I do really like LingQ as a language-learning aid. But I am not oblivious to certain shortcomings.
My biggest issue with LingQ for learning Vietnamese is LingQ’s apparent inability to identify ‘multi-words’. Vietnamese seems to treat each syllable as a separate word, so the language uses very many short words.
So a single multi-syllable word in English often translates to a 2 or 3 word combination in Vietnamese rather than a single word. Ideally, LingQ should not seek to identify a single Vietnamese word in isolation, but look to see if including the next word also eg in a dictionary look-up makes much more sense as the correct Vietnamese word or LingQ.
Perhaps the simplest example is the word Vietnam itself, which in Vietnamese is Việt Nam. The two component words in isolation have other meanings rather than the country.
I can expand on the problem if anyone is interested. I appreciate that this may not be something that’s easy to fix completely. But a good start would be to suppress the appearance of the individual component words in the vocabulary list in page or sentence view if a multi-word LingQ has previously been created manually.
LingQ is still very useful as a companion for learning Vietnamese, but how much better it would be if it could accommodate this short-word writing system more intelligently.
Would be nice if it recognizes individual words based on context but unfortunately they do not have the package or program like chinese to identify which words are words, but they are still trying to figure it out. It is still a beta language too in which it’s still lacking multiple features. It will take time but will mostly happen in the far future
Is Vietnamese on LingQ still classified as a beta language? It doesn’t surprise me at all if it is still in beta, but I can’t spot the beta label any in the descriptions or UI for Vietnamese on LingQ.
I’m not quite sure what you mean about recognising individual words in context and I don’t know how Chinese (Mandarin?) works on LingQ, but what I’d like to see in LingQ for Vietnamese are 2 separate new features:
First, look-ahead: I’m not sure exactly how LingQ works when it first parses a completely new block of text. Does it just identify a space-delimited block of characters as a word and then wait for a click on that word before looking in a dictionary to offer a meaning? Whatever, there is obviously a dictionary look-up at some early stage of processing.
But what could happen instead is that if a word is flagged in a look-up table as often being paired with a second word to form a larger 2-component word then the word plus the following word could be looked up as a pair.
Second: In the vocabulary list in the sidebar of page and sentence views then if a 2-word LingQ exists then the LingQs for the individual component words for that LingQ should be suppressed/hidden so as to considerably simplify the vocabulary for that page/sentence.
For example, for the word pair Việt Nam, only a LingQ for Việt_Nam should be shown and the individual meanings of Việt and Nam should be hidden.
I suspect that the second of these would be much easier to implement in LingQ. Obviously a less perfect solution than implementing both features, but nonetheless a valuable enhancement.
There is a section for beta languages, but they do not have a label. When you first open the language, it will warn that it is still in beta. They included a package for mandarin in which it matches pairs of words that mostly exists in the dictionary and possible combined words as well.
Every word/lingq is manually made from our side in which it works with one of the translators/dictionary that the respective user has chosen, google translate in most cases.
A solution could be to record all user’s lingqs or have someone go through the app and create a list of words that are confirmed by vietnamese natives and it will show up as a known new word if haven’t been discovered yet.
But in the end, it’s up to them on how they want to approach this language if they decide to further develop it. For now, content is their goal
I think you’re simply talking about creating a LingQ and yes of course this works in Vietnamese. But to restate the 2 separate issues:
Because the unit of meaning in Vietnamese is often a combination of 2 (or 3) words rather than a single space-delimited word, LingQ does not proactively suggest the word combination as a LingQ rather than the 2 component words.
To reiterate the example from above. Việt Nam (ie 2 separate ‘words’) is the name of the country, whereas Việt and Nam as individual words have other meanings. If the LingQ reader sees the word combination Việt Nam in some text then it is a high probability that the country is being referred to rather than trying to interpret the individual component words. So it is the word-pair ‘Việt Nam’ that should be offered as the LingQ rather than the individual component words.
If a word-pair LiingQ is created manually (eg for Việt Nam) then this LingQ should have full priority over any LingQs for the component words. So only the priority LingQ should be shown as coloured in the text AND the component words should not appear as separate entries in the vocabulary sidebar. (Given the prevalence of word-pairs in Vietnamese, the sidebar can become 2 or 3 times longer than necessary (and hence quite confusing) if the word-pair AND the component words are all shown separately in sentence or page view.)
I completely agree with you, because I’ve encountered this issue with other language learning apps as well. For example, I use the Language Reactor plugin for Google Chrome that works with YouTube and Netflix. It shows subtitles in Vietnamese and a translation below, and you can click on the Viet words and save them, to then study on the LR website or export to make Anki flashcards, etc. You can also mark words that you know or that you want to study, so they will show up in future subtitles as either green or orange, respectively.
It’s rather hit or miss when the subtitles will recognize a full word or just separate out the “syllables”, so if I recognize a word and I can’t save it as the “full word”, I’ll just wait until I come across it again.
I’ve used LingQ for Italian for a long time, but I probably won’t be putting money down on it again for Vietnamese until they fix this.