense to have a configuration to “not move words to known when page scrolling”, but not have a configuration to not move them when the lesson is finished.
They both follow the same principle. You’re not always gonna learn everything from a certain content, and it is ok to do that!
No. But efficiency has nothing to do with satisfying every single user. It has to do with what’s physically possible with the software and with what needs to happen to reduce users’ workload.
And yes, the LingQ team are indeed deciding how the people who choose to use LingQ should learn. But that’s the same with every piece of software ever invented - the programmers make people use the software in the way it was designed to be used. Usually, people make the decision to trust the developers and abide by the limits of the program when they choose to buy it. That’s an implicit contract that’s made between the developers and the users.
And while it’s true that a lot of users bring up this issue, that does not mean it’s a problem with the product. “A lot” does not equate to “most”, and may not even equate to a large minority. The reality is, LingQ is very successful - that probably means most people are happy to use it as it’s designed to be used.
But no one is forcing anyone to use LingQ. If it doesn’t meet your needs, look somewhere else.
So you would have every user click on every single word they know, to designate it as a known word?
I guarantee such a feature would result in the vast majority of LingQ’s user base quitting overnight. I mean, it would make LingQ virtually unusable. as you get more proficient in a language, you’re going to see more and more words that you know from context and from similar word forms, meaning that you’re going to have to mark all these words as known. As a result, you would never be able to read at a normal pace.
Even giving users the option of doing this would be silly. It would slow down reading speed immensely. No one wants to read at the snail’s pace that such an option would impose, and while it might seem better to a complete novice to mark all known words (because there are so few of them), as soon as you are beyond that beginning stage, such a feature would very quickly become burdensome. And before that happens, such users would be demoralized because reading at such a pace is incredibly boring.
To designate resources to program this - I dunno, it just seems insane to me.
Comments like yours are why I sometimes wonder if there might be some rival company paying people to bring up these kinds of ludicrous ideas. The only way such comments would make any sense is if those making them have no knowledge of their target language whatsoever, and the reality is, LingQ is intended for those who already have some knowledge of their target language - it’s not meant to be a learner’s first entry point into a language - that’s what apps like Duolingo are for.
Nobody ever said that. They want an option like for page turn, so they can decide.
There are people who want to consume as much content in as little time as possible, that is certainly true. But there might also be people who want to study material in detail or material that is way above there level, for example due to limited availability due to the language they chose to learn, and who may want to revisit a started lesson later on.
That’s why the proposals made always suggest an alternative option not an exchange of the current behaviour in favour for another one.
Really?!
I don’t see why someone shouldn’t use LingQ as a beginner and I can’t recall that such a statement has ever been made by the LingQ team or Steve himself in his videos.
There are some very simple suggestions that have been made. Either add another toggle for finishing the lesson, a prompt upon doing so to ask for what the program should do or a simple displacement of the “finish lesson” button, for example placing it right next to the button that does close the lesson without marking the remaining blue words known.
LingQ is not a product in a classical sense, where you pay once and get something “as is”. It’s a service that is continuosly beeing developed further. Why shouldn’t customers give feedback on what they like or dislike or on what could be improved. That they dislike one feature doesn’t mean they dislike the whole service, and that it has downsides doesn’t mean there is a better suiting one on the market.
I heavely doubt that it is in the interest of the LingQ staff and the users if everyone who encounters something they would like to see changed just quit and move away.
I disagree with the concept of marking all words as Known automatically. Or atleast you should ask the user to confirm this, atleast if this has a major effect on user data in the database, e.g. more than a hundred words.
I am a A2 level Spanish learner with a vocabulary of about 2000 words. I started with LingQ yesterday and went through some of the first mini episodes and successfully completed the quizzes so that all the words sofar were either marked by me or the quizzes as Known.
However, in addition to gradual basic learning, I also want to occasionally just immerse myself with some more demanding reading, in this case a 30 minute B2 level LingQ podcast with approx 1000 new words. My only intention was to listen to the podcast with the assistance of seeing the dialog text and getting some idea of how much of the words are (really) known to me. But before I reached the end, I realized that LingQ had silently been marking all those words as Known.
This completely distorts the stats and also makes it almost impossible for me to resume my studies with the basic lessons where I would want to continue learning actually new words. But now the one-time listening session has completely garbled my data sofar and the key LingQ user interface capability of being able to focus on words I need to learn.
Now I am forced to go through all of those words, considering a right translation and forced to regrade each of them due to the automatic marking of Known. Still some 500 left to click through. Being forced to do this because of unintuitive and hidden background processing makes me upset.
This is a horrible experience! I really do not understand the ****heads who think automatic marking of all words as Known would serve the majority of users. For expert level it might be useful. But please keep in mind that the volume (and payment base) of beginners and intermediate users far exceeds that of expert users. Unfortunately, the participants of a forum like this, and views expressed in messages, will be biased towards expert users.
I really thought this was a serious bug in the fundamental implementation and already considered searching a Money-back link.
What is the point of asking the user to confirm when the user can simply not click on the button that makes words known?
Over the last 4 decades of computer use, I’ve probably wasted literally days of my life clicking on buttons that say “Are you sure” after I just clicked on a button saying I wanted to do something. If I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t have clicked on the button, now would I.
I do not want to waste even more of my life clicking useless buttons just because some folks can’t seem to stop themselves from clicking on a button that’s going to mark words as known.
A blue word is an unseen word, not an unknown word. An unknown word is a LingQ. You can set it for auto LingQ creation if you want to just immerse.
LingQ is a tool designed to assist in natural language acquisition through input. Markers and measurements are, and should be, fundamentally centered around whether the input has happened or not.
LingQ is built for a specific task. While it’s great that some users find LingQ so easy to use that they want to use it as an e-reader, it was never meant to be that, so if they want an e-reader, I think they should switch to an e-reader, or a book.
I do have 4 decades experience of studying and designing user interfaces. On a general level the LingQ user interface is clean and likeable, otherwise I would not have voted with my money and become a customer.
However, a combination of some features result in some, not many, undesirable outcomes. For example the back and forth scrolling of the Reader window has been made friendly by the large clickable pane areas on the sides and thus you do not have to hit exactly the arrows, only somewhere on the side. Fine. However, a shortcoming is that the right hand pane area becomes end of session button already before the horizontal slidebar on the top indicates reaching the end.
Thus consecutively, if one scrolls back and forth in a fast manner, it is possible to inadvertently Close the session, potentially and equally inadvertently updating the status of hundreds of words. N.B. it is not sufficient to change the arrow to a tickmark, because elsewhere the tickmark is used in a safer, and revokeable, way. The solution would be 1) to move the Close action somewhere else to a safer location, OR, 2) if for some reason this cannot be done, prompt the user before any massive data update is done (“Are you sure you want to mark 751 words as known?” OR 3) provide an App setting such as “Expert mode: Closing moves to known”, just below the “Paging moves to known.”
This is a genuine user interface enhancement request. I give my single user vote for it and I do not mind if other individual users vote against it, again with single user votes.
