I have been using LingQ for Spanish for a couple of years now, and I am just starting on German. So, I have been reviewing my methods and workflows for language learning.
Do any of you do Sentence Mining? If so, what tool or workflow do you use? The issues I am having is that if I copy a line of text out of the main reader, it pastes without spaces or puncuation. LingQ is actually making my experience worse than using nothing.
When I select the text, a popup bubble appears, and I can sometimes copy from that bubble and paste into a text document but I lose any trailing punctuation. Other times, the puncuation like commas is lost.
In any case, this is a multi-step process. I cannot use LingQs for this purpose, because sometimes sentances have more than 9 words.
I use Brave (where I use Chrome Extensions) or Firefox. I do not want to pay another subscription or account, so am hoping for a free offline option.
What is your recommened workflow for sentence mining?
Short sentences you’ve marked can be retrieved later in the vocabulary screen by filtering on “phrases” (see screenshot below).
If you want to select words across 2 lines, there’s a workaround:
I’m assuming you’re using a browser for this? I always keep the panel open on the right side for the definitions of words or phrases rather than doing the popup. So “Expand sidebar” on the right and I think capturing it from there will be easier.
Another option is to have something like google translate extension installed on the browser and using autopopup for that. You can copy the string from there.
Third option is to go to the 3 dot menu from within the lesson, go to “print lesson” and copy sentences from there.
I do some sentence mining, but not from lessons in LingQ. I’m going back through the most common words that I still don’t always get right or understand at all. Have chatgpt create sentences for them. Then I copy them into a spreadsheet. Sometimes into LingQ. Or I’ve created “language islands”. I do all of that outside of LingQ.
alainravet1, I know that LingQs can be phrases, but there are some limitations to this. I often capture LingQs to phrases that are idiomaic or common colocations. However, many linguistical structure do not fit neatly into lexis. For example, a partially schematic construction or grammatical idiom like:
¨Una cosa es X y otra cosa es Y
“Una cosa es prometer y otra cosa es cumplir.”
“(It’s one thing to promise and another to deliver.)”
These structures are worth learning, but they will not be in a dictionary, so I do not want to handle them the same way as things like “sin embargo”
ericb100, I do not want to copy the LingQs (as would be included in the right panel), I want to capture whole sentances. The print menu is a novel approach, but it is more cumbersome. If I am reading a 3000 word chapter, I do not want to have to open another tab, do a CTRL-F to find the phrase, manually copy, and paste into a seperate file. Further, I absolutely DO NOT want to use AI to generate examples (I have used Claude Sonnet API for lemmatization and polysemy handling) because AI examples do not stick in my brain.
Literally, all I want to be able to do is:
highlight a an arbirary-length block of text in the LingQ reader window,
right-click
save
It seems like a tracktable problem, and I would prefer not to write the extension if one already exists.
When I understand a word structure - it is “known” - but I deem it “worth revisiting later”, I mark it as level 4. This way it will appear underlined, not coloured, and it can easily be retrieved by filtering the vocabulary on “phrases + level 4”.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but it can be useful.
LingQ could add a copy sentence button somewhere to help with sentence mining.
I usually do my first reading in Edit Sentence Mode. (so I can make tweaks and edits as I read) It is easy to copy sentence from there. might be an option.
Yeah, it seems like a modest enhancement request for PD and an “easy win” for LingQ to support this common language learning technique. (I also understand that each enhancement requires long-term support and that every production software has workflow limitations.)
Highlight the entire sentence…it will appear in the sidebar. Copy from there. I’m not saying to LingQ it or select any individual word. Although I do see a problem with this if you go beyond one sentence in that it strips the punctuation for some reason:
