LingQ shows me 喝啤酒 (drink beer) as one word. Is there a way to separate into 喝 (drink) and 啤酒 (beer)?
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Just edit the lesson, find the sentence and put a space between them.
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Easier to switch to sentence mode first, then edit. That way you don’t need to hunt down the sentence.
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Thanks. Putting space between works, but frankly, it’s not ideal. Mandarin does not use spaces. I would prefer that LingQ would only use words, and then if you like you can add a phrase or word combination.
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The fact that Chinese doesn’t use spaces is exactly why this problem occurs in the first place. When you import text, the text doesn’t include information about where the words start and end. LingQ has to put that information back in the imported text so that it can display words for you. By adding spaces into the text, you can manually tell LingQ where you want a word to end (because sometimes LingQ’s algorithm makes mistakes).
(There is also an option in the settings to display spaces between words on the front-end, but I suggest turning it off.)
The much more prevelant problem is that LingQ obviously wasn’t designed for this, which besides Chinese also affects Japanese and probably other languages, and that the only way is, as you described, to add spaces in sentence mode. This is both not a good or even mediocre solution if the language isn’t supposed to use spaces in the first place and if the interface forces you to click the “edit sentence” button, edit the sentence and than save the change and repeat this over and over again for every sentence to come.
It would generally be a huge improvement if we could edit sentences without this cumbersome procedure, but in the case of such languages as these having a way to mark where a word ends, preferably a one-click solution, would be mandatory imho.
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You are of course 100% right. Below is story just pasted - with no word spaces, but spaces at punctuations. This is the text:
-
- 外星人
谢心月今年十岁， 她是一个小学生。她有一个新朋友， 叫" 马天明" ， 马天明今年也是十岁。他们每天都一起去上学。
马天明的爸爸今年已经四十岁了， 他写过很多书， 他的新书里有外星人， 马天明和谢心月都会看他写的书 。有时候， 两个爸爸会和他们一起去山上看星星。
- 外星人
And it displays pretty perfectly:
Anyway, I would love to have the ability to edit the grouping without adding spaces between characters.
Ok, one error: 马天明 - it’s a name, Martin. I can understand, it’s difficult, not a real word.
One more error: 四十岁 should be 四十 and 岁. In fact, even 四十 no need, 四 and 十 would be fine.
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Go to Settings → Reader, then scroll all the way to the bottom to “Script Settings”. Untick “Show spaces between words”.
Now the text will display without spaces. Any spaces you add (or delete) in the lesson text will only affect how LingQ groups the characters into words.
This works partly. There are still some spaces added.
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I just tried it out. I think if you have Pinyin transliterations displayed, some spaces are added between adjacent transliterated words. Without transliterations, you don’t get spaces.
Seems like this can be fixed in the app. Afterall, when it combines words, it ends up creating phrases. Seems like the AI or software would not have these as single words in it’s dictionary and not create them unless asked to do so manually.
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