As I am living in Ethiopia, I am trying to learn one of the important languages of this country, Amharic. I have already made some mp3 files of texts that I could import into lessons for my own use. There is little material in this language at beginner level available on the web.
My question is: 'is it possible to import texts in writing systems not supported by LingQ? Can I import texts from Word or in PDF format, for example?
I would really like to know this, too. Thanks for asking this. I would reallyl like to learn Finnish language here at LingQ…!!
It would be great if we could have a function to study non-supported languages in LingQ and use the system’s functionality for personal study. Perhaps that will get implemented some day but I wonder how tricky it might be to implement.
Yes, you can certainly do this on LingQ. Members in the past (and currently as well) have been know to study languages that aren’t supported by using a different slot.
As a native English speaker, you may not be interested in studying English further, so you could simply import Amharic texts, for example, into your English slot and study it like that. The one disadvantage is that you won’t have built in dictionaries to use, but you can open a dictionary in another tab and enter the term, then just copy and paste it back into LingQ as you would normally.
Of course, everything in this case would show as activity in English, but you can just imagine that this says “Amahric” 
What about the Amharic fidel writing system? It is basically a syllabic system using completely different symbols from most other languages. Can I import texts, from Deutsche Welle, for example, or texts I have written up in Microsoft Word? I do not know of any online dictionaries and printed ones normally available are not so flash either! I can, however, ask my friends with some success.
I have just now imported a short text from DW. It has come up looking like completely normal fidel!
Is is possible to import from MS Word? What about PDF files?
rae68, If the file to be imported is Unicode (probably UTF-8) encoded, and you have your browser’s code page set to the same, if nothing else works you can probably just cut-and-paste the text from your computer to LingQ. (Browser’s code page. In Internet Explorer 9.0, for instance, use View->Encoding->Unicode (UTF-8) to set it.) I’ve cut-and-pasted onto LingQ Russian texts from my own computer that way.
I’m not familiar enough with the Amharic script to understand exactly what you mean. You should, however, be able to copy and paste text from Microsoft Word or a PDF file (providing the format is correct) into the Text section when adding a lesson. As long as there are spaces between the words (which there are), then it should work more or less correctly.