While going through the Mini Stories looking for Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations (called: 多音字 / duō yīn zì) I found a string of other errors in Mini Story 6.
Errors listed by sentence number: wrong > correct
2: 简和福 来 得 > 简 和 福来得 (Jane and Fred) (wrong spaces)
3: 7 > 七 (Arabic numbers used, also in 14, 27, other numbers in 7, 18, 28, 29)
8: 热水澡 > 热 水澡 (also 19 - “hot bath” isn’t one word, or?)
13: 福 来 得 > 福来得 (also 24, 43, 44) (wrong spaces)
Please proof read ALL Mandarin Chinese mini stories ASAP!
Some other other errors in other stories so far:
1a: 着 zhe/zhao (9 - audio error single character)
1b: 着 zhe/zhao (9 - audio error single character)
2: 还 hai/huan (10 - audio error single character)
便 pian/bian
I wonder if I am the first one taking up Chinese Mandarin? This should have been corrected loooong ago.
Here are the 3 most common 多音字 errors in Mini-Story 1-20 - the error is the Pinyin and the single character audio - the sentence is correct:
着 wrong: zhao // correct: zhe
还 wrong: huan // correct: hai
便 wrong: bian // correct: pian
了 wrong: liao // correct: le
That means, for 多音字 characters you need to have multible sets of Pinyin and audio.
I paused while it’s getting fixed. Now it’s 3 weeks later and still not fixed. I am a paying user that can’t use the buggy material. (But strangely get those reminder messages asking me to keep learning)
Can you at least pause my subscription and then add those 3 weeks later once it has been sorted out?
So far I looked only at the Mini Stories, I thought that’s the LingQ own system and therefore must be perfect. OK, that’s my error.
I suggest you remove the Mini Stories from Mandarin and put them back when they are fixed.
In the meantime I am looking forward to some other material suggestions for learning Mandarin. Or a refund if LingQ can’t provide it yet.
I have to admit, my experience is very disappointing. I understand that bugs can happen, but believe the Mini Stories are out for maybe a few weeks or month, so there must be more reports from users. Or maybe I am the only one doing Mandarin here with the Mini Stories.
I can actively help, but seems nobody cares. Nothing gets fixed.
Correct them, yes, please. This does detract from the quality and value of the LingQ product.
However, it is far from fatal and nobody will be permanently scarred by it.
When you hear something in the audio different from what you see, just use Pleco and look into it. When you see errors in the way words are broken up, remind yourself that Chinese is not a language that includes spaces in between words, so those spaces are artificial anyway.
For your own sanity and learning, just do the ministories a few times as a beginner and move on to more interesting content. Any words that are important you will see again thousands and thousands of times elsewhere.
You are right, however, this gives a really bad impression about LingQ. They put something out that somehow functions, and then never fine tuned it or corrected errors.
I mean, come on, if an error is reported it should be fixed right away. The Mini stories are out how many years?
Today I though, ok, check again how I am suppose to use LingQ, so I had a look at “LingQ 101 - Getting Started”
I though, that MUST be really easy and useful - well, it’s in Mandarin.
So I thought there is probably a “LingQ 101 - Getting Started” on their Youtube channel - nope.
It has been discussed quite a few times on here: the pinyin and text-to-speech “single character pronunciation” are automated and cannot, at present, be fixed without overhauling how LingQ handles these functions.
It’s not an issue with the lessons, it’s an issue with the software, and not one that has an easy fix. Wrong spaces on public lessons (especially “core” ones, like the Mini Stories) can and should be fixed ASAP.
For anyone curious, LingQ uses AWS Polly as their upstream TTS provider (at least for Mandarin). Polly only provides a single voice for Mandarin, “Zhiyu”. Fixing this issue would require swapping out the TTS engine for a different one.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t really appear to be any good alternatives for Chinese. Almost all the TTS that support Chinese are either extremely robotic or have strange artifacts like this (many of them make the same mistake for 还 or worse).
The pinyin for individual characters with multiple pronunciations is often wrong. It’s nothing unique to the mini-stories. I always combine reading and listening so I know the common ones.
LingQ only allows for one pronunciation per character/word, which is a conversation you’ll find in a separate thread. So the pinyin you’re seeing is likely not wrong, but correct in a different context.
This is why people have resorted to putting pinyin in the definitions, which of course spoils some of the SRS.
