It is time-consuming to put in your own definitions. It’s also a time suck to review and delete translations that are completely wrong.
But . . . thirty years ago I’d be making my own flashcards for each and every new word, so I’m just accepting the situation for what it is and making the best of it. I’m not going to ask LingQ for translation help when there are so many other tech issues they have to deal with.
Also, the fact that they put in romanizations for Korean gives me no confidence in their judgment on how Korean should be learned.
Yeah this is what I hope for in the future. The main problem was that I initially (first few days) didn’t really realize that many or most of them were user generated, until I discovered some very bad typos and also totally bad translations. By that time with my initial enthusiasm I had already marked 2-3k words as known because I learned Italian for some years in school.
On the other hand… double checking translations and carefully adding new ones that include more precise meaning and so on is a tremendous boost to my own learning because I’m really careful with that and sometimes look it up in multiple sources, check coniugations and so on.
Maybe, in the future, the simple point system (how often a translation is chosen by users) could be refined to a system where contributions of “higher rated” users (because they add more or correct a lot of things) are considered more and their translations rank higher.
Thanks for that hint, I would not change the target language (at least I wan’t to speak one of the pairs perfectly wenn but I didn’t think about that and it gives me a good explanation for that.
I fully agree, there will be no catastrophe because of that but I really have to “unlearn” quite a few expressions - especially prepositions and binding words. On the other hand, correcting as many errors as I can with careful research also is a strategy for learning
One thing you can do is select the phrase where the word appears. That may give you a better idea of what the word means in context, and may be more accurate than the individual definitions.
As a rule of thumb, I always look up definitions by myself when given ones that do not fit in the sentence. I prefer more concise definitive dictionary entries, and we can put any common grammatical explanations and morphological variances in the note section.
I usually resort to the monolingual dictionary for reference when a direct imprecise translation does not suffice. By the way, it’s understandable to see the pronunciation guide for the definition for the overlapping purpose, but entering a sample sentence in T1 is utterly weird.
That is good to know and somewhat unfortunate. I used to create quite a number of translations (for everyone) - however if those can indeed get lost - I need to reconsider whether I should rather put those in my personal comments instead.
It can be a problem. I use LingQ primarily to read news and magazine articles that I import. My strategy is to accept a word translation if it fits in the context of the sentence and the story. If it seems off, I look up the word in a dictionary. If it appears to be an idiom or common phrase, I’ll google it to see what comes up. If I just can’t resolve it, I pick anything to turn it yellow and just move on. Eventually,I’ll run into those things again in another article, and I might then know the solution. Learning a language is a highly iterative process and bounces all over the place. It’s not linear at all. Even in your native language, you hear new things and have to decide if they are correct, slang, proper nouns, acronyms, etc.
The reason Community Definitions exist is because of copyright. The company cannot buy dictionary licences for every user for every language. This would mean your subscription would cost much much more than it currently does. This is their solution to the issue - allow users to write their own definitions (and give the copyright of them to LingQ).
Personally I’ve written 30,000 definitions for Italian (from English). Even though on LingQ, Italian has been studied by thousands of people before me, I still prefer to write my own definitions because I had (and still have) problems with Italian grammar. Now it’s become a habit that’s hard to break. As you get a higher level, writing definitions becomes less important for several reasons: (1) more words go straight to known; (2) the words have only one definition and the Google Translate is the correct one; (3) you understand the grammar so don’t need to correct the current ones; (4) you know all the other words in the sentence, so can better guess if the community defintions are correct; (5) you know the word is rare and you may never see it again so why waste the time writing a complex definition?
I agree there’s an issue with a lot of the high-frequency words. There are wrong definitions, such as specifying the wrong pronoun. When I was a beginner too, I know I wrote some wrong definitions too, which were saved. What really needs to be done is someone to go through all the Mini Stories and other beginner material (i.e. with high-frequency words) and clean up the definitions and write some good ones. For the mid-frequency words, my definitions are decent (because I improved in how I wrote definitions over time). And for low-frequency words, it’s not worth your time and you are skilled enough to just use Google Translate definitions. As @bamboolzed said, due to the priorities within the company, for cleaning up of the high-frequency definitions to be done, you either need to wait a long time or alternatively someone needs to take it on as a community project.
That being said, I’ve learnt a lot of high-frequency vocabulary, despite using wrong definitions initially. When you advance, you just realise that the definitions are wrong and you either choose another one of the Community Definitions or end up editing it yourself. There’s none of this long and painful ‘unlearning’ because you never knew the word well in the first place (it’ll stay yellow because you feel the word doesn’t make sense to you). You will just eventually realise that ‘nelle’ means ‘in the (pl. f.)’. Or, in these cases, if you learn a bit of grammar, you won’t choose the wrong definition in the first place. It is rare to find definitions that are completely off (with the exception of Google Translate, because the word could have multiple definitions). It is much better to get 80% there (such as ‘in’ instead of ‘in the (pl. f.)’) than to just be watching TV series without subtitles and having not the faintest idea what it is. Usually with the definition, the sentence, and the context of the whole lesson, you get the general meaning and that’s all you really need. Over time, the word becomes clearer and clearer.
I have noticed that user-submitted (mis)translations often contain obscene language or other nonsensical translations. Who knew that so many Polish words meant either the F-word or “strawberry flan” or a string of random numbers?
I try to report these user-submitted (mis)translations as much as I can. It seems like a losing battle, though. I guess I’ll have to learn to live with them.
It would be nice, though, if LingQ could employ robotic process automation or something to at least flag obscene language for the librarians or a volunteer committee to review to make sure the translation is correct in both meaning and register.
@ed_shin That said, the mere act of all the clicking and selecting or writing definitions takes a lot of time.
The comparison for me would more be like reading while listening on LingQ at ~55 wpm, reading while listening on YouTube with Language Reactor at ~150 wpm (I just tested it with the Harry Potter audiobook on YouTube with auto-subs at 1.3x, but having to repeat sentences every now and again) or true extensive reading while listening at 1.65x/~240 wpm. In this case, using my reading while listening speeds, we would be talking about 10M words read as extensive reading while listening, ~6M with Language Reactor and ~2.5M with LingQ. As mentioned, the LingQ reading speed is so slow because of the amount of time it requires to get a decent definition (which often includes pausing the audio to open up a dictionary and write a definition). With the translation under the subtitle on Language Reactor (aka bilingual text), you can merely glance down often to get a good definition, without ever having to click anything, hence the increased reading speed. Is extensive or intensive reading faster for vocabulary acquisition? - #43 by nfera
I’ve also found this to be a problem. But I found an easy work-around. I downloaded the “TransOver” app and I use that to double check any definitions I find suspicious. I set it up so that it shows me a translation when I mouseover a word. It’s saved me from getting a poor definition quite a few times. It’s available for Chrome and Firefox, and probably other browsers too. Here’s the link:
I want to point out here that when you click an unfamiliar word in LingQ, only one definition shows up. You have to click it, no matter how wrong it is, or leave the word without any definition, or write a definition yourself even though you have no idea what the word means. THEN after that, you can click the word again, and the second time you click it, you suddenly have access to a long list of definitions and you also have access to some dictionaries.
Because of this, probably thousands of wrong definitions are clicked every day because people have no other choice, and then this wrong definition becomes “popular.” Also because of this, people are forced to type nonsense in the bar in order to proceed, because of the error message saying that you cannot leave the definition blank. (Except actually you can ignore the message and just click away from the box to leave it blank. Things I’ve Learned.)
On the web, blue words show every available definition on the righthand pane. In the app (on android and ios), if you select a blue word, it shows just the one or two “top” ones (not sure they really are the top, but that’s another story), but you can swipe up on the pop up (aim to swipe near the top of the popup–there is a little “bar”. This will open all of the definitions.
You also can select any of the online dictionaries in the dictionary section on the popup and input a meaning based on what you see in the dictionary.
Glad to hear it works that way for you. Not for me, though. I just now checked it again (edited to add: on my Android phone). This time I see at most two definitions when I click the blue word, no way to scroll down to see the rest. Maybe there are only two defs? Let’s see. Click away, click the word again, and now I see an option to click “dictionaries and definitions” down-arrow, which wasn’t there before, which opens up a whole new world of definitions that weren’t there before.
This happens again and again and again. Every single time. No way I’m imagining things.
On the computer (Windows/Firefox) it does work.
Sometimes when I enter a new definition (because it wasn’t in the initial list), click away, and then click back, and now I find out that several other people also entered that same definition that wasn’t there before, or variations thereof. Also, sometimes when I try to enter a definition, the (edited to add: Android) app doesn’t accept my definition. So what I have to do is click a bad definition, back-arrow to delete it, and write the new definition in its place. Then when I click away from the input box, the new definition is saved and the old definition is still there, and then I manually delete it from my list of selected definitions (but it’s still in the list below or other people if they want it.)
On the initial popup…when I say “swipe up”, I don’t mean scroll up/down. Click the blue word once. Then on that popup, there’s a “bar” near the top of the popup. Place your finger below that and swipe upwards though the bar/top of the pop up screen. That “expands” the popup two show the dictionaries, and all the other user definitions.
but I didn’t think about that and it gives me a good explanation for that.
