Hi LingQ Community!
For finding an appropriate text to read i usually sort my courses by the “new words” percentage. However, I always wonder why there is no “known words” percentage/ sort function. When sorting by “new words” you might encounter texts which have quite few new words (blue words) but have quite a lot of yellow words. Therefore these text might still be to difficult for me. Via a “sort by known words” function instead of a “sort by new words” function this could be avoided.
Or to put it simply: I dont want to know how many blue words there are. I want to know how many white words (everything excluding blue AND yellow words) there are.
I would love to hear your opinion on this.
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The problem is that LingQ consistently refuses to give us the option to finish a lesson and decide which words we’re already familiar with (so they are really “known”) and which ones aren’t known yet, meaning that maybe we’ve seen them here and there, but they did not stick yet. Because of that, sorting by the % of known words is very flawed, because it insists that the word I saw only once 3 years ago is as familiar to me as another word that I see every day. It would be such an immensely useful feature and it’s beyond my understanding why after years of requesting it, it is still not implemented.
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On PC there is now a check that ask you whether you really want to finish the lesson, as this results in the remaining words to be known. If you don’t wan’t that, you can always close the lesson via the cross at the upper left corner. Not intuitive, I know.
That doesn’t solve any of the problems I described above, because there are only two possible results:
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you either never finish any lesson, which means that after doing hundreds of them, you have no idea how many words you actually can count as known and on top of that it’s impossible to keep track of which lessons you already read, but didn’t mark as finished.
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or you mark all the words from the lesson as known, even though this is simply not the case. The more more you do it, the less you can trust the “% of know words” in the search results, because at some point it will tell you that the lesson contains 20% of unknown words, when in reality it will be more like 90%.
For a while I was trying to literally mark every word I already know as a lingq, so that when I would open a lesson, I could immediately see all the known words in gold. But as I described above, at some point the results of searching according to the percentage of known words would simply not give reliable results anymore, and that’s one of the most needed and important features for me here.
It’s truly a mystery why LingQ is so stubborn about refusing to implement this feature.
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I guess you have probably followed this particular feature request closely due to your passion for it.
Perhaps LingQ isn’t stubborn so much as focused on high-priority features.
As a very long-time user of LingQ, I’ve never needed anything other than the current system and I have a hard time even understanding the problem that is frustrating you so much.
The only metric I track is the total number of words read. Seems to me to be the only number that actually matters in the long-term.
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Then what’s the point of having the “% of known words” at all, if it cannot function properly? If you use is, it insists that you already know a word you actually don’t know at all, because you only saw it once ages ago and there’s no way you would remember it. On the other hand, if you don’t use it, it it will completely mess up your ability to search for lessons that are on your level. They should just remove it entirely and stop pretending that they offer this feature when it doesn’t really work as intended and expected.
If your learning style is based on simply reading as much as possible, then I’m happy that you’re satisfied and don’t need any other features. I just hope you’re not paying for the subscription here, because this you can do for free with pretty much any browser and a variety of plugins. But for those of us who put much more thought into our learning process, the feature I am talking about is quite essential - you can google “language learning and Goldilocks zone” if you would like to know more, all graded readers are based on this concept, it’s a very important and useful technique when learning a language and it definitely should be on their high-priority list.
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- Do you really have to finish a lesson for a words marked as known to be added to the known words count? Sounds counterintuitive (but I never paid attention, so you may be right). I read that words read gets updated on page turn.
- On my end there is a green bar shown below the title image of a lesson showing me how much of said lesson I have already read. For a lesson read to the end it is full.
However, I and many others do wholeheartly agree with you on this. But as this is been demanded for god knows how long and all we got was a warning at the end, I just wanted to provide you with an alternative you may not have been aware of.
EDIT: It appears that the green bar isn’t of much use, but the known words count gets updated once you mark a word as known. So you don’t have to finish a lesson in order to keep that number aligned.
Sure, but if I don’t finish lessons, the searcher will treat them as any other new lesson and will keep suggesting the ones I already worked on. After a while it becomes extremely time consuming to sieve through hundreds of lessons, trying to remember which ones I already read but didn’t officially finish.
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The “% of known words” works perfectly fine as a piece of information for me, even though I use the software the way it’s intended.
When I read, I look up any words that I don’t understand in the context of what I’m reading and make a yellow LingQ for them. If I understand the blue word in context of what I’m reading, I just skip forward and the software automatically “marks as known” at the end of the page/lesson.
I don’t worry about trying to capture every single word into a repository of some kind or to track how many words I “know.”
If I can understand a word in context, it gets marked as known. If I don’t understand a word in context, I look it up and make a yellow LingQ.
When I do this, the “% of known words” charts work just fine.
I think the Goldilocks zone is nice and true, but it’s more important for the content to be interesting. If something is hard for me (too many unknown words), I just skip it for a few months and then try the Sentence Mode so I can go slowly and use the Translate Sentence function when I come back to it.
I guess my point is to say it doesn’t matter that the “Known Words” number is “accurate.” It’s a non-essential metric, kind of like the argument over whether you should measure words based on word stems or uniquely-spelled-because-of-declension-and-conjugation words.
If the Known Words count is increasing because your Words Read count is increasing, your knowledge of the language is going up.
The system works well.
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This. It also depends on the language. So a percentage of unknown words that correlated to an easy to understand text for one language might be impossible to understand in another one. And a percentage that feels about right in one language may be super boring and easy in another one.
In the end one will get an idea what range of unknown words is about right in regards to the language learned, the amount of learning performed outside the app and the personal learning style overall. For me most of the content I use has about 15-25% unknown words, which feels about right for me.
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The system works well.
Yes, you keep saying this. But that’s only valid for you and for your learning strategy. As I said, I am very happy for you, but please try to understand that you’re not the only user here. There are many others, including me, with a different learning strategy and for us this system does not work well. Indeed, maybe it’s because of how the languages we learn differ from the language you learn. But we also pay for our subscriptions and I think we have the right to suggest that our learning strategy should also be taken into account. Dismissing us with a simple “the system works well, period” statement doesn’t really help anyone here, because after reading this, many potential future users will think twice before paying for a subscription, which is not good for me, you nor anyone else who is using LingQ.
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I think that was what he has meant.
As stated it is unlikely that the way LingQ works in this regards will change in the foreseeable future. It has already been an issue for god knows how long and all we got was the “Are you sure?” prompt at the end of the lesson. The LingQ staff stated several times that “this is how it is supposed to work”. So if anyone is causing potential users to overthink their subscription, it’s the LingQ team themselves.
As a consequence - and this is the essence of what @R819beyn has written as far as I understood him - it leaves you two options, if you want to continue using LingQ. You insist of the metric beeing super important to you, getting frustrated as the way LingQ is setup causes this metric to be non-representative because inaccurate. Or you try to live with the idea of the metric beeing only a rough guideline, inessential for your learning progress.
I find it annoying that you can’t listen to/read a piece all the way through once without focussing on known/unknown words. I like to get a sense of the entire meaning of the piece before focusing in at the word level. Once you have listened to a piece all the way through without stopping to highlight words, it assumes that you know them all. I have kinda given up on the vocabulary feature in LingQ. I tend to just make a note of the unfamiliar words I want to focus on. Another reason for this is that quite often there are just far too many new words in any one given piece to worry about. Ideally, I would like to read something with only 5-10% new words but these seem quite hard to find in the app. It can get overwhelming to add so many new vocabulary words on a daily basis. So, I tend to use LingQ for reading and listening only and I really like the content on offer. Of course, I focus on new vocabulary but at my own pace and in a way that is manageable for me. Just because you encounter a new word doesn’t mean you have set about about learning it then and there. It is bound to come up again and when the time is right you can make a point of learning it. One of the great things about LingQ for me is that I am not spending time every day searching around for appropriate things to read and listen to. It has introduced to the podcast Unlimited Spanish and at the moment I am just following my nose through that and really enjoying all content. I also read a bunch of Traditional Tales in Spanish and, because I knew them in English, they were pretty easy to follow along with. It is amazing the difference knowing the context can make when reading something in another language for the first time. Individual words and their meanings are important, but it the bigger picture stuff that really counts.
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