New LingQ App Launched. Check out LingQ for iOS 4.0!

Updates, Tips and Known Issues
21

I must say that I love the new App, although that was not my original reaction. It has become my go to way of accessing the site. I can easily flip back and forth between the languages I am studying and they come up fast. The initial problems with speed have been overcome. The app is much more stable. It is easier to find one’s place in a text. I find the interface and lesson page pleasing, and that is important.

The only shortcoming now is how the content is presented to the learner, and we are very close to resolving that. The reaction of our community has been positive to judge by the large increase in LingQs created once the new version was introduced.

Reinhard, I am sorry if you feel that what you grew familiar with has been taken away. We appreciate the loyalty of our long term users and Classic is still available. However, we needed to make the change. You will have to take my word for it. I hope you will gradually get used to the new version, and maybe even find it better as I did. Cheers.

22

The app is great - really a fantastic improvement. One question though, is it possible to remove a course from ‘My courses’? In the old app I could just swipe to delete it. I can’t seem to find this option.

23

Mark, Steve,

Thank you for your replies. I’ll try to be more specific. It’s good to have notifications included. But why does tapping on my user icon log me out? It looks as if it would take you to your profile page.

I understand that my old playlists are gone with the old version. Okay, this has happened before, so I can just start new ones.

About vocabulary, as long as there are no filters (are there?), I don’t need to see a complete list of saved lingQs. There are more than 14,000 saved lingQs and only 448 phrases, which raises the question, what is a phrase? As for SRS Due, are these random words and phrases or recent lists like Daily LingQs? Clicking on “Wiederholen (revise)” gives me a list to revise which consists of recently saved LingQs, that’s okay. But is there a list of Daily LingQs of about two weeks? In the old version this was very convenient. I don’t use Daily LingQs all the time, but occasionally work through the lists of a few days over a certain time to see the number of words I still have to learn in each list go down.

Settings: maybe this is not yet complete. I can choose to download playlists via 3G, I can email support and I can see the latest app version I have on my device. That’s not much of settings to my mind.

Tapping on Home gives me a list of Feed lessons where I would like to see my courses. Funnily “Show all” takes me to the page I want to see, which is “My courses”. And of course, I have found the way to switch from Feed to My courses too.

As before on the new homepage the default settings on the lessons page are not my first choice. Turning a page does not mean I know all words. Somehow I got around that, i must have tapped “more” and I disabled this default setting. Was it Intuition? I would prefer to have all settings in one place.

I am not happy about dictionaries on my iPhone. On the iPad there was no problem.

What I miss is sentence by sentence view with the possibility to listen to the sentences (text to speech). Is this functionality hidden somewhere? I don’t mean words or phrases but sentences.

I understand your concern to attract as many new users as possible and i am sure that many people will like the look. Whether they can use the system or the app will depend on their openness to technicalities and their love of trying things out. I am waiting for improvements. I’ll do my best to come to terms with the new app on my mobile, but I’m glad I haven’t updated on my iPad.

24

In the old app, courses were removed from the list but stayed in your account. We are currently working on enabling them to actually be removed. But, for now, you can remove courses, by removing all lessons from those courses individually.

25

I agree that it is strange behaviour to be logged out when you tap on your username. I’m not sure why that was done that way but we will fix this. We hope to have the profile available on the mobile app in the future.

As for playlists, you can only have one playlist now. For most users, multiple playlists were a further complication that wasn’t being used and created an extra step all the time.

A lot of users would like to be able to see all of their LingQs in one place. That is why we added the Vocabulary section as we have it on the web. There are filters in the Vocabulary section. Tap on the filters icon in the search field. A phrase is any multi-word LingQ.

SRS Due is the same as on the vocab page on the web. These are words or phrases that our SRS algorithm has determined are ready for review. The LingQs of the Day are normally a subset of this list based on some criteria. There is not that much difference between reviewing your LingQs of the day or doing random review sessions in the Due for Review section. However, to access your LingQs of the Day, you can do this through the notifications list. You will find your Daily LingQs notifications in the list from which you can click through and review them.

The lesson settings are accessible from the lessons themselves. Just tap on the Menu icon and then the Settings icon. There are also settings for the Activities available when you click the Review button in the lesson.

Available dictionaries are the same in both iPad and iPhone versions. There is less space on the phone obviously so, has a different format.

Sentence view is not available in the new app. It is in the works with some enhancements.

26

Sounds good. Thank you.

27

This sounds great, and I’m really looking forward to using the new app aswell as the new reader in the browser version. Only problem is that I’m studying Arabic, and that words are displayed in reverse order!

Do you have any estimate as to when you’ll get around to having a look at those beta languages?

(?languages beta those at look a having to around get you’ll when to as estimate any have you Do)

28

I would like to use LingQ offline. Is it possible in the future ti make this happens ?

29

It works fine off line for me. You just have to make sure that you have opened any lessons on the app while online, then you can study off line. I use it on airplanes.

30

It could be useful with some kind of “look up in advance” feature for unknown words though. I often find myself in low coverage areas where I have trouble looking up words, so being able to automatically look up all words in a lesson and fill in the google translation (perhaps just as a placeholder until I get around to finding a more precise translation) would be helpful

31

Google translate does require Internet access. If you are in a language and at a level where there are a lot of user hints created by other users, you can see these since they are cached in the system. However any access to external dictionaries will require Internet access, I believe.

32

Ah I see. Since I’m learning Arabic I hardly ever use hints since there are very few of them. Yes google translate does require internet access, which is why it could be helpful (in my situation at least) to be able to “cache” google-translations for all unknown words while online for later offline use. It might be a case thats only relevant to very few people, though, since most languages have plenty of hints for most words.
I just installed the new app, and I must say that it seems promising. It seems both faster and less buggy than both the old app and the desktop version! (Even for Arabic!)

33

Sorry, Thomas. No real timeline on fixing up Arabic. We just have to find the time to fit it in.

34

Forget what I said! It was based on the assumption that the new app would have the same display bugs as the browser version, but this seems really great! This update seems really promising! Great work!

Only, the 1 2 3 4 known buttons are placed a bit low for my preferred couch-slouching study position :wink: I think I could reach them easier if they were placed in the middle of the screen’s hight. It’s a luxury problem though. I could go jog once or twice a week.
Happy new year!

35

As someone who wants to study Arabic and knows nothing about it, and only wants to study it on LingQ, I have a question for you. What are the biggest problems with Arabic on LingQ, or what needs to happen for it to become better?

36

I’d love to see you study Arabic, Steve!
I study Arabic mainly via Lingq, but it does have quite a few problems. I seem to find a way around most of them, though.

You’re probably aware of the main problem of the new reader (in the browser version) displaying the words from left to right (Arabic being a right to left language) This seems to be fixed in the new app, which is great news. In the browser version, I use the classic view.

The second big problem is the one with diacritics. Arabic is most often written without its “short vovels”, but not always.
Example جلس and جٓلٓسٓ
Lingq doesn’t deal well with these diacritics and sometimes only consider the beginning of a word as a lingq - eg the letters until the first vowel.
This is why I use a piece of software for erasing all diacritics from all the texts that I import. This is better - but it creates other problems! First of all, sometimes the vowels are necessary for making the distinction between two words. Secondly, the software also removes other diacritics than the vowels, for example the sign for a glottal stop. This transforms ئ to ي which is a different letter (same story for other letters in the arabic alphabet) which makes dictionary lookups very complicated. Ultimately you end up getting used to reading text that has errors, but I don’t thing that this is too hard to overcome once you’re a fluent enough reader.

From the top of my head, these are the biggest problems with Arabic on lingq, but as I said - it still is possible to use and lingq is really my favorite tool for language learning.
Another problem is a lack of good dictionaries, but that problem is not really on your end.
There’s not a lot of interesting material in the library, and I mainly import my own e-books. It can be a little difficult to find them, and finding audio is especially difficult, so I use Lingq mainly as a reading tool and not for listening.

37

And I noticed that there are some lessons in the library in Egyptian Arabic as well as possibly other dialects.
I consider Lingq mainly a reading tool, and the dialects of Arabic are all strictly oral. I’d advice you and other learners to use Lingq only for Modern Standard Arabic, and study dialects elsewhere, because dialects have no fixed grammar, orthography and even vocabulary. Lingq is not ideal for that kind of thing in my opinion.

38

Does it mean you currently have a big belly?

39

Yes, in order for the Ipad not to fall over, I need to :wink:

40

Thanks, I was just going to post the same question. I look forward to filtering by tags in the app. And of course another plug for my suggestion of reviewing vocabulary within a single course (as opposed to just a lesson). Once again, congrats on the new app.