How does someone alert LingQ when there is a mistake given for a word definition?
I am taking Spanish and have found several mistakes.
Thanks
If you see a LingQ with an error, simply don’t select it. Create your own accurate LingQ. Both LingQs will be shown to the next user, who hopefully choose your new one as the more correct definition. The one which is chosen more rises to the top of the choice list.
I don’t think that this is a good approach. I didn’t know the definition when I selected it – I only learned that it was wrong later. (I would not have selected the word in my reading unless I didn’t know the definition.)
And, this approach results in a lot of wrong answers being available.
There should be a way to contact LingQ and get them to remove the wrong definitions.
@JohnR
While translating a word into German, there are often 3-5 ways.
depending on the sentences.there is not false or right.
j:-)
True, but that is not the issue here.
As part of the Spanish text, the word “destacan” is defined as “verb”.
But, “destacan” never means “verb”; it is a verb, the third person plural of “destacar”, which means “to make stand out” or “to detach”.
I think that LingQ needs to have a method for people to report wrong meanings and to then eliminate them.
If you really believed that destacan meant “verb” you must have read a text in which it would make sense. Otherwise, you would have noticed that something was wrong, would have checked for yourself and either entered a new hint or corrected the old one.
Long time ago there was no possibility of correcting hints - I believe - and if someone by mistake never finished his/her entry which was meant to begin with “verb destacar”, then it would have simple been saved as Verb… (just trying to find an explanation for something so weird.)
The bottom line is that the definition is wrong and should not be allowed to stay.
I am still looking for a way to contact LingQ and correct this and other errors that I have found.
Does anyone know how to do that?
@JohnR The bottom line is that they are user hints, not definitions. Perhaps a user just wanted to remind himself/herself that the word was a verb. The cost of having users provide hints for words is that occasionally there will be a few oddball entries. By the time you need to know what destacan means you will probably know that it is 3rd pers plural of destacar and can look it up easily enough. As long as this doesn’t happen too often, no biggie, right? It is a small problem that LingQ doesn’t seem to think is worth investing any more time in rectifying.
Or you could try looking up every word you don’t recognize in the various dictionaries that LingQ has made accessible. It’s up to you how finicky you want to be. If you are desperate to know the exact meaning of a passage you can do some detective work, ask questions in the forums and then put in that perfect hint. LingQ has said many times that it expects the hints to gradually improve over time. You can correct as many errors as you like this way. You could even consider it giving back to the site that provides such a useful service (in your case, for free, if I’m not mistaken).
It is self-adjusting system. The more users select the translation, the higher position it gets in the list of the suggested hints, i.e. you will see the list of most popular translations. No need to correct anything. If the word is quite rare, you should use dictionary manually. There is also “Google Translation” as a way of checking the hints to some extent.
Moreover, one do not have to write translation in the hint. The content of the hint is up to user. Some may prefer to write mnemonics, associations, definitions etc. in their hints. This will be then presented to other users. If administrator correct the hint, I presume, it will be corrected in someone personal lingqs, which is unacceptable.
P.S. Yes, I am a slowpoke, but I am not going to delete my post, even if kcb written the same things much faster :)))
A way to correct hints exists.
If you click on a new word highlighted in blue, then the pane on the right pops up.
If there is already a hint, then hovering the mouse over the hint brings up a stubby little pencil on the left.
If you click on the stubby little pencil, then you can edit the hint.
I’m not sure every member can do this. Maybe only paying members can do this. Maybe only paying members whom the LingQ staff have given the edit pencil can do this.
I will add that while logging around 20,000 LingQs on this site, I found very few incorrect hints. Very, very few.
@JohnR - We know there are some incorrect hints showing but we are unable to go in and remove them. We do have plans to enable users to identify incorrect hints which will then be moved to the bottom of the suggested hints list. This will happen at some point. In the meantime, if you are unsure of a hint, we recommend using the dictionary to create your own hint. In theory, over time those incorrect hints should be moved to the bottom of the list but it doesn’t always work out that way.
I think there are at least 2 mistakes in the transcript of this audio:
Login - LingQ
What can be done to correct them?
“produced by their facts of drinking alcohol” should be “produced by the effects of drinking alcohol”
and “Ditch” should be “Deutsch”
I don’t know if this is the right forum to post this, if not, where else?
ok, Thanks, I’ll do that.