I love LingQ but I have a suggestion that I think would make it even better. When creating a new LingQ it would be nice to have the ability to indicate what part of speech the word is, for example, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc. You can add tags that do this but you can’t filter or sort on them. If you could flag your words with appropriate part of speech and then have the ability to filter on it this would allow you to focus on just your LingQs that are verbs or nouns or adjectives, etc.
Also, for verbs when the LingQ is in the conjugated form, for languages like Spanish, it would be nice to have somewhere to indicate the infinitive of the verb.
I don’t know why anyone would want to sort through words like that.
My first few attempts to learn French usually went like this: I’d decide one day I’d learn 5 verbs, 5 adjectives, and 5 nouns on a list. It would last for four days, then I would bore myself out and quit for a few months.
Now that I learn words in the context of sentences I find them hard to forget. I’ve even found that the more I ignore the categorization of the word (meaning the part of speech that it is) the more likely I am able to use it in a natural way in my speaking.
I feel similarly to djvlbass. But I want to point out that sorting by tag is possible. Just go to the vocabulary page and click on the tag in the list of tags to the right. Or did you mean something else?
You can indicate the parts of speech and give the infinite forms in the hint. A lot of people seem to do this and I often choose previously saved user hints where this has been done. You can also tag words by parts of speech and sort by tag in the vocabulary section. Personally I wouldn’t do this because I am too lazy to tag LingQs, but I think it is possible to do so.
Last time I checked, it was possible to filter LingQs according to tag and then you could review only those if you wanted. Maybe that has changed, maybe I’m dreaming.
In any case, a default “part of speech” tag is easier said than done. Many words in many languages have several functions. Some tenses look alike, some words are nouns and verbs, some are adjectives and adverbs et.c.
Of course it does, and I’m sure that Colin knows that, and that he brought it up just to stress the fact that a word can belong to several groups, which in turn makes all this “part of speech”-talk rather useless. At least if the suggestion is that the system itself should add the information “automatically”.
@jeff_lindqvist: But from technical point of view it might be extremely hard to do it in realy automated manner. Google translate didn’t achieve this level yet, so i think we have to wait before anyone else could do it right.
First, I figured out how to filter using the tags, which is helpful. Thanks for pointing that out. Second, I wasn’t suggesting that adding the part of speech be something that the system should do automatically. I was only suggesting that it would be nice to have a field where the user could set the appropriate attribute based on the context in which the word is being used.
Everyone learns in their own way and if some people feel this extra information about a word is “useless” then they wouldn’t be obligated to use it. But for those who might find it helpful, I just thought it might be a nice added feature.
Yes, it might be helpful, but for some languages you’d still have to add several tags to words, since many words can belong to more than one class, and in those cases it might take longer to come up with the perfect combination of tags than to learn the ord itself.
In other words, feel free to add whatever tags you find useful (the function is already there).
I add such information sometimes. For example, if I was making a hint for ‘weiß’, I might make it “v. to know; adj. colour white”. You don’t need an extra field since you can add it to the hint itself.