I think LingQ has been available for 2 years now. And still Japanese and Chinese are Beta. LingQ has been upgraded, the whole interface rewritten, redesigned and reintroduced a couple of times. Then here’s what happens:
・First try and fix all the bugs that showed up after deploying the new version.
・Then decide that some bugs aren’t worth fixing.
・Despite users pointing out areas that need improvement, the developers of LingQ start working on the next new version.
・Acknowledge all of the areas that need improvement and promise the next version will be better.
Therefore, there’s always a new version of LingQ being developed or something more important than taking care of the Japanese and Chinese Betas. I think having Japanese in Beta for over 2 years is getting to be unreasonable.
In an ideal world we have unlimited resources and everything gets done to everyone’s satisfaction right away.
In the real world we have limited resources and have to make choices. Both Mark and I feel very badly for those members who are learning Chinese and Japanese. Mark has said that it is next on his list. However the vast majority of our learners do not learn Asian languages. We watch what they do, and what the new visitors do, and we are painfully aware that the way LingQ was structured was not convincing enough newcomers to stay and learn with us. We feel that we are now offering, once the bugs are worked out, will improve the experience of our learners. Once we feel we have a system that an be successful for many learners, not just the language keeners, then we will expand the range of languages, and of course, make it work properly for Asian languages. Mark says that may only be a month away.
However, the choice is with us, and we have to resist the pulls from this direction and that, and with limited resources try to make this venture a sustainable success. Please understand and be patient. Your patience is appreciated.
My own opinion is that there are pretty many keeners of learning asian languages. As for me I wanted to subscribe for the site but the main reason I still haven’t is that I want to learn chinese but it’s not convinient to add and then to work with the content.
I agree with the sentiment above. I have admittedly not used this site for a while, but was excited to read that you had released a new version of Lingq. My hope: “Maybe 2.0 will finally support Japanese and Chinese?”
One question Steve. Do you not think the reason for the apparent lack of demand for Japanese and Chinese lies in this site’s lack of support for these languages?
The internet learning community for Japanese is extremely vibrant and we all know that Chinese can only become more popular with time. I fear that you will miss the boat with these languages as people (including myself) turn to other resources out there.
I for one am quite disappointed, but that is irrelevant really. Disgruntled users moaning about lacking features is nothing new. It is, however, far more surprising from a business point of view that you continue to neglect languages with such potential.
Rohan, we realize that there are many frustrated Japanese and Chinese learners out there. We are working on this functionality as we speak. Who knows? We may be able to take Japanese and Chinese out of beta within a week or so. Be patient a little while longer…
It would be interesting to have another statistic for the numbers of known characters for Chinese and known kanji for Japanese someday. I think for those languages it’s more important than the number of known words.
Anyway, for now, LingQ is best the thing I’ve found to learn Chinese (although I have to use paper instead of the website since the update). Keep your good work.
Known characters… I don’t know. A number of characters doesn’t really say anything about your vocabulary, since words are (often) combined of two or more characters. Imagine keeping track of the syllables in English, and then thinking you’re on your way to being able to read Shakespeare…
For certain SRS applications there are “character statistics” plugins comparing your collection to HSK requirements and so on.
I do not agree with you Jeff, I think the characters of a word in Chinese are more like prefixes and suffixes in English. For exemple, every words ending with the -logy suffix are related to a field of study just like Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Theology… In Chinese, words use to be monosyllabic, so it’s just like how 2 or 3 words in Latin or Greek make only one English word. Well, that’s my opinion.
The fact is that many people studying Japanese and Chinese do want to know how many characters they know. How and if we can accommodate this remains to me seen. In the meantime we are going to base our approach on words, just like in the other languages.
Yup, I think it is fun to know how many kanji we know. Since learning kanji is suffering, it is better to have more fun factors It doesn’t need to implement soon, but maybe someday.
This is off-topic, but I was just wondering… How do Chinese people write when kanji slipped their mind. Japanese have hiragana and katakana, so we can write no matter what happens. Do Chinese people use pinyin if they don’t know kanji?
Japanese have hiragana and katakana, so we can write no matter what happens
Ha-ha…
I am writing several "hagaki"s to Japanese postcrossers right now… and realized that I’ve forgotten several hiragana signs! Again!!! Grr!
Re emma’s question on how do Chinese people write when a Chinese character slips from their mind.
Well, it actually depends on what you mean by “write”. Like most people, I seldom “write” by hand these days, since I type on the computer. When I forget how to type a certain character, I’d resort to a pronunciation input method. For example, if I forget how to type 明, I’d use the Cantonese input method and type “ming” since this is how the character is pronounced in Cantonese (my native language).
Even though I seldom write out the Chinese characters by hand now, I am quite sure I can remember how to write most of them without too many problems. This is because I used to write them out by hand when I went to school, and the “muscle memory” is still there. In fact, I am quite amazed by how strong this muscle memory could be. On the hand, young people may have greater problems with writing Chinese characters because they are so used to typing on the computer and just don’t have the same kind of muscle memory like I do.
