This is an issue that exists only in Japanese. We hope to get time to look into it in the new year. Essentially, because there are no spaces between words in Japanese, the system is unable to properly split the text into words. Only properly split words that are LingQed will be highlighted in the text. Sometimes the way the words are split works out but mostly it doesn’t. So for now you will only be able to review most of your vocabulary in the Vocabulary section. Some of our Japanese learners are importing text and putting spaces between words in the text to try and get around this problem.
This is the reason why we haven't introduced other Asian languages yet. However, there are many members who are still enjoying LingQ for Japanese despite its limitations.
Improving the Chinese and Japanese version (now called Beta) is a priority. However, we simply have too many things to do. I do not want to promise when we an get at it.
Meanwhile, there are many people happily studying Japanese using the functionality as it is.
Kurisu, you can play a little with the system, using it as a source of audio and text content. You can review your words in the Vocabulary section. You can even open up the Vocabulary section in a second tab, and make sure you keep the order as “Creation Date”. You can thus use quite a bit of functionality. You can also arrange to talk to a tutor and have your writing correction.
I suggest you read Zuangzi’s parable of the crooked tree at the beginning of my book. You may learn to appreciate LingQ -Japanese for what it is, and not what it might be, or should be.
I haven’t tried the Japanese version yet but am pretty sure that it works about the same way as the Chinese - which I don’t have a problem with as long as I do minor changes (i.e. add spaces) to the texts I study. That way, the words get saved and displayed as intented.
Given that this is a known limitation, why not have the people writing the transcripts of your podcasts and so on insert spaces between words for now? It’ll be easy enough to remove them later on once the site is able to do word detection, and it’s much easier to do it while the document is being written than for a bunch of individual users to have to go repeatedly make exactly the same edits to the same files after the fact.
I was rather bummed when I discovered the Chinese version of the site wasn’t doing all the neat vocabulary stuff the demo advertised. I wish I’d figured it out before spending hours going through some of the text to build up a vocabulary list, but oh well.
You are probably right. We keep expecting to be able to get to the Asian characters issue but it keeps getting pushed back by other priorities. Therefore, we will now start asking our transcribers to insert spaces and we will ask all members sharing content if they wouldn’t mind inserting spaces. When we do eventually fix the Asian language functionality we will worry about how to remove the spaces.