Hi, I hope this is the best place to post this question.
First, I want to say that LingQ is the best language-learning resource I know of.
There’s this thing with Arabic, though: if there is no harakat in the words, a word in isolation might mean something grammatically different to what it means in the sentence. For example, in the sentence, an Arabic word might mean “of BLANK”, whereas it would just mean “BLANK” when alone, so that when you click the word, only the “BLANK” shows up.
Every time you make a LingQ, it shows up for everybody else, right? I don’t want to screw things for other Arabic learners by putting in the meaning of a word or phrase that the word or phrase actually does not mean, but only means in the sentence that I’m LingQing it from. So my questions are:
Is there a way to make LingQs private, so I can put in whatever meaning I want there?
If not, is it ok for me to do this, or am I causing a problem for learners of Arabic (especially beginners) if I put in whatever meaning I want when I LingQ?
Most people put different things into the meaning section.
For example, for learners of Korean on LingQ they’ll often create LingQs for words in a variety of ways:
Direct meaning of a word
Context-dependent meaning of a word
The above types of meanings + additional grammar or word endings their word had
the root word of the word they’re linking + the above + every possible direct meaning of the word
Etc.
It’s up to each user to look into their definitions to verify that they are correct based on how they choose to LingQ. No one is forced to select or create a specific type of LingQ. It can mean less reliable LingQs (if you don’t do the research/are less familiar with the language), but it is a “community dictionary” of sorts.
In my experience, language learning involves looking at various contexts, resources, and materials to learn more about a language, so mistakes happen.
LingQ is based on context; Choose/create a meaning for a word, if you want (or don’t). LingQ is all about learning a language in context, so learners encounter a variety of texts in their learning. (Unintentional) mistakes in the community dictionary will not derail someone’s learning as much as you might think.
At least in my opinion.
You don’t need to worry about that as much as making edits to shared lessons. That can cause many problems for learners if you make drastic changes by mistake.
P.S. I think the other thing you can do is select a definition/meaning from the list given to you before you LingQ a word and then edit the meaning, and it might not add a meaning to the community dictionary, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
I’m not sure either. I’ve been mostly choosing pre-made definitions and modifying them, and I keep getting informed that there have been hundreds of instances of other users choosing the Lingq’s I’ve created… (I can’t recall creating very many completely from scratch; most already have definitions close to what I need).
This is not a unique problem to Arabic, it´s in almost all languages (dispose, dispose of). You have to use a certain degree of discretion whilst viewing lingqs. There are also words with very rare meanings, like treat (meaning to discuss/do business) and I found a word in Swedish “drev” which means both the past tense of “to drive” and “sprocket” and I have no idea why, but it has something to do with the long version of the word for sprocket being “drivhjul” or drive wheel. You will have to get used to this coming up again and again I´m afraid.