Just tried the new version of the app, and sorry but it’s got many problems. I think the old app was much more usable.
First, most importantly, I cannot disable spacing between Chinese characters. This is an incredibly important feature that doesn’t work in the new version. Yes, there is a place in the settings to change this, but changing the settings does nothing at all.
Second, playlists are now nearly useless. There is only one playlist now which is a problem, I liked to maintain multiple playlists. Also, you can only listed to the audio from the playlist screen. You can no longer use it as a way to open the lesson. if I am listening from the playlist and want to check out the lesson, I have to go back to the home screen, change to courses, choose the right course, find the lesson, then open it… This is way too cumbersome.
Which brings me to my last point. The new app is way too slow. Every time I click on anything it reloads it from scratch. It seems like nothing is cached anymore. If I leave a lesson and go right back in it takes nearly a minute for it to open again. This is unacceptable.I know my network connection here is bad, but the app should account for this with basic caching.
@Jorde - Thanks for the feedback. Regarding Chinese spacing, we’ll take a look into that. Sounds like a bug.
As for playlists, we chose to try and make this feature more easy to use. Most users did not use multiple playlists, and this just caused an extra step in the playlist process. Most users want a simple way to group and listen to audio. This can now be done very quickly and easily and is now synced across devices which is a major improvement. We are sorry to have removed the multiple playlist option but it is very easy to add and remove lessons so your main list should be more versatile. Likewise, the playlist was there to help you play the audio, lesson access was possible but was never the focus. You can access your lessons in the Recent Lessons or My Lessons, you should be able to sort by Recently Opened or use the search field to find specific lessons quickly. I understand that we made changes which affect your flow and we do apologize.
The app looks for a connection and then tries to sync. If you turn off your wifi and use it offline, you shouldn’t have this problem. We are looking to make it a manual refresh in the lessons which should solve your problem. As for speed, the loading of lessons should not be any different than it was in the old app. In fact, quite long lessons load quite quickly for me.
Thanks for the response.
As far as load times, you could be right that initial load times are faster, I don’t know about this. The problem is that sometimes I will flip through several lessons in a course. Every time I do this seems to reload the lesson from scratch, taking a long time. If there is no change to the lesson, there is no reason to do this and causes terrible delays.
As far as multiple playlists, if thats what most people want, then fine, but you have to give the ability to access the lesson from the playlist. If I’m listening to the playlist and want to look that the script for what I just heard, it is painful to drill down to the lesson it was in. Load times is the biggest part of this, but still…
Here is an example. I am listening to the playlist, and I want to take a closer look at something I just heard. I have to : touch the top right icon, hit home, change from feed to my lessons, change from lessons to courses, choose the course, find and select the lesson. 6 steps. Then, I go back to listening to the playlist. If I want to check something again, there is no back button, every time I have to go through those same 6 steps, it never remembers any settings.
Maybe I’m alone on this, but I would never just turn on the playlist and let it run. Without the ability to easily and quickly access lessons the feature is useless.
Finally, if you could add something in to customize the home screen… I never, never use the feed and I probably never will… It’s a waste of a time, maybe 15s in loading. I would much prefer it to default to the specific course I am working through at the moment instead of the feed. Letting me customize where ‘Home’ goes, or adding in a hotkey to quickly go to preset courses would make the UI much more user friendly.
It sounds like the bulk of your problems stem from the fact that you have a bad network connection and have to wait a long time every time you open a lesson. If you are going to be flipping through lessons on a slow connection, I recommend turning off your wifi so the app goes into offline mode. Then, it won’t try to reload the lessons each time. Most users have good connections so updating the lessons each time they are opened makes sense. It is not just lesson text but all word data in a lesson that needs updating and changes to words happen all the time across all texts and need updating for most users.
Regarding lesson management, you should be able to find your lessons in My Lessons too, or, if you do want to use My Courses, the app does remember that you have chosen Courses and shows courses the next time without you having to choose it.
Regarding home screen customization, we have done this on the web and are going to be bringing it to mobile soon. You will be able to make My Courses your default listing. Give us a few weeks.
Hello, I’ve deleted unwanted lessons from ‘my lessons’ but they are still showing up in ‘my lessons’ in the app and I can’t see how I can delete them in the app?
They should be deleted in the app as well but you may have to refresh the list. Switch to the Feed and switch back again to make sure it refreshes.
When I tap on a word that the app thinks is part of a phrase, “Tap again to see related phrases” pops up momentarily. The problem is that it appears right where it covers the tapped word.
Can that be made to show up so that it somehow dodges the line of text I just tapped? Above or below, or inside the main vocab pop up, I don’t care, anywhere other than exactly where I’m trying to read.
Hello,
The new app is great. I have a few questions/suggestions. I’m quite new here so some of this might be possible to do already.
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Is it possible to lingq a word without setting a specific translation? Sometimes I look up a word with no easy translation. And I don’t want to get stuck trying to find one and instead just move on. This is possible on the desktop version but not here I believe?
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I really don’t trust google translate. Is it possible to remove that from suggested translations? Maybe put a symbol next to it showing that it is a computer translation?
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The controls I use the most are the play/pause and <5s button. I don’t think I’m the only one? For right-handed (one-handed) use I think these control would be better placed more the the right. I think play/pause in the center and <5s next to it on the right hand side. This would work pretty well for left-handed use as well.
Thanks for the new app. I have started to use it today, and already like it a lot. The one oddity that has been a bit troubling so far is the app’s tendency to scramble words at the start of a continuation lesson. I mean, I am reading a text which has been automatically split because it is more than 2,000 words. I like the splitting feature, but I see that in the new app, the openings of lessons 2 and 3, in the text I am reading, are marked by strangely intruding random words from elsewhere in the text. After a brief blip, the expected/normal text resumes. The other thing is that letters have silently vanished. So, for example, I am reading the transcript of a radio broadcast, and the speakers are identified by their initial and surname (S. Sorokina) and so on, but only the surname is shown - the s has quietly vanished. Has anyone else observed these phenomena?
@Pres - Yes, sorry about that. That will be done in the next release.
@wnint - Glad you like the app!
- No, this isn’t possible on the app. You could just input a space in the hint field when you open up the dictionary, or choose a hint and delete it.
- No, that’s not possible either but if you don’t see a popular translation that makes sense, just click to check one of the available dictionaries. You can choose from a wide selection of available dictionaries and remove the ones you don’t want to see like Google Translate.
- We’ll think about the player controls but there are a lot of controls on the page for which we have to find a spot. it’s not that easy to find a good spot for everything and ensure all controls are suitably placed for one handed operations…! But, we will look into it.
@protorich - There can sometimes be problems with the text due to certain characters present in the text itself. Do the same glitches exist when you look at those lessons on the web? You will probably have to email us the text so we can import it ourselves and see what the problem is.
I’ve tried various ways of refreshing & logging out and logging back in again but still have the same issue of having unwanted lessons in ‘my lessons’ on the app despite them not showing on my web account
@johnlynn - Can you send screenshots of what you are seeing to support at lingq dot com. That is working properly on our end. Confirm that you have a proper network connection also just to make sure that isn’t the reason the app isn’t updating.
I am currently reading a couple of books which I imported. I bought some books from Litres.ru and wasn’t sure how to import them, so in the end I just chose the HTML format and copied and pasted the whole book and let the system break it up into 2000 word ± chunks. I haven’t seen the problems you have mentioned. I do remember importing some newspaper articles using the LingQ shortcut and some of the Russian с were imported as English c, so they were a weird hybrid of initial letter in English and the rest in Russian eg ситуации is saved under c in English not c in Russian so alphabetically they are first in my vocabulary. I have about 20 words like this so nothing major but a bit strange. I do wonder if some of my words which don’t start with c might have a c in the middle as an English c. How did you import it?
Thanks Mark. I’m travelling for a few days, and it will be later in the week when I manage to reply, but thank you very much for your attention, and thank you again for the new app.
Mark - I’m back home now and not aware of the problem any more. If it recurs and annoys me, I’ll pick this back up. Many thanks