Japanese word splitting

Open Forum
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Hi, I’m a new user here just having a look to see what the site is like. I’ve got a question about how words are split up in Japanese texts on LingQ:
I encountered in a lesson the word 言われています(iwareteimasu) but it was split up in to 言わ・れて・い・ます. Thankfully because I’ve been learning Japanese for a time before this, I knew that these four parts came together to form the one word but what if I hadn’t? If I’d never encountered that before, how would I know to consider it as one than as four separate words? Is LingQ supposed to be used in conjunction with an external grammar book/course/reference? I’m just worried that if I come across something like this that I didn’t know already (some knew conjugation or phrase or what have you) it’ll lead to a lot of confusion. I’m kind of curious about using LingQ to learn Spanish from scratch but will I be likely to encounter problems like this? Is Japanese a language that just unfortunately has these quirks? I like the idea of learning a language through listening and reading and not worrying too much about grammar but maybe it’s a necessary evil.

On a related note, since I know 言われています already, I understand that I can highlight the four broken up parts to create one LingQ, but how do I say that I “know” this word as a whole? There’s no option for this when you manually highlight a collection of words. If I say I know each part individually, the system will say I “know” 4 words when it’s really only 1. Again, is this just a quirk of learning Japanese on this site that you have to get used to?

Thanks a lot for any help.

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I’m just one of the Japanese learners on LingQ but I think this is just one of the quirks of Japanese. The language doesn’t have spaces so LingQ has to use a word splitter to guess where to break up the words and that word splitter isn’t perfect. I think you’ll find that the conjugation of verbs, such as your example above, to be when the word splitter has the most trouble. You can ignore (press the ‘X’ key on the keyboard) the non-word fragments so they don’t get counted in your known word count. The whole word ‘言われています’ will be counted as a phrase in the system so if you move it to status 4 it won’t be counted as a known word but instead as a “LingQ learned”.

3

@cgreen - you beat me to it, lol

It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but in those cases, I just click on the affected blue words and choose ‘ignore’. Then I make a lingQ of the actual word/phrase I want by dragging over the text.

And yes, I move it to status 4 as cgreen suggests.

The system isn’t perfect, but overall the pros outweigh the cons. I tend to edit others’ hints, and create my own words, to overcome any problems or inaccuracies. Also, I think it doesn’t take newbies too long in practice to discern the stem part from the conjugating part, imho.