I have generalled tried to avoid the dog pile on the litany of technical problems at LingQ. Its funny because i usually complain and whine about things but have somehow managed to accept the problems with Lingq as the price of doing business, even though the business model strongly encourages long-term nonrecoverable investments of time and money which makes the sense fron the management that you just have to grin and bear frustrating.
But what i am increasingly unable to be zen about is the nature, not just volume of errors in the ministories. we literally wait YEARS, with zero guidance, being told any month now, for the stories to come. they refuse to let users do languages when they havent done the mini stories, and then you come across stuff like this that is just flagrantly not written by a native speaker (according to my Kenyan tutor) :
Hawakosi kubadilisha nepi ya binti yao hata kidogo
This means, âthey dont miss changing the diaperâ, which is goofily direct from English; according to her âto missâ can only be used like that to mean to miss the bus, etc. You guys need to either make this a free platform or get your stuff together.
I like LingQ a lot and genuinely believe that Zoran and other mods do what they can to keep us in the loop and that thereâs not a whole lot of control they have over this.
That said, this whole workflow is pretty disastrous. Itâs a lot of time and money the community voluntarily puts into adding these languages, which does add to the value of the product only to get repeatedly ghosted.
And yeah, I do not like mini-stories whatsoever and kinda wish they would just do away as a whole.
You might want to forget the mini-stories and import some content originally written in Kenyan.
If I understand things correctly, Lingq relies on A.I. appâs to do the translating, and the A.I. translations are far from perfect. If I import French text, itâs easy for me to work with a slightly mangled English translation. I wouldnât want to import English text and then study slightly mangled French.
It sounds like your âKenyanâ mini stories might be slightly mangled A.I. generated translations from another language. So you might want to ignore those and import some better content.
But im not talking about the english translationâthe reason im so frustrated is the endless and unknown wait times are nominally on account of the mini-stories. and then they finally come and are so unreliable as to be unuseable. they should just put them on the platform like wikipedia while allowing users to continuously improve them, which is after all exactly what âbetaâ means if im not mistaken?
I did the German mini-stories over a year ago and looking back I wish that I had not bothered. I should have imported beginner videos from YouTube, and studied those. As an aside, for many months I used sentence mode and did the exercises. In retrospect I should have skipped the exercises.
My guess is that Lingq might have been waiting for an A.I. app to learn a language well enough. It seems Lingq doesnât translate anything. For French, it relies on Google Translate, ChatGPT, and DeepL. If itâs using the same appâs for Kenyan, the delay might have been Lingq waiting for one of those appâs to translate Kenyan reasonably well. The quality of translation will depend entirely on how well the A.I. app is working. I donât know if Lingq can do anything to improve that. In the settings menu, you might be able to choose from multiple appâs. If so, try them all and see if one works better than the others. The translations will always be a little rough, though. If Lingq used human translators for everything, I imagine the service would be prohibitively expensive. A.I. may not be âintelligentâ, but it is cheap.
Poor translations and half-baked content occurs in every language learning app.
Unfortunately we live in capitalism, and as long as business owners need to make a profit and translators need to get paid enough so they can at least afford to live comfortably, weâre going to have a situation in which translations are half-baked because the business canât afford to, or simply wonât, pay the fee that competent translators need to demand.
Until peopleâs basic needs are met to the point that they can start offering their products and services for free, this situation will continue to occur.
Duolingo is full of errors, Busuu and Babbel are almost free of them in my experience, but they have limited content. LingQ, in its defence, is massive so minor errors are to be expected. The strength of LingQ is importing external content, and for the most part translations, in French anyway, are good.
Capitalism is the reason peasants such as myself have access to a high standard of living. The language learning resources we have at our disposal today are incredible.
It was Churchill who said that capitalism is bad, but not as bad as the alternatives.
It is fallacy to blame any economic problems on capitalism. Labour is a scarce Ressource that has alternative uses. This circumstance would not change in a different economic system. It is an illusion to think that a communist Government would allocate more resources to improve the translations on lingq for a language like Kenyan.
Thanks to capitalism you have the option to vote with your wallet and choose among the various other language learning resources out there.
Perhaps this got out of hand. I was more complaining about the long wait for stories to be added because of how central they are to the companyâs messaging, and how necessary it is that they be correct before adding, only to be addled with enough errors to impede confidence in the process
Simplified, this says âpeople donât give you everything for freeâ. That is the world we live in. In a non-capitalist society, the rich and powerful get whatever they want, but nobody else does. Here in the US, a person below the poverty line can afford LingQ.
LingQ has 47 languages. That does not mean that LingQ can afford to pay each of 47 translators enough to be on call to fix mistakes, not to mention the AI companies and other services that LingQ somehow manages to integrate.
LingQ could afford all that, if each subscriber paid $1500/mo (and there were just as many subscribers). But not for $15/mo. You get what you pay for. LingQâs price reflects what people are willing to pay. It is worth more.
What a bizarre, distorted view of âcapitalismâ this is. It sounds like political rhetoric from some college professor who has never lived in the real world and never had a job or owned a company.
It is false. Iâve never been âpitted againstâ anyone, and nobody I know has been. Iâve never seen it happen, except in sports.
In his defense, it depends on the company. If the people leading the company are making non well-thought decisions, this can lead to such scenarios as suggested by @Pr0metheus . However, I am not convinced that this is an issue specific to capitalism, but probably more one with human nature. We all value our own good higher then that from anyone else.
There are also different forms of capitalism. I would say that there are some major differences in how those systems work in the US compared to Germany, for example, with both systems having their pros and cons. Still, they are both capitalistic countries. On the other side, Eastern Germany was a communistic system for quiet some time, and it is not that the majority of people here seem to be missing it. I donât know whether someone who has never lived in such a system, which due to my age includes myself, can really make a profound statement.
And I have stated this before but criticising something doesnât imply you want it to be gone. You may also want it to improve. And even if not there are probably more ways how an economy can work then capitalism and communism.
I agree that the state of the mini stories is somewhat weird. I donât know whether theyâre really using ai systems for the translation or professional translators. As far as I understood it, the speakers are natives, not ai. There are also differences in the way the mini stories are set up in different languages which makes me believe they are not machine translated. In addition I barely remember another discussion where I think it was stated that they also rely on voluntary work for this, but it is been a while so maybe I am mixing something up here.
I donât know how much a translator get paid, I would assume this depends on the country the person is living in. But there isnât much LingQ created content aside from the introduction, the mini stories and this âWho is she?â story, at least not that I am aware of. I may sound a bit arrogant or maybe I am just underestimating the effort, but considering the amount of text we are talking about and the language level, I would assume that a professional translator can get the job done rather quickly, so within a few days. And any argument on whether money plays a role in regards to the quality would first require to know how many customers and therefore how much income for LingQ we are talking about. I would assume that only a minority is actively participating in discussions here in the forum. But anything beyond that is highly speculative. So simple assuming that the quality of the mini stories is lacking because they canât or donât want to pay for a better quality is without fundament.
What bothers me the most is the sloppyness in the translation. Each language uses the same stories, so there is nothing within them that somewhat resembles the culture of those who are natively speaking it. Most of the time they donât even exchange the names of the characters (and if they do, they forget to do so in the translation). And for some reason the whole world seems to be paying with dollars. It might be a minor thing, but considering how little effort such things take, it is hard to justify imho.
In the end the mini stories reflect the whole LingQ philosophy. A bunch of encouraged people with good ideas, but a tendency to only half-do the job.
@BabyRuth the sentence âHawakosi kubadilisha nepi ya binti yao hata kidogoâ is actually correct to a certain extent. But a few corrections would be needed; i.e. the last part ââŚhata kidogoâŚâ. This makes the sentence feel a little bit unnatural in as it is probably from an English translation and therefore more of a repetition. However it doesnât make the sentence entirely grammatically incorrect as it is. Just unnatural.
If I was to reconstruct the sentence then I would probably say âHawakosi kubadilisha nepi ya binti yao kila anapo enda hajaâ.
Note: You may also get two swahili speakers arguing if it should be ânepi ya or nepi zaâ.
(Welcome to the third dimension of hell âNgeliâ)
I donât think any of the mini-stories are created by translating with AI. For languages where there probably are only going to be relatively few users, itâs generally LingQ users who create the mini-stories out of passion by translating the English version or perhaps some other language version they understand. They are then also read by LingQ users who might be the same ones who translated them or someone they recruit to do it. When users translate and read material, there isnât much of a guarantee itâs going to be high quality material.
I am pretty sure if LingQ employed professional translators and voice actors for all material in all languages, access to it would become extremely expensive. Although there are LingQ empolyees who add material to some of the âbigâ langauges at least, I think most material for the âsmallerâ languages is public domain material added by users. LingQ is in a way a community where langauge enthusiasts help each other out by adding material.
Ahahah, wonderful joke. âLingQ is in a way a community where language enthusiasts help each other out by adding material.â = we canât anymore. Those guys bark about copyright even if you take it from an open source.
Iâve start to share, during 5 month, the news from NHK easy, an open source, and out of nowhere, i canât do it anymore. So, if we canât share, and they are doing shit like absolutely everytime, what is the purpose of paying ? Waiting them to add material ? When they are not even capable of helping the community with those tremendous amount of bugs ?
