I tried the new reading interface and I don’t like it.
Scrolling has been invented for a good reason: to avoid endless paging. LingQ is also wasting a lot of screen space.
@ak472 - First of all, as Jingle pointed out, you can change the settings for the new Reader to turn off all the things you are not used to as a former user of LingQ. You can turn off auto conversion of blue words to known as you page, you can turn off auto text to speech and you can turn off auto LingQ creation. All of these features are very convenient for many users but if you don’t like them, you can turn them off. Just click on the gear control.
Regarding the handling of lessons, we are working on improving this. We recognize it is not ideal now and are working to improve it. However, lesson handling in the previous version was also not very good. The fact is that things need to constantly be improved.
As for access to Classic, that is only available to pre-existing accounts from before the update. I guess you must have cancelled your account from the past and created a new one. I’ll tell you what we can do. You upgrade your account and let me know and I’ll have classic mode re-activated for your account.
@benscheelings - Good point about the user hints in other languages. We’ll see if we can’t get that back in the new reader soon.
@ceta96 - Before you could remove courses from the Home page. In fact, they were not removed from My Lessons. However, we are working to make it so you will be able to actually remove courses from My Lessons. We have some changes coming soon. Hopefully, that won’t be far behind.
Otherwise, right now, if you remove all lessons from a course, that course will also be removed from My Lessons.
@boromir - As I told ak472, if you upgrade and let me know, we can re-activate classic mode for your account.
I think the more specific we articulate our statements, the higher is the likelihood our voice is heard.
Thanks for the message and the messages that everyone has posted.
First, I am not going to upgrade my account. I am grossly unhappy with things the way they are WITHOUT paying for them. I am not going to go ahead and pay for them simply to get back classic mode. Offering this makes me seem like this website is more interested in marketing themselves and making money than about actually learning languages. I would be happy to upgrade and pay something if this site actually offered something unique. But a silly, poorly developed interface, limits on vocabulary, and one of the worst organized media libraries in the word is not something I am going to pay for monthly, classic view or not.
Second, it is really quite disheartening that some of the admins on here are responding to our complaints that the new interface is bad and poorly arranged in a hostile manner. Service 101 says the customer is always right. Imagine if you checked into a hotel and said “There are bed bugs in my room, I want a change” and the hotel staff and manager responded by saying “It’s not that bad, we’re working on the bug problem.” By justifying all of these ridiculous features with length explanations is not helping your cause. By calling my post that used the words atrocious “ill-mannered” is not either. By saying “Things constantly need to be improved” is politician-like rhetoric that again eschews the problems and reasons we are complaining in the first place: because these interface changes are for not for the better.
Thankfully i can still access the classic mode, even after fiddling with settings it can’t approach the functionality which fits my own learning style.
Some have found success in the dual interface idea, using classic and new for different activities but for me the benefits don’t out weigh the negatives.
I wouldn’t class the interface as a joke because not everyone has the same sense of humour!
I was however upset by the new mode and it’s radical move away from what we knew and respected as a great system.
For me the main problem with the new interface is that the text only fits about 1/5th of the screen! The rest is just taken up by cartoons/gimmicks/etc. The reader should be about just that - READING! This is why I love the ‘Classic View’ in hover mode. Just pure, unadulterated language content that is simple and easy to read and navigate. It’s a shame LingQ have moved away from that, but I’m just glad I still have access to classic view.
Right now I do most of my learning reading E-Books on my Andriod tablet through LingQ, and I’m terrified about the new app being like how the website is now.
@Josh5 - Depending on your screen size the text in the Reader fits more or less of the screen. You can increase the amount of text that shows in the Settings where we have small, medium and large size pages to choose from. In the new iOS app we were able to fit the text to the screen dimensions which is ideal. We are going to try to do this on the web but it is more tricky to do there.
In so far as reading ebooks goes, I have been doing this on the new reader and can’t imagine going back to classic. I have been reading ebooks on the new reader since it was introduced and can’t imagine going back to classic. I don’t need to convince you since you are free to use classic but I actually think you are really missing out if you are still using classic for your ebooks.
ak472
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You make the point that LingQ is more concerned about generating income to pay its costs and staff than in “language learning”, as if the two are in contradiction. No income, no staff, no LingQ. Not a complicated concept.
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Our change has resulted in more people understanding how to learn at LingQ, more people creating LingQs, and more people joining. That tells us that for a majority of learners, we are on the right track.
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There are issues with the library, issues with the change over, and other aspects of the site that we know we need to improve. We are working to improve them. As it is now, however, LingQ represents value for many people. We can’t please everyone. If you see no value here, even with Classic view restored for you, no problem.
4)It was another LingQ member who termed your comments “ill-mannered”. I would agree that your comments are a little aggressive but it doesn’t really bother me.
- The issue here is not “bed-bugs” but basic design issues. It is inevitable that any design change, in a program, in a car, in a hotel, will please some people and not others. We can’t possibly accommodate everybody’s wishes. We need to decide on what will benefit the largest number of users while minimizing the unhappiness of people who preferred the previous set up. That is what we are trying to do.
I wasn’t going to mention any details but as you mention it yes this aspect is pretty woeful.
In a thread of suggestions one of the top requests was to increase the text box size. The resulting update decreased the available text area markedly and added many unneeded extras.
As soon as i saw that text box couldn’t be altered or scrolled with the down key, i was done with the new version.
By using an artifically sized immovable box, the learning process becomes such a chore, it’s almost like a suffocating feeling very unnatural to me.
Using large zoom and font, very little of the article can be viewed at once and the mouse interaction which i try to avoid becomes a real annoyance.
What do you think?
Actually, the new version can be scrolled with the down key once you are on a yellow word. It should work the same as in classic. We know it’s not ideal to have scrolling in this paged interface and we are working at filling the available space no matter what you have set for your font size. But, it is easy to navigate now using the keyboard only.
As much as I love LingQ, I would like to echo the complaint made by Josh5 that the text box in the new interface only fills a small portion of the screen. Combine this small frame with the fact that the text gets cut up into fragments that are way, way too small, and the result is that I am now unable to quickly get an overview and feel of the text. The old version had a continuous text that one could quickly skim through to check if it would be interesting to study. The new version makes this very difficult; clicking the arrows is simply not a substitute.
It seems that there is a lot of screen space that could be used much better. The top blue line with your know words and coins can be shrunk to half its size. The same goes for the bar that contains the play button and progress bar when you’re in a lesson. And the same goes for the bar below that which contains the title and picture of the lesson. With all due respect, but these things are ridiculously oversized.
Granted, for beginners in a language the new version may actually work better due to them being less able to handle large texts at once. But for intermediate and advanced learners I do not see the benefit of cutting everything up into small chunks and only filling a small portion of the screen with a tiny text box filled with oversized letters. I use the smallest font size and largest page size, and still reading in the new version feels really closed in, like walking down the street only being able to see two feet in front of you.
I believe the following things would make the new version much better:
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Drastically shrink the size of the things I mentioned: the top blue bar, the bar below that with the play button, and the bar below that with the huge picture and title of the lessen. Or integrate two bars into one (such as merging the bar with the play button with the bar with the “menu” and “notes” buttons).
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Provide the option to increase the page size further, or better yet, to view the entire text at once like in the classic version. If this results in the system being slower for those who choose that setting, so be it. I’ll gladly take the old slowness over the current lack of ability to see the entire text at once.
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Provide the option to decrease the font size even further. The current smallest setting is still huge to me.
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Provide the option to change the distance between sentences. There is too much white space in between.
I realize the classic option is still there for old users, and I’m very happy with that, but the new version also has many things that I enjoy and want to use (such as suggestions for lingqing phrases). I just believe that a middle ground between the old and new version would be so much better.
Honestly, I feel that if the classic option would disappear or if I would be a new user and wanted to use LingQ for a language I am already intermediate in, I probably won’t continue using it…
@eddyhopkins - As I said earlier in this thread, we are going to work on improving the ability to fill the available space with text. We will see if we can also add smaller font size options. In terms of paging, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. I find paging for intermediate and advanced lessons much better than scrolling, largely because for long lessons, the bookmarking functionality which works cross platform is so useful. This is a function of paging.
We do understand what you’re saying but we have to focus on making tools that work for the majority of users. So far new users are responding better to the paged interface than they did in the past.
I’m happy to hear that news about the app filling the whole screen Mark - appreciate the reply. I also have to echo Eddy that if the classic version was to disappear I would find it very hard to continue also. However, as it is still there for me that is not an issue for the moment!
It might be easy, but more complex and tiresome than classic version. As you have mentioned the paged interface seems to be the issue.
Looking forward to some of the suggestions being incorporated into the next edition!