So, I am wanting to learn German. So far I’m doing it from a book and some of this cause listening is definetly needed. A lot.
Anyways, I am also a native speaker of Russian, so I figure I’d check out what happens at higher levels. Essentially, to see how well definitions match up. I went to the advanced 1 level and scrolled over random words. I immediately noticed that a large quanitity of (usually inflected) words do not have a definition. And a few were just wrong (for example the word ласково).
I was just wondering
a) what the source of those definitions were because they certainly don’t look like dictionary defintions (well, the ones that you see when you roll over the words). and I also seem to be missing something because i don’t see easy access to a dictionary anywhere …
b) The problem I enountered with inflection. I suspect it is partially because, if i were an actual Russian Language learner, i would’ve encountered those terms in prior texts in perhaps a different form that did have a definition. How much of a problem is this? I’m just asking as they are both heavily inflected languages. (though i suspect russian is much scarier in general)
I have learned my Russian here. Each form or inflection of a word that I either do not recognize , or want to save to help me remember it, I save. Since I am the champion LingQer for Russian, I have few learner generated hints. I usually have to go to the dictionary. Where the User Hints exist, I use them.
To me the Hints, or dictionary definitions are just hints, a part of the picture. I know that I have to see the word many times in many contexts before I can understand it.
The dictionary definition does not usually tell us what the inflection or tense of a word is. That is what the online dictionaries give us.Nothing prevents a learner from refining the definition. You can see the different online dictionaries that are used. You can set your own default dictionary. You do not know which dictionary was used for the learner generated Hints. But then you do not have to use them.
All in all it has worked fine for me in both Russian and German.
The user created hints are an easy way to create new own LingQs. But I don’t trust other users in this case. So I never use them, and I always use “create new hint”. Then I’ve access to the dictionaries.