I’m looking for guidance on tagging, especially in regard to the new LingQ 5 library. I would like to take advantage of the new features when sharing courses, but since I couldn’t find documentation on this, I’m asking here.
1 What are good tags for courses?
I assume the tags should be in line with the categories displayed on the library page, i.e. Podcasts, News, Entertainment etc. Should the tags also be confined to these categories?
2 What are good tags for lessons?
Should the tags describe the content of each lesson? Should course and lesson tags be identical? Should the each lesson contain the course’s tags as well as lesson specific tags?
3 LingQ 5 doesn’t allow sharing a lesson when it has less than two tags. Is any action required regarding previously shared lessons (having e.g. only one tag)?
4 How to tag courses / lessons, so they shows up on the LingQ 5 library page, that is in the categories like Politics, News etc? For example: What would I have to do to get this course Login - LingQ to show up under books?
5 Are Tags supposed to be in English or in the target language? For example: should I write News or 新闻, or both; in a Chinese course?
If you click on the Settings button (gear icon) on the home page, at the bottom of the Settings popup, you will see a list of Library Topics. These can be good suggestions for tags you can use. If you add any of these tags, your lessons will appear under that category.
So, for example, your tags can be Books, Politics, News, Travel, Entertainment, Sports etc… You can include accents in tags too, if lesson you imported has specific accent (for example you can add tag “Europe” for lesson imported in Spanish if it’s European accent).
You can’t share a lesson without adding a minimum of 2 tags, but your already shared lessons will remain shared, so no need to take action there, although it would be good to have all shared courses properly tagged to make it easier for users to find content they are interested in.
As an experiment, I already shared a course with “news” and “politics” tags last week, but the two shelves in Cantonese remain empty. If I use the search function on top, the courses and lessons show up when querying “news” or “politics”. So the system seems to have picked it up already.
(Login - LingQ)
Another question: What is the difference between tags for individual lessons and tags for the whole course?
Will the system place a course under let’s say “books” if the course is tagged with “books”, but none of the lessons contain the “books” tag? And vice versa, if only a lesson is tagged with “books” and the course is not, this lesson would not show up in the shelf “books”, right?
And in consequence, it’s best to have not only the course, but also each lesson contain the tag for the correct shelf?
Regarding question 5, I do understand correctly that the official tagging language is English? So does it make sense to have target language tags as well, especially if the tags are used for the search function (I suspect the tags are used here)?
Sorry for asking all these dumb questions.
But maybe some of this information can be incorporated into the new “LingQ Support Centre powered by WiX Answers”, at the bottom right in the web beta?
Hi, I can see your Cantonese course in News shelf as well as Politics shelf.
Each shelf (except for books and podcasts) has a course view and a lesson view as you can see on top of the shelves. so if you add one of the standard tags only to your course but not to the lessons of that course, those lessons won’t show up in the shelf under lesson view. they just appear under course view. and vice versa.
We have added equivalents to English tags in some other languages too but not all languages. Chinese is supported.
Adding standard tags puts your content in the proper shelf/shelves, although you can use more related tags so that users can find them when they search for those tags.
It’s advisable that you add proper tags to your previously shared content, otherwise they don’t sit in any shelves.
My shared courses in Chinese are also not visible in the shelves.
I’m sure you have a lot on your hands with the LingQ 5 launch and this issue is probably not too important. But at least on my end the shelves don’t work quite right. But if others can see, it’s really just a minor inconvenience.
Thanks again for your efforts, they are appreciated!
I should mention that if those lessons/courses are in your Continue Studying shelf, you don’t see them in other shelves, but they are actually there and users are able to see them.
if you remove them from continue studying shelf, you’ll also be able to see them in other shelves.
OMG! Thank you very much, I would have never figured this out. I can confirm removing the lessons from ‘Continue Studying’ does work, my courses now appear on the right shelves. This resolves my issue.
But maybe you can take our exchange into account when you (or anybody at LingQ) edit and expand the LingQ Support Center? Because I don’t feel that the special status of the Continue Studying shelf is intuitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if others were getting confused down the road.
It would be great if the support documents would give more guidance on the tagging etc. Maybe the questions and answers in this thread could be incorporated in the documentation? Currently it is a little sparse.