Currently, the popular meanings for words can only show up for one language at a time and you have to toggle between them.
For example, if I want to know the definition of the word “너” in Korean, the English definition would say: “you”, but the Spanish definition would be “Tú”. In this case, the Spanish definition is better. However, I can’t leave the popular meaning setting on Spanish because there aren’t Spanish popular meanings for enough words in Korean.
It would be nice if see the popular meanings in multiple selected languages at a time.
So under the popular meanings category it would show both “tú” and “you” for the translation of “너”.
For such a situation, just create your own new definition like this:
you (tú). Or just add definitions in Spanish for words that do not yet have definitions. The definitions that currently exist were likely added by language learners just like yourself.
Adding the definitions in a second language is painfully slow. So people often don’t do it. I often don’t do it simply because it takes way too long to switch back and forth between the languages.
So yes - your suggested workarounds do work, but LingQ could make this a lot easier. This would also encourage users to add more translations (apart from the English ones).
Isn’t the whole idea of LingQ that the “library” of definitions grow by the users adding their definitions? So if noone adds definitions for words, where should they come from? And how would you speed up the progress?
Personally I would prefer if the reader would be able to directly readout the definitions available in the dictionaries usable. But as they have differing formats, I guess this is a tough thing to implement. And even than you aren’t neccessarely going to find definitions for every single word you encounter.
Fully agree that LingQ would benefit from users adding definitions. The more convenient it is to add more definitions, the more users will add.
That’s why I like the suggestion from ‘brocklee’. I had suggested in the past to make toggling between languages easier by adding a keyboard shortcut. This would also have helped and would have been rather easy to implement.
Ah, so you mean that someone who knows another language besides his native one might add definitions for that one, too?!
I understood the OP in the way that he wants to have a possible fallback shown if a definition in his native language isn’t available.
What would speed up things a lot would be if the dictionary would automatically be shown when clicking on a word, somewhere where there is space left. Or, as it has been mentioned in the past that this is troublesome to implement, automatically update the word searched for in the pop-up window. And than clicking on a word or selecting a phrase in a dictionary automatically adds it as a definition.
Unfortunately I don’t have high hopes for anything like that. LingQ has its advantages, but the UI is definetely none of it. Even the simplest things, like modifying a sentence, take half a dozen clicks.
For me it is the other way round. My native language is German. However, the defenitions I add are mostly in English - simply because that works much faster.
If I could toggle quickly between the languages (English and German) and/or if I could see the popular translations for both languages at the same time, I would be inclined to add a lot more definitions in German.
The LingQ Community would benefit from more definitions in German - and other users would do the same in other languages.
German here too. Because many languages have mostly English entries from users for a lot of words. That means during reading I use English translations and when I myself want to add a translation in German at any point, I’d have to switch to German in the translations section, which is often painstakingly slow, and then switch back AGAIN because, like I said, there is a higher probability that for the next word English translations exist. When I go through a text and look at a lot of translations it completely rips me out of the flow when I have to wait an extra 5 to 10 seconds at each word for the entries to load.
I would assume if your mostly monolingual you would use only your native translations from the start and more often rely on external dictionaries anyway, so it’s not as bothersome because you’re missing the comparison with the luxury of having user made English translations for 99.5% of all words.
I’m German, too, and I use German for my LingQ’s. I never had the idea to switch between several languages. If you are mainly relying on user definitions and are able to understand English, wouldn’t it be easier to stick to it? On the other hand, how is the database for let’s say german translations supposed to grow if noone adds new ones?
I suppose that for languages that are closely related, the ai could be used to translate user definitions into your language if there is no existing user definition. This would probably be a good addition to the current ai usage, which tends to create nonsense for highly different languages.
So in regards to the OP. If I understand him correctly he is a Spanish speaker learning Korean, who is also able to understand English. So if there is no Spanish translation available, using the English ones and translate them via ai and provide the results to the user might be even more worthwhile to what the OP suggested, as this would also work for people who are not good at English.
Adding an English definition can be as quick as adding a German one - fair enough.
The difference is in the popular meanings - as ‘Suhnik’ has meanwhile explained.
I could omit the step of toggling back and forth (English - German - Englich) and directly add a German definition without even looking at the German popular meanings. I had not considered that as a permanent practical solution yet. Still, I would prefer to see the German popular meanings before adding a German definition with minimal time delay. Popular meanings can be valuable puzzle pieces to derive a good definition, even if the existing ones are not quite right.
[Plenty Examples of ‘not quite right’ can be found in Korean popular meanings, where the meaning of suffixes are often missing, words added in the definitions which are not at all part of the Korean expressen …]
I usually stick to English (at least for target languages Korean and Spanish), but there are situations where using 2 languages could be overall much faster.
A prime example is Dutch (for German speakers):
If usable German popular meanings are available - I would prefer to work with those (given the close relation between German and Dutch)
But - there are many expressions where there are no German popular meanings, but English popular meanings are available. Using those is then usually much faster, than consulting a dictionary.
For Dutch, sticking to English only is not a good option (if one understands German), since many expressions are very similar.
Another example for me would be Japanese. Here I would prefer to use English and Korean in combination. The grammatical structure of Japanese and Korean is quite similar and both languages are using expressions which do not exist in English. So using Korean could be very useful for some expressions, and English could fill in the gaps where I don’t know the Korean word.
For learning Portuguese I would prefer a combination of English and Spanish. Again, Spanish being closely related with Portuguese and English filling the gaps and providing additional popular meanings.
Fully agree - that’s why I would welcome improvements from LingQ that make it easier & faster to add tranlsations in languages other than English.
Regarding the OP example from brocklee: To my understanding he also pointed out that the Spanish meaning of “Tú” better matched the meaning of “너” than the English “you”. The English “you” is the same for different polite forms wheras other languages make a difference (also German with “Du” and “Sie”).
This appears to be a similar argument, as I made with Japanese and Korean.
This might be useful (provided the AI translation are good). Yet for the above example, the polite form would likely not be conveyed, since it was already lost in the English translation.
Das ist genau der Punkt. Es gibt keinen Anreiz auf Deutsch zu bleiben und dort Übersetzungen hinzuzufügen. Im Gegenteil, wenn es entweder keine gibt und ich mir die selbst raussuchen muss, oder wenn ich zwischen Deutsch und Englisch bin und her wechseln muss, dann ist das einfach ein Zeit- und Nervenfaktor. Mein Punkt war, dass vermutlich alle die sich wohl fühlen mit Englisch auch damit in LingQ arbeiten und nicht dazu beitragen mehr User Übersetzungen auf Deutsch zu erstellen, was die Gesamtmenge der Übersetzungen dann erheblich schmälert.
@B.Oliver Just to be clear, I am in no way opposing the idea brought up by @brocklee, as I can clearly see its advantages. And from your explanations I can clearly see the advantages of using definitions from several languages, although the latter is only useful for those who already know several ones (at least to a certain degree).
In regards to the example provided: Yes, Spanish differentiates between tú and Usted similar to how German differentiates between du and Sie. However, as far as I know Korean doesn’t has an equivalent for Sie and 너 is not really the same as du either. (Me and my colleagues use du with each other, but I don’t think Koreans tend to address their colleagues like that). So trying to convey that meaning by a simple translation is already pretty ambituos. In general, as you say, there are aspects of asian languages for example, that have no equivalent in european languages. And there are cultural aspects. Hence I tend to restrict my LinQ’s to the semantical meaning only, and study grammar and culture by other means.
Those could be definitions made by me. I only write the meaning of the word stem most of the time. If I don’t know a word clicking on it would than give me the semantical meaning only, with me still having to figure out the correct grammar. If I can’t remember that, I google.
Those are most likely the result of the badly implemented ai suggestion “feature”.
@Suhnik I meant it the other way round. I only use German.
