I can’t get over the fact that the system decides for me that just looking at the page counts as being read. So, potentially, I could go between two pages and it’d be counting dozens of thousands of words as “read”. I want it just like in 4.0v so the words will be counted read only when I finish the lesson or anything else just as efficient. It messes the coin system too, I don’t have to really read anything, just skim through a couple of pages and it’s done, like I might’ve just wanted to see the text of the lesson and it would go right into my goal for the day. Please, do something or explain what can I do, because I have to count how many words were in the lesson and manually change the amount of them, that I’ve really read. It’s too inconvenient - the whole mission of the new version was to make it more accessible and easier to use, now it’s just a painful experience. I do get as to why it can be useful, you don’t need to read a whole lesson for those 2k words at once, right? But also, so many problems with that.
From what I can see, once you complete a lesson, you do have the ability to reduce or increase the words read count. There is a plus and minus button you can click. So in theory, you should be able to reset the words read count to zero clicking the minus button.
yes, probably something should be fixed here. I don’t pay attention to it anymore but I believe that anyone could go beyond pages and boosting their coins without even realizing it. It could probably messed up the Challenges as well.
Right, right, it’s possible to reduce the count to a set figure like “1.0” instead of “1.2” as an example, and also I can pretend i’ve never read it, setting it to zero. BUT, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to reduce the number of words in statistics… So those seem to be just numbers and something to know for yourself, how many times you’ve read the lesson and how many words there were. So, intentionally or not, it’s very annoying despite all the good changes. That might be unimportant to some people, but honestly knowing how many words I’ve read today or in a week is very important.
Yep, I second this request. The word count gets messed up even when switching between sentence mode and page view, also it seems that just resizing the font increments this counter.
With some trepidation I just checked my stats for today:
40 minutes of reading and listening Chinese yielded 76.834 words of reading! I see a huge spike in the graph as well.
I’m uncomfortable with this, although I personally don’t attach meaning to those numbers - but this is just misleading.
I generated 8.000 coins in those 40 minutes as well!
Fortunately I’m not currently part of a challenge so this doesn’t affect anybody else.
Update: manually changed the number to a more reasonable value, the coins remain unchanged though.
is that why it said i read it 5 times? i was playing with the setting fonts/lingq highlighting lol that makes sense now
Ah yes, you are correct. Just checked, and it is somewhat strange. If I reduce my count using the minus button, it has no impact on my actual words read statistics. But, if I increase my count using the plus button, it does impact my words read statistics and it goes up.
I assume it must be something they can fix. The minus button should have the equal and opposite effect of the plus button.
Didnt’ know that. I’m lukewarm on the change. I do often end up re-reading usually a couple of sentences depending on where LingQ thinks I left of so I’m cool with the “extra” reading. However I do some things occasionally that will overcount the reading…For example, I do occasionally like to go through a lesson jumping from yellow word to yellow word to read it in context, rather than reading through a whole lesson again. However, this ends up adding another reading. Easy enough to correct by subtracting 1, but if it’s not reducing the words read count then that’s a problem. Hopefully it gets corrected.
Still I don’t know overall if I like it yet or not.
This is some extra work fixing reading stats manually. And keep remembering the exact count. Just browsing a single page of a lesson adds words in the total reading word count. In v 4.0 , my reading strategy was to make blue words into 1 or 2 all the way to the completion of the lesson. Then I go back to the first page of the lesson for reading so when I do actual reading I no longer disturb the flow of my reading by making blue words into 1 or 2 etc.
I do not know how you guys approach your reading do you make your blue words into 1 or 2 while reading the lesson itself? Is there a better way for it?
In this way probably your reading gets doubled for that lesson so you should correct it and I agree that doesn’t make sense and it’s an extra step.
I actually go step by step for each word. Also because I focus on what I’m reading so I don’t care much about the “flow” but about focusing on learning words, or paying attention to some sentences and so on.
Then, if you keep your percentage of blue words at the minimum, probably around 5%, in any case below 10%, you shouldn’t have many blue words for each lesson.
I believe that we should actually slow down when we are in learning process because if you have noticed, our eyes have the tendency to skip things and move faster. But in this way we don’t pay attention to the orthography or grammar stuff and so on (and I’ve noticed that I don’t learn much if I keep that speed).
If I want to read faster or with a different flow and focus just on the content without anything else I just don’t use LingQ and read outside the app. Imho.
mostly they are within that range but i guess my old strategy should say goodbye with v 4.0 as well. And create new ways of working with the new version thanks for your advice i will keep that in mind.
I was hoping they made it optional in the settings tab because in some cases this can be super useful and others not. And some people will love it and some other people hate it. Although its a bit glitchy right now even if it worked 100% correctly I still believe it should be optional because the 4.0 way of counting allowed for different ways to handle a text. But the automaticity of the 5.0 auto counting is wonderful as well.
All good feedback thanks! We will see if we can add a setting to track manually as you guys want. The reality is there is no perfect solution. This solution, assuming we can get it working better and better, will work for most users since it doesn’t require any user interaction and more or less tracks as accurately as the previous method, given that many users never bothered to manually add reading time. In fact, in many cases it should be more accurate since re-reading pages previously was not registered at all.
At any rate, give us some time to look into this.
I won’t bother to change anything manually but I hope that I can rely on how many words have been added by the system.
100 words more or less is not a big deal but if a person goes back and forward from the same lesson just to check previous LingQs, it doesn’t make sense that pages are instantly counted as read again and again. Or something like @bamboozled explained before for example.
I hope that you just make it as reliable as possible fixing these bigger issues or behaviors that you didn’t expect at first.
Hello Mark,
Let me take a moment to outline they way I would like this option to work, if I may:
- Whatever happens between opening and finishing a lesson has no effect on the word count
- only when the user clicks ‘finish lesson’ the system increments the words-read-count by one. This would basically be equivalent to the behavior on version 4
- When the user revisits the lesson, clicks finish lesson, the counter would increase by one again. This was not the case in LingQ 4.
Making this behavior dynamic and have the system count the words read upon turning the page is certainly great idea. And it can work, if the user plays by the rules, so to speak and doesn’t do anything unexpected.
I think it comes down to the fact that a website is a less controlled environment than an app. Things that work well in an App might yield unexpected results, due to the users having more control, eg. resizing the window. An App is a far more restrictive setting with fewer variables.
As for my issue from yesterday:
My problem seems to have originated in various actions like going in and out of sentence mode, resizing the font, and the browser window and resizing the font in the browser (control+). This seems to have caused the text reflow repeatedly, which in turn confused the system.
Today I behaved myself and did not diddle with any settings while reading. I carefully checked the read words count after finishing each lesson and found no issues.
Thanks again for taking our feedback on board.
We are continuing to optimize things but keep in mind that skipping quickly through a page or sentence does not mean that page will be counted. There is a minimum time required based on the number of words on the page before words are counted. The reality is that it shouldn’t be much less precise than before when any re-reading really wasn’t ever added.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, all the resizing etc… will have an impact. We will see whether we can optimize things there further. But, for now, getting your screen set and not resizing while reading will probably work best.
Thank you very much for answering! The idea is surely great, it works perfect for my listening experience, but reading is what really suffers here. I hope everybody contributed enough feedback for you guys to think of some kind of solution.
I think you’re right Mark that it’s about as precise as before. Except, previously it wasn’t counting when we re-read a page, or if we stopped a lesson halfway. Looking at the statistics we then knew that we read for example 100k words in a week, knowing that in reality it was a bit or much higher.
The experience is different when you look at your reading statistics and you know that in reality you read a lot less than what it displays.
The reality is that it’s probably no less accurate than before, except that now it overestimates the words read, which in my opinion makes it more difficult to track progress with - especially since for many of us the words read statistic is the most important tracker.
I think it will end up being more accurate especially as we refine it but we will also look at disabling it.