I’ve started to use lingq recently, its pretty disheartening to spend a few hours on beginner material and feel a bit acquainted with the material – then mistakenly paging a bit on different content to see what it would look like and getting a bunch of words I don’t know added to my vocabulary list. Seems like the ‘paging moves to known’ data is stored in cache on cookies rather than the account, its really easy to forget to toggle it off if you move to a new device.
If that is suprising to some users, the fix is simple – toggle it on, reread a couple pages, and your vocabulary state is accurate. Compared to the existing product where its accidentally toggled on and the user needs to manually mark each word, this seems like the right choice.
Especially for those doing a “try-before-you-buy” run, to discover after just a few minutes that you’ve used up all your free Lingq’s before you even knew what they were, and now your trial is over, sorry.
A.K.A., an option that is off by default, and when you want to mark more known for that added convenience, then a user can “toggle it on.”
Of course, this feature’s abilities would need to be clearly communicated to the community so that more advanced readers could toggle this feature on if they want this feature.
However, for less advanced learners, this feature can seriously mess up the known word counts of learners who are unaware of this feature or how to turn it off.
They would then have to manually go in and remove each individual word accidentally marked “Known” by having this feature on by default (since there is currently no way to undo this).
This is much more troublesome and discouraging than advanced users having to manually mark words as “Known” because this feature is not set to default — until they discover and turn this feature on.
In my case, I had already begun learning Spanish prior to LingQ. I imagine many other students also start learning prior to using lingQ. My first month on lingQ I made 325 lingQs and marked 2874 words as known. Had I not been using “page to known” I would have had to manually set the status of ~10X the words, making my lingQ experience much more cumbersome. If the default was the other way, I’m not sure how long it would have taken to learn about the “page to known” option. Perhaps I would have given up on LingQ. I certainly could never have stomached brushing up on my Japanese reading if I was stuck marking every single word.
You all are probably right that in the absence of an explanation, many will inadvertently mark words to known with the current default. However, I think ideally, rather than a hard default one way or the other, you’d have pop up when someone is trying to use the “next page” function on lingQ for the first time (or each time until they click “don’t show this dialog”). The pop-up dialog could have an explanation of the options (perhaps a link to a video or detailed explanation), and either the ability to select one of the two options, or at least let the user know that it can be changed in settings.
@hiptothehop - no you’re not weird. I think your use case is the sole reason it’s there (well, I’m sure there ARE some weirdos out there, but I don’t think your usage is weird). But at least if it starts in the off position, the worst case for you is you’re slowed down for a bit, until you figure it out. For others, they may go for awhile not realizing they are marking everything known automatically and there is no great way to mass set things back to just 1 or something else. It is possible, but not easy, especially for new users.
I could be wrong, but I think maybe that feature is mentioned as you first start as a hint? So maybe there is some warning, but it’s been awhile and I don’t remember now.
I think I remember seeing it at one point, but it seems to be a common problem for new users.
I read how to turn this off in the Forum by chance when I first started, so I think I was saved from having this issue, thank goodness.
I started using LingQ back in June.
However, it might be a better alternative to have this feature off by default and have a popup message for users that turn to the next page of their first few lessons (as a new user) that they can turn this feature on in the reader settings or something like that. Rather than a message that says, “Turning page marks all blue words as known” for a feature like this being toggled on by default (as it stands currently).
Note: I’m not sure if the message I saw said something like this at all, but I do remember seeing a prompt that clicking the check mark ( ) at the end of a lesson marks all blue words as known, the first time I clicked on the check mark at the end of a lesson—which as an excellent warning.
Another idea. Perhaps it would be better to not have “page to known” as an option at all, and rather have the option at the end lesson landing page (or whatever they call that final page) to click move blue words to known. I would not mind one more click per lesson. This would also solve the issue of accidental “paging” forward moving words to known that even folks with my use case have.
Did you by any chance use different devices? Because the setting needs to be adjusted for every device you work on. It doesn’t replicate automatically.
yeah, changing the default would make this worse for you
my guess would be though that users who are more advanced on their language are also more likely to be more advanced with their usage of lingq, so hopefully the burden is more limited?
I’m not sure if language ability correlates to tech savvy, but I agree with you and with the others here that if they have to choose a default, it might be better to NOT move them to known, because the inadvertently marking words known seems harder to recover from.
Still, I like jpp025s suggestion about setting the default to not move-to-known, but having a hint pop up to make users aware of the option, or my last suggestion to simply eliminate that and allow users to manually move blue words to known once per lesson. My suggestion has a couple added benefits: eliminates the need to remember which setting you had on which device, and eliminates the accidental page-to-known even for users like me who use the feature. Both suggestions would make the trial version more functional, as WillowMeDown pointed out.
Probably not the response you want to hear but it really doesn’t matter. Even if you known-bomb an entire page of unknowns, you can either just a) LingQ them the next time you see them or b) Lingq them right now. Whether you choose (a) or (b) no extra work on your part is required. It’s really not an issue at all other than a temporary spike in your statistics but even then if you’ve been going through hundreds of thousands, if not millions of words, then even this spike will barely register at all. So ultimately, it doesn’t matter and you shouldn’t stress about this. Just keep on keeping on.
I don’t like that at all. With longer texts, I often don’t finish a “lesson” in one sitting. I want to have my work continually updated as I read, not a sudden flood of potentially hundreds of known words at the end.
I like the way it is and never had any problem with it.
However, the more options to customise the better, as always.
A simple tutorial for beginners would fix that.
In any case, even if blue words don’t become known by default, they will be once you move to the next lesson. If I’m not wrong, when you finish any lesson, there is no option to keep those blue words.
Beginners will tend to have short lessons anyway, so they will have this problem just at the first lesson finished. It doesn’t really change much unless they keep all lessons unfinished.
It would be useful if all of this could be customizable per course, not even per language or for the entire system. In this case we could decide to leave all blue words untouched for specific courses where maybe we want to read them or listen to them on Mobile without having to look up for words.
science fiction: settings synchronised on multiple devices.
The (iOS) app does feature a tutorial for new users, which (if memory serves me right) does explain the “paging moves to known” feature and may even prompt the user to turn it on or off.
As for customizability, that quickly turns into undesired complexity. This thread is an example: I, for one, like the fact that I can have slightly different settings on different devices. My use scenario differs between my desktop, my (touch-enabled) laptop, and my smartphone. But that’s precisely what tripped up the OP here: he/she realized too late that a setting was set to an undesired default.
I suppose I’m not helping matters by adding yet another feature suggestion to the mix, but I think it would be helpful to have a clearly designated “read-only” mode - something like the karaoke mode, but more reader-friendly. But again, adding too many different modes for slightly different use cases becomes a mess in its own way. (Although if implemented, I’d suggest replacing/expanding the “print lesson” option, which already seems rather atavistic in today’s internet.)
The issue is that the setting is extremely hazardous because it can set potentially hundreds of new words to know in 1 button click. There is no corresponding button to set known words to new or even to remark a word as new.
I’ve been looking into a feature for my AutoLingQ addon to remark a page/lesson as new but I havn’t found the correct endpoint/payload yet.
What sort of features do you want in a read-only mode? Have you seen the Rooster Reader addon?
True. An “Undo” function would be truly helpful, I think. Despite the “hazard”, I suppose an “automatic-known” function is necessary to LingQ’s core use case.
(I haven’t tried any of your add-ons so far, I haven’t seen a major function missing for my use case.)
I use page to known.
) at the end of a lesson marks all blue words as known, the first time I clicked on the check mark at the end of a lesson—which as an excellent warning.