I just imported 2 books. One made lessons at about 2500 words each. The other book made lessons at around 14,500 words each.
why did it do this ? It’s hard to estimate known words/ difficulty when the lessons are at different length.
I noticed this occasionally before as well. Not sure why.
I’m having the same problem. For me, there are some book chapters that are being split up, which makes studying via LingQ very difficult. I’ve mentioned this on another thread.
LingQ support: Please, please increase the word limit for imported lessons.
ideally the lessons would split at a chapter. But I don’t mind the lessons at around 2500 words. It’s just disorienting when it’s that way most of the time and suddenly it makes one 5 times as long .
The reason for chunking used to be slow response as a consequence. This was a long time ago. Technology has advanced a lot in the meantime, but the chunking is still based on some old criterion. Also, last time I imported a large article or book or podcast, chunking applied only to text, not the accompanying audio, putting the problems around chunking squarely in the hands of the user.
The lack of control one has over chunking is annoying to say the least. An obvious solution would be to make the chunks configurable, from small chunks, to large chunks and ideally by chapter.
I have given up on most error reports due to the arrogant tone of answers often boiling down to: " no " or " we will look into it " or just ignoring.
Lingq will most likely look into it. Or not. And improve it. Or not.
Transparency of software development and bug reporting is not a property of Lingq.
Apparently, this “chunking” (which I absolutely hate by the way) should become a thing of the past. It no longer applies to imports for which you generate a transcript and is due to stop applying to all imports soon according to Mark. How soon, though, I have no idea. This chunking is very hit and miss. Yesterday, one of the chapters I imported split at 2100 words and left me with only a handful of words in the second half. I hope we will soon be able to have one lesson per chapter.
Sounds like it’s pretty inconsistent, but I’m wondering how they intend for imported books to behave (or what other users really want). If there is no chunking…do we really want one single lesson for a whole book?? I guess I personally like the smaller chunks, even if they aren’t the chapters themselves. If nothing else it breaks things into “manageable” lessons. I can maybe focus on vocabulary for just that lesson. At least for myself, that 2000-2500 word size is pretty nice. It would probably be nice to at least have it configurable as gbonnema suggests. I would not like one super long lesson, nor would I want lessons that are 14,500 words either.
Having a configuration mechanism where we can chunk audio, text and video depending on the document’s structure and contents would make sense. Chunking serves a purpose if the user is in control of the sizes (text, video as well as audio). Leaving out the possibility of chunking is just as bad as random divisions. I guess the exact mechanism is food for thought, and I really hope this is thought through and tested before implementation.
What I hope to have is one lesson = one chapter. If the chapter is 14000 words, it’s fine by me. However, other users might not want that, so they should make personalisation options available in the settings. But the current system is way past its sell by date.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestions everyone. We will see what we can do to improve the feature.
LinqQ is still chunking on a low threshold (for me) of about 2500 words. Can this limit be moderately raised, even if the other requested features aren’t implemented soon?
It’s always possible to cut text into shorter sections for users who want to do that, but it’s not possible to lengthen texts past the imposed limit.
Thanks.
Yes, the possibility to not have words limits for MANUAL import so to align 1 CHAPTER=1 LESSON could be great. Yes, for importing articles it’s great to choose to not have them split, although it’s never been a big deal for me.
BUT for automatic book imports I definitely don’t want to have 14500 words or greater per lesson. Creating TTS would be way longer, and searching something in the middle of lessons so big would become just painful.
Daily, I listen to lessons on iPhone and often the audio just reset from one day to another letting me trying to search where I was with the audio in the middle of the lesson. (And there is no reference inside the karaoke to where to go). I can’t imagine doing that for an entire book in one lesson only!
Lastly, smaller lessons can be psychologically easier to digest, giving a better feeling of progress. If I had a choice, sometimes I would even create shorter lessons than 2500. I just hope to have a choice for new imports.
Thanks.
I really hope something is done about this soon. 2500 words is ridiculously low. I am tired of having my book chapters split into 10 lessons. I believe this chunking also makes it harder to know at first glance how difficult a book chapter really is because it is fragmented.
FYI— I think I figured out the mystery of why the books chunked like this. There were 3 that did. In all three cases, they are novels whose writers made the artistic choice to write reallllly long paragraphs. In one case, the entire book (around 150 pgs) is one paragraph which made 1 Lingq lesson. In another case the book consists of several short books of another author Each book is a Lingq lesson since there are no paragraph breaks. I didn’t realize this at first because I hadn’t read these books. (they are also by three different authors. though perhaps they were influenced by each other.) But the Lingq problem reproduces the problem the author is creating in not making paragraph breaks — it’s hard to know when to break as a reader.
ok so my hypothesis is that the Lingq chunker tried to chunk around 2000-2500 words at a paragraph break. If it can’t, then it creates a very long chunk until there is a break.
Once again LingQ has arbitrarily truncated my imported text, this time from the first chapter of a new book at 2054 words (12279 characters), less than 200 words shy of the total chapter length (2345 words). I’m not even trying to import audio, I just want my imported lessons to match my book chapters.
Please, please raise this threshold limit. 
I understand the limits for automatically pulling content in. It basically has to be done by number of characters. However, it would be amazing if the manual lesson creation would allow for much longer lessons.
A user friendly lesson builder where I could just copy and paste an entire chapter from a book that maintains the paragraph structures and supports the entire chapter in 1 lesson would be game changer. I really don’t mind spending a little more time manually copying and pasting 20 chapters from a book. I’m going to spend a lot of time reading it so I don’t mind putting a little extra effort up front.