As soon as I subscribed to LingQ, I started a story, and the app is telling me I know all the words just because I turned a page. Is having this option on by default a serious design choice or some kind of bug?
Also, those words seem to be stuck as “known”. With some digging, I see there are scripts available to reset the “known” words, but is that really how it’s to be handled? There’s no setting for this, when it’s something that’s happening to plenty of users? I’m a bit concerned that this is the very first thing I tried in the app, and the only solutions are to play with user made scripts to solve it.
Is this app still in development? I subscribed thinking it was a finished product. I’d love to use LingQ, but I don’t have time to learn a new language AND fight LingQ by searching for scripts to solve common problems.
So sorry to hear that this happened to you. It basically happens to everyone. It’s a feature, not a bug.
What you can do is go back through the lesson and click on every single word that isn’t yellow, and mark it as unknown whether you know it or not (create a Lingq for it). Then you can mark the ones you know, after that. That way the words get added to your vocabulary list. If you let the system mark your words as known at pageturn or at end of lesson, they do not get added to your visible vocabulary list, but to another list that is more difficult to find and rather useless.
I’ve just gotten into the habit of marking every single blue word as LingQ status 1 first before going through the lesson. Then mouse over the progress bar at the top of the lesson to make sure there are zero blue words. After that, you can go through the lesson in peace.
The browser add-ons from @roosterburton are really helpful, and not hard to install/use (even for a not-so-tech-clever person like me), so I highly recommend them, but of course that’s your own choice whether to use them or not, and LingQ does work without the add-ons.
Good luck and hang in there, LingQ has many advantages despite a bit of a learning curve. Welcome aboard.
Thanks for the reply. I’m still a bit confused about a few things here. Are you saying the ‘Paging moves to known’ being on by default is a feature? If this is a problem that “basically happens to everyone”, what could the feature possibly be providing, other than headaches?
After looking further into it, I’m lucky I didn’t complete the lesson, otherwise I’d have made a bunch of extra work for myself before even getting started with LingQ.
Thanks for your tip about marking as LingQ status 1 first. I’ll definitely try that, but it does still seem like fighting a broken system that doesn’t need to exist. I keep reading that these are decisions related to the language learning philosophy itself, but I can’t find any info on what makes these very strange decisions relevant to learning when they could just be settings if that were truly the case.
I was also under the impression that the roosterburton extension costs money, but if it’s free then I’ll definitely check it out. When I think of a learning curve, I think of the fundamental building blocks required to learn a thing, but if somebody changed all my locks and I had to learn to pick them, that just feels like an annoying roadblock that serves no purpose.
Sorry for the rant. It’s not directed at you or anything. Just frustrated that a seemingly great tool is locked behind a black box of arbitrary design choices that seemingly have been criticized since long before I got here. I really do appreciate the response, and thanks for the warm welcome.
Glad to hear you didn’t click the “complete lesson” check mark without doing a little reading first!
There is an option to turn off “Paging moves to known” in settings, but there’s no option to turn off “completion of lesson moves to known.”
Yeah, I could totally rant but… never mind.
Regarding the extensions, I believe some are free and others are for pay, either package or piecemeal.
Good luck! Sounds like you’re finding your way around.
Edited to add: I’d recommend starting with the AutoLingQ (it’s a free install on Firefox/Chrome I think) and also the extension (script) that undoes the “moves to known” for the most recently completed lesson. Those two are free and really helpful.
It’s not really a “problem” per se, and it’s not something that happens to everyone. For example, it never happened to me. It’s a thing that happens to many people who start using LingQ without understanding the basics about how LingQ works.
If paging didn’t move words to known, we would need to spend extra time manually putting words we know in the known words database. I think the vast majority of users would not want that. LingQ is all about speed of reading, and “Paging moves to known” facilitates that, and ensures that the only things that stall reading speed are words we don’t know, which naturally become fewer and fewer as we acquire our target language.
And if there are unknown words that accidentally get missed, the vast majority of them will quickly come up again, and those that don’t come up quickly are likely so rare that we won’t need to know them until we’re really advanced in our language journey anyway, so there’s no problem there. LingQ is self-correcting in this way.
If there is a problem, it’s that the folks behind LingQ don’t adequately explain to people how LingQ works before they let people use the program. It would be far better, I think, if LingQ came with a quick unskippable tutorial that made it very clear that the program is intended to work in this way (and why it has to be this way), and that options to change it exist for those who want to use it in a different way.
I definitely agree that they should put more effort to explain the basics on how the software works. I don’t remember anymore, I think there was a tutorial, right? Probably skippable and too quick? I really don’t remember.
Maybe a repeated message for the first 10 times someone is turning a page would help too. I think there is something like that? Maybe only the 1st time?
But we can also understand that people can forget or make mistakes. A sort of “undo” button wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe this is more complicated that it seems if the software wasn’t build that way. I have no clue.
Thank you so much for this! I’ll be checking it out today.
This absolutely makes sense and is fairly intuitive.
This is part of what I was getting at, but also partly what @davideroccato mentioned regarding extra functionality when a lack of explanation leads to problems like an overpopulated list of “known” words.
I’ll absolutely be keeping the ‘Paging moves to known’ option on, for the reasons you listed, but when it wasn’t made clear what would happen, there were only tedious solutions (and that’s the best case scenario as I stopped after a single page).
Better explanations and/or warnings would go a long way, along with more flexible ways to edit the “known” words list, or some kind of “undo” button. That being said, I’ll still be using LingQ because it seems like a very convenient way to get my daily time in.
There is a bit of a tutorial, but nothing that gets too granular about how it works (not that I think explaining this aspect would make it too granular). It’s very short.
All in all, the user experience could definitely be worse. It’s just very annoying to be excited about trying a new tool and immediately be met with a battle for functionality.
Are there analytics to support that? It seems anecdotally from the messages on these forums and intuitively by the assumption that most people coming into a new language don’t know thousands of words already that they’d want to immediately mark as known, that the opposite would be the case.
Regardless, it’s not an intuitive system, especially for newcomers. The fact that every week or so another thread like this appears is evidence enough of that. Would it not be simple enough to change the default so that it leaves the unlingqed tokens, then have the app ask at page turn and lesson completion what the user wants to do, providing with that question the typical extra option of “don’t show this to me anymore?”
E.g., “You finished the page. Mark unlingqed words as known? YES / NO (__ Don’t show this again.)” Now new users don’t get blindsided by unintuitive functionality, learn that it is an option, can confirm the operation (which you want since it’s essentially irreversible), are reminded as many times as they want, and expert users can hit the option once and be done with it.
Great idea! Better than the 10 times I suggested above. In this case, users would have control over deciding when they would feel comfortable proceeding unassisted, all without changing the nature of the software. It deserves to be proposed on lingq.canny. I would also make it resettable in case they change their mind and want the popup back.
