I must say, I am super impressed by the new exchange initiative on LingQ.
I have just listened to Lewis’ (user: maths) pronunciation in Russian, and although I don’t speak Russian nor am I learning it, it was nice to see all the comments he got congratulating him on his efforts and suggesting ways of improvement.
I then looked at a writing submission in French, already corrected super fast, with exchanges back and forth. And what’s more, there is even a recording of the corrected version by Serge, there for everyone to hear. There are additional contributions in Spanish, visible for everyone to see.
I submitted a short text in German to test the system and found my text corrected within 30 minutes by Vera while on a coffee break. Wow!!!
A super way to learn.
This is a wonderful way to get everyone actively involved and it is a great way to learn passively too. Everyone can benefit from everyone’s contributions, learning from the mistakes of other learners through exposure to corrected versions. This ranges from corrections of written texts, and audio recordings and correction of pronunciation and comments on accents, to translations, audio transcriptions of audio provided, and audio of text provided.
If people prefer to keep everything private there is that option too of course. You don’t need to share your language initiatives with the whole world if you prefer not to.
Well, I’m having trouble correcting a submission that was sent to me before the new updates. I select a string of words, and click on “new correction” then I get a progress message saying “adding” then nothing.
I wonder if the system is confused because the submission is about 5 days old? Does it have some fields missing or something?
I will experiment with the system again tomorrow and send a short text to you directly, Hans-Peter, as a private submission, permitting you to correct it whenever you wish. Let’s see if that works out well.
Despite the hiccups, this idea seems to have tremendous potential, not only permitting greater interaction among community members, but allowing for potentially faster corrections and enhanced learning where members can explore submissions and learn from each other’s mistakes.
I just read a text from the French ASSIMIL book and posted it for comments about my prononciation. As long as the text is not posted, there should be no problem.
Just one doubt and a suggestion:
Let’s suppose I’d like to correct your or anyone’s pronunciation exercise. On the left I have a player with your file, on the right there is a text field where I can read “Post pronunciation correction”, I don’t seem to find any possibility to upload my audio version of the text you have read, or am I missing something? Am I supposed to correct pronunciation by writing: “You didn’t pronounce well the following words…”? I don’t think this helps much.
It would also be good, when someone submits an audio file to correct pronunciation, that the transcript of that audio could also be included.
@mfr - You will only have the option to post audio if the member who posted requested an audio recording. Otherwise, they are just asking for feedback on their recording. It’s a good idea to suggest to that person that next time they ask for a recording as well. You can comment on the post to that effect. Yes, you are supposed to write suggestions on how they can improve their pronunciation. Indicate sounds to work on, words that were mispronounced, an overall assessment. Whatever you like. Yes, the idea is that users would include the text when they request pronunciation correction.
I think this added interaction, and encouragement of members interacting with each other could be great for lingQ, I was certainly pleased to see it installed.
I agree with u50623. They appear to be really good. I think they have one weakness. The list of requests is too hidden. I think it should be on the main page that people see when they come to LingQ (maybe instead of the ‘Timeline’) so that when people log into LingQ, they automatically see what is available for correction instead of having to go to the ‘My Requests’ section to check if there is anything to do. It is just a suggestion.
It would be great if there was a mail notification, otherwise we have to refresh “My requests” regularly to see if there’s something new.
Colin, you’d have to refresh the Timeline as well, I’m afraid.
Well I just tried out the correction tool on the first English request. Very cool. I’m very impressed. Couple things:
After I submitted my correction I noticed I made a small typo in one of the notes and in the correction. It would be nice to be able to edit notes
In the list of corrections, some times the corrections are as small as “t” should be “t,” (ie, small changes). It makes it a bit difficult to find in the text – this is related to my first point. I was searching for an invalid correction so I could delete it and re-do it. What about highlighting the correction (in red or something) in the text as you scroll over each correction? That would make it very easy to find the appropriate correction to edit/delete
edit Ahh… you can edit them just by clicking. Nevermind about point 1.
Is there somewhere I could get an idea of what this is all about. Our internet has been out for almost two weeks and I don’t understand what is going on. Where is the pie chart and where is the error count, and what errors are being counted?
I looked at the ‘My requests’ page and found a few requests, but none of them are my requests. I looked up one of the corrected writings which apparently took 5 hours to correct two sentences, neither of which had any errors!
By the way, I have only had one piece of writing corrected, about 6 weeks after I first started looking at German. It came across to me as quite negative, so I havn’t tried requesting a writing correction again. I don’t think that someone who has only been using LingQ for 6 weeks for a completely new language can be expected to understand yet what is correct and what is not correct. Therefore I recommend not using LingQ for corrections unless one is pretty sure everything is at least gramatically correct!
My speaking efforts were also a disaster. I can read a whole novel and generally make sense of it, and can pronounce reasonably well, but I cannot carry out a conversation. Help!
I don’t want to give up, but I think I will wait until I have been learning for at least three and a half years before I make another attempt. I have been learning for two years and almost six months so far.
