LingQ for Japanese has become fundamentally unusable

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Hello Team LingQ,

I’ve been a long-time power user for years, plus a long-time advocate of LingQ. It’s my favourite language learning tool.

Somehow, in the past few months or so, the Japanese LingQ product has become unusable.

There seems to have been some software update that completely changed how the text is broken up into words and phrases. Here’s an example:

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In this screenshot, notice the phrases (eg: 見て気に) that are randomly collected into a single LingQ.

In another example, "でもマンション持ってる女の人って " is split in the MIDDLE OF THE WORD マンション, resulting in " でもマン " and "ション持ってる女の人って " as the two LingQs, both being nonsensical. Lingqing such phrases is useless, as is adding them into my “known words.”

This was never the case before, and it completely ruins LingQ at a fundamental level.

I suspect that LingQ has been experimenting a lot trying to squeeze AI or new algorithms into places where these technologies offer no value. I love the experimentation, but I think the recent changes should be rolled back.

I’ve had to stop recommending LingQ to new friends for fear of embarrassment. Please, please fix / restore this!

2

Yes, they’re only fixing/enhancing the packaging, not the fundamentals.

3

I agree. There are some real issues at the moment. We will get this sorted out soon, so at least these obvious problems are dealt with.

4

Thanks Mark for your attention. Could you promise a date for this particular fix?

5

Did you try custom prompts for the ai?

I use this one (adapted by another user)

Keep compound nouns intact as single vocabulary units. Only split and isolate grammatical particles, markers, and auxiliary verbs from the nouns and verbs. If the input already has words seperated by spaces, don’t split anything.

I haven’t imported in the last few days, but thus far it created results okay for me.

6

Hopefully, we would have something to push next week. We’ll see how it goes.

7

This seems helpful but I want to use LingQ the way it was pre-AI, it worked perfectly fine for Japanese.

8

It would probably be more helpful if it just split the text completely, into individual characters (in which case we could simply manually select the ones that make up the word or phrase), than to use AI to figure out how to split it.

9

This post is a shame to see. I used LingQ for Japanese for a few months and liked it a lot. Then an update several months ago made it unusable for the reasons described here. I checked back into the forum today to see if its been fixed and I see it hasnt. I hope at some point it is, what LingQ offers is unique and its a real shame that its still so broken for Japanese.

10

Hello @amanagarwal could you please check how it is working now with a new import? To fix previously imported lessons please use ‘Fix formatting issues’ in the Editor.

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11

Hi, I actually haven’t tried importing lessons — the formatting issues were occurring in lessons that were already in the LingQ library, in fact, many of them I had completed before, but revisiting them somehow created these new nonsensical phrase breakups and showed them in blue.

I’m facing another huge bug though, that clicking on a word somehow selects a totally different word and shows its meaning instead of the word I selected. This one is really annoying. @mark @irynalingq2025

12

@amanagarwal I’ll give this a thorough check using older lessons.

I imported a lesson the other day, the parsing was much better.