In principle LingQ is brilliant. I have with one exception (1) never seen an application with so many serious bugs, including show stoppers.I have had to figure out numerous workarounds for the bugs.
(1) Thirty years ago I was a developer on a product, and version 3 was a serious mess, new features didn’t work, many existing features were broken. They rushed out version 3 too quickly as competitors were stealing customers. The company went bust.
I never cease to be amazed by German technology and agriculture.
“How do you take note about the word?”
I think of the lingq as the primary note. If I scroll down to the bottom of a lingq window, there’s a space that says “add notes here”, but I don’t use that much. A sentence translation is also a type of note. (It can be edited for imported content and can include a note added to the end of the translation.)
For me, that’s the best part of lingq. I don’t need to keep looking things up, over and over again. I can just look at the lingq or sentence translation.
While I don’t see a problem with providing the option to automatically show the translation and play the sentence audio in a future update, there is something to be said for focussing on the reading and attempting to understand new words in context before falling back on the sentence translation.
I thought that it would be good to bookmark the sentence somehow, with interesting words or structures… May be notes could help, but I didnt find how to work with them
It’s a fair point, and certainly if I just signed up for the first time without any history with the tool then I would likely be somewhat irked. However, I’d probably simply ask for another month free or something like that so I could adequately test it out. Perhaps there should be a warning when using it…this feature relies on 3rd party…etc. etc.
Better, I think, would be to mark the word or phrase as critical to memorize. That way you could have a separate list to focus on with the attached sentences and notes.
As it is, I have nearly 9,000 words lingQed and over 500 phrases. So I need to keep a separate journal book for my revisions. In addition to Anki of course.
I have a small spiral notebook and I fold over the loose side of the page with the answers and write what I know on the left. That way I can quickly scan down the list to see if I still remember it and if I don’t I can peek under the flap to remind myself.
That said, they really do need to continue their focus on squishing bugs before extending the interface.
“And how do you find those notes later?”
The lingq is the note, so I just click a word to see the note/lingq. If I scroll down to the bottom of the lingq, there’s a spot for an additional note, but I don’t use that. For imported content, sentence translations can be edited. I sometimes add a note (in brackets) after the translation. Then if I click [shift-t] I can see the translation and any note I’ve added.
Your mileage may vary, but I don’t see how it makes sense to use Anki to learn lingQs. I personally have about 43,000 words and phrases lingQd in Ukrainian. There’s no way to learn that many words using Anki. Yet my known word count is over 31,000 and growing. I feel like the system works best when we just keep reading and trust that we will learn words over time.
As for the original post, I feel like OP is trolling us a bit with his teaser and lack of follow-up response. I credit LingQ for significant progress in learning Ukrainian. It’s not all I use of course, but it is my most important tool for increasing vocabulary. LingQ is not without its flaws, but so what? Show me the perfect language learning software. That unicorn doesn’t exist.
My own experience is that LingQs don’t work. Words just don’t sink in, unless I make a distinct effort to notice in which case LingQs become redundant. Also, I don’t like to remember isolated words. Words out of context are not so useful. I record phrases in Anki so I learn contextual meaning and usage e.g. the correct preposition. I struggle with phrases such as La balançoire à bascule and Le stand de tir as the preposition can be à or de or absent.
We all have different learning routines and methods, and I don’t think anyone can claim that theirs is the correct method. Do whatever works.
Not knocking your experience. How long have you been using LingQ, and how much do you read per day? Some LingQs also don’t sink in for me, but very many do. I read a minimum of 400 coins worth per day and usually log 40-50 known words added each day. On days where I read 800+ coins worth, I’m racking up 100+ words. With truly massive exposure, the words sink in better. Those words that don’t sink in, I’m not worried about learning until later. For me, flashcards to force memorization don’t speed up anything–they slow me down.
*Edit - many links don’t sink in at first. That’s fine–the system still works if you read a lot. We eventually learn those words, when we’re ready.
**Edit 2 - I’m close to B2 in Ukrainian, and learning words is going much faster on LingQ now than when I was, say, A2. If you’re early on in your French journey, it is definitely harder. Somewhere between B1-B2, learning new words accelerated for me. **
You’ve marked hundreds of words known this week for both German and French but you are saying LingQ’s don’t work? What exactly do you mean when you say they don’t work? i.e. What are you doing in LingQ? Or are you learning the words outside of LingQ and then updating LingQ afterward?
If you are able to learn the words, how can it be possible that you cannot learn them through LingQ? Read text several times till you you dont need to click every word and translate. Each time you will need less and less translation. for me, it is enough to read 4-5 times. Some words were not memorized, it is not a problem. you need to understand 80-90 % of the text. Then, go to the next text. Several days later - return to the text and read it 1-2 times. Thats all. If you take texts with 30-35% of unknown words, you are able to read this text and learn in this way and enjoy the text
That one got me by surprise.