Hi, i’v just signed up today and I can’t understand how to use it even after watching the tutorial! it says ‘‘a box will come up with a bunch of words you don’t know…these are highlighted in blue’’ but I don’t know any of them so how do I learn those? also 3 phrases come up on each word so which one is the correct one? is it about guess work?
Please can someone help me? it looks likes its so easy because so many people have learnt languages perfectly, I am learning japanese 
Hi there,
First off, welcome to the site! I’m sure you’ll learn a lot while you’re here
When you hover over a blue word, you’ll see up to three User Hints. Every hint that you save on LingQ is added to our database and is displayed for other users, allowing users to easily share definitions for words. You may not know right away which one is right, but the ones displayed will be the top three hints chosen by other users. If you select one of these hints and later on think it’s not quite right, you can always go in and edit the hint for a word. Additionally, if you see the user hints and don’t like them, you can simply click “Search Dictionary” to open up a dictionary to search for the word. There are quite a few dictionaries integrated into LingQ, and you’re free to add or remove these dictionaries at any time.
I encourage you to click on Tutorial View at the top if you haven’t already. If you have any more questions about the site, be sure to ask!
One thing that I’ve noticed with LingQ, is that hints for some languages are much better than others. Mandarin - brilliant. French… fairly terrible. I’m not sure what it’s like for Japanese, but even with the best I find myself making little edits, changing things to suit my own way of doing things. I try to add more than just one word hints because another language is not simply a English with other words. It’s a complex web.
After a little while you’ll get used to it all. Welcome to the site!
It’s within the system that the hints are better the more people with the same native language study the same foreign language.
Many people learn French who speak English as a first language (or use that dictionary language) and that number is likely more than for Mandarin. The hints for French are worse.