All words are in blue, so I can say that I “know” a single words “pull” and “my” and “leg” but I don’t understand the phrase “pull my leg”. How do we mark known “language” or “phrases” instead of just single “words”?
Or for instance, learners often need to learn phrases such as, “As a matter of fact…” but it is meaningless to click on each word saying, “I know ‘as’, I know ‘a’, I know ‘matter’, I know ‘of’, I know ‘fact’”. Their word-focus is to micro here and missing the meaning of the phrase as a whole.
You can highlight more than one word and the phrase will turn blue. Then you can LingQ the phrase as a phrase and the system will keep track of it as if it was a new word (except that it won’t count it in your ‘known words’ total on your profile once you learn it… I think).
Quite correct kcb. You can save any word or phrase as a LingQ. You can move its status up to known but if it is a phrase, it will not count in your known word total. It will show up in LingQs learned however, if I am not mistaken.
I LingQ more words than phrases but I do LingQ phrases too. I also review the various captured phrases by clicking on “examples” in the LIngQ widget.
I seem to go in spurts, LingQing only phrases some of the time, and going heavier to phrases at other times. I will usually LingQ phrases on a second pass, after the main words have been LingQ. To each his/her own.
As much as I am a proponent of learning in contexts, I do find it useful to review the words and phrases out of context, particularly the My LingQs list after I complete a lesson. I do this most often using iLingQ.
Alex and I have been discussing this recently. I come across phrases which I know quite well but might not know the individual words. Lingqing it and then moving it to know is a solution for known phrases, but some problems remain. A literal translation often provides little clue as to the meaning. Quite often, making a lingq of a phrase like this, gives no dictionary definition because they often don’t exist in the dictionary. This is one of the most difficult areas as a language learner, I find.
An idea that I’ve had would be to create a LingQ database for each language with a collection of these phrases. I’m not sure how they would be added or how it would be implemented but it’s a possible solution.
I think that this issue is closely related to the problems that LingQ is going to have with agglutinating languages. Perhaps is would be wise to create a sort of test.lingq.com on which people can join to become beta testers so that some experimentation can be done with the goal of improving the detection engine. That way it would not interfere with the main site and some more ideas can be tried out. If they work well, then they can be brought to the main site, if even just for particular languages.
Yep, I fully understand that Steve. I’m just putting this out there as something for the distant future. Just something to think about.
p.s. haha yes my name is quite long and unwieldy. The meaning is ‘if God wills it’ and comes through Yiddish, ultimately from Hebrew ‘Im Yirtzeh Hashem’. Feel free to call me IYH
