Good evening everyone,
All my imports of any language are completely out of order. Sentences are broken in the wrong places, and the audio doesn’t match the timing of the text. I’ve tried importing through TXT, PDF, and other formats, but the same issue occurs. Even when I try to edit the lesson, everything remains disorganized. Could someone please help me? How should I import the sentences and text to ensure they appear correctly?
It’s hard to know what your issue is as you didn’t provide much information, but two things:
If you import an .mp3 along with a .txt or a .pdf, the timestamps are auto-generated. This means a complex software tries to do it, but modern, commercial software is just not up to a level to do it perfectly. The most common factors for inaccurate timestamps are: text not exactly matching the audio (eg. an introduction of the podcast not included in the transcript, the foreward of the book not in the audiobook) and unclear audio (eg. people talking about top of each other, music in the background, mumbling). Auto-generated timestamps works well in some cases (clear audio with perfectly matching transcripts for some languages), but if you are expecting that it’s a perfect software, you need to go forward in your time machine several years to find such a software.
Importing is only as good as the original document. If you are trying to import a .pdf, which is not text, but rather images, it just fails. If you are trying to import a .txt file, which has poor paragraphing (which is common), your lesson will have poor paragraphing. Have you checked the quality of the original documents? Many original documents are not great quality to be easily imported into LingQ. That said, the importing function 100% has issues with paragraphing, when I last checked a month ago. But you need to provide more information, if it’s going to be reported as a bug - exact details how to replicate (eg. go here, then here, then here, etc.), links to documents, screenshots and/or screen recordings.
If you want great timestamps, import YouTube videos (because they are human-edited). Unfortunately, you get subtitles, not real paragraphs.
If you want great paragraphing, import news articles or some eBooks (my favourite format is .epub, but sometimes it also has paragraph break issues, but this is the LingQ bug I was referring to from the other month). Unfortunately, you don’t get audio with it.
The only sure-fire way to get perfect paragraphs and timestamps is if you manually edit it, which IMO is not worth the time.
All the files I import are always the same models, TXT or PDF, which have always been in accordance with audio. The big problem is the sentence division that LingQ doesn’t separate correctly, breaking lines or phrases in the middle… Anyway, I’ll wait for a response to see if it’s a bug or something like that.
Yeah, line breaks was definitely a bug last time I was importing books, as mentioned. If you provide some screenshots of the original book vs. screenshots of the LingQ import of examples of poorly split sentences, this would be much more helpful for the testers to see you are also having the same issue as I was having. Screenshots with bug reports are very helpful.
@zoran
I believe I have identified the problem that causes the incorrect sentence fragmentation. LingQ automatically breaks sentences whenever there is a (space) after a comma or period, but not every comma indicates a new sentence. For example, if I import the following sentence into LingQ:
“Sí, pero hay un problema. La ubicación no es tan buena como la del otro. Está en las afueras de la ciudad.”
LingQ will break sentences after any space that comes after punctuation, whether it be a comma, period, or symbols. For example, this sentence would be divided by LingQ as follows:
Sí,
pero hay un problema.
La ubicación no es tan buena como la del otro.
Está en las afueras de la ciudad.
What actually causes the incorrect fragmentation of the sentence is that, in fact, everything should be just one sentence.
To import it correctly where LingQ considers the entire text as a single sentence, I would have to import it in the following manner:
“Sí,pero hay un problema.La ubicación no es tan buena como la del otro.Está en las afueras de la ciudad.”
It can be observed that I had to remove all spaces within the sentence in order to prevent LingQ from incorrectly breaking the sentence. I still believe that LingQ’s system should automatically break sentences only when there is a space after a period (.), rather than a comma (,) or symbols (!)… Well, I hope I have helped in some way to address this error.
Thanks, we will investigate that further.