How to stop words being counted as read even when they're not?

Open Forum
21

I’ve using the system for two weeks now, so I’ve spent half the time with v4 and the other half with v5.

The first few days I used both the website and the android app for several hours each day, but now I’ve adapted my habits. I’m a developer and spend literally all day at the computer, but reading on this website was starting to give me blurred vision and headaches, I guess from the eye strain generated by reading for several minutes at a time on a screen. But I don’t know the real reason, I’m a developer not an eye doctor…

I’ve a kindle oasis and the integrated dictionary is quite fast to use, so I can read 30/40 minutes on the kindle, check the words that make me ‘lose the flow’ and then I come to lingq, import the book and skim it putting the focus on the blue and yellow ‘lights’.

Great plan if it weren’t for the way the words are being counted in lingq, which marks me about 300/400 words of reading in a lesson with 2000 words. Actually, that may be a more or less real number of the amount of words I’ve read in lingq, because as I say, it’s a quick reread of what I just read, so I think the functionality is pretty well achieved.

But because of the above, for me the stats are broken. The element that I liked the most about lingq in these first days of use was precisely the statistics, not as a little number to be proud of but as metrics that allow me to analyze my own learning over time. Two/three days ago I was thinking about paying for the annual subscription and today I am thinking about cancelling my account.

In my opinion v5 is much better than v4, I understand that it’ll take a few weeks to fix bugs and add small changes and then the community will stop complaining as bitterly as I see in the forums.

But this way of counting reading words per lesson is not a bug, but a feature (https://twitter.com/urban_linker/status/1001779017895301120 I couldn’t stop myself from sending this when I wrote the above), and therefore I don’t know if when you indicate that this functionality will be refined, you are talking in days or months.

22

Please disable it and go back to the old way of recording words read. I sometimes go back through previous lessons to look at LingQs in context and don’t want these pages count as read.

23

This seems to be a popular request. We will look into adding a setting to disable it over the next week or so.

24

Hi Mark. That would be great if it was a bit more customizable rather than just disabling and enabling the option. For example, make it changeable for each language separately and the most useful probably would be the option that disables counting the words when going between the read pages, so that new pages would be counted and added to the system, but those that are already read wouldn’t. It won’t be applied when you start the lesson anew, I hope, because that is actual re-reading. I hope those are good suggestions and you will consider adding them! Thank you!

25

@fjestrella I’m not exactly sure what you mean here. You mean you want us to disable automatic tracking or have it keep tracking like it does now?

26

Is this the reason why the read count is not a round number, but 1,03 or 1,86 for example?

27

yes

28

Ha! That is very unlikely I’m afraid. It will either be automatic or manual. And, the same for all languages.

29

Ahh, that’s a pity. Alright, I guess that’d not that easy to realise, I will be happy with the ability to disable it then. When disabled, it’s going to be the same as in the previous version? Counting the words only when finished the lesson

30

(hi @mark, I’m replying to you in this comment because the forum doesn’t allow me to reply to the most recent one)

For me, the ideal solution is to have both options.

I recognize that the new way of counting words works well, but it doesn’t work for me.

In my opinion, the underlying problem is that the new reader is focused on an idealized user who only consumes content with lingq, and it’s assuming that when you open a lesson, or when you go forward or backward, you’re reading.

When you’re reviewing a lesson, the amount of time you spent in front of a number of word has no relationship to the number of words you are reading. You may be taking notes on paper, you may be looking up translations in the dictionary, you may be trying to analyze grammar, you may be copying words to anki, and so on.

So, in short, I think it’s great to have the new ‘smart estimation’, but only if you can turn it off when you need it.