Recent App Updates - Week of May 9th

Updates, Tips and Known Issues
1

I will try to post regular updates with details of what has changed on all apps over the previous period. Since this is the first update in a while it will include updates from a relatively long period. We do push updates regularly to all apps and often our users aren’t aware of these changes. Or, maybe there is a particular update you are waiting for.

As always, please share any feedback about the apps or these updates.

Web App

  • Bugfixes to Sentence Editing screen
  • New For Kids and War in Ukraine shelves in Library
  • Setting to show Status Bar on mini popup in Reader
  • Ability to add images, videos, links to forum replies
  • Reader settings added to show/hide Examples, Notes on LingQ widget
  • Added widget settings for New Words in Reader
  • Batch addition/removal of tags enabled in the Vocabulary section
  • Fixed Vocabulary print feature
  • Numerous other bug fixes
    Android App
  • Tablet support;
  • Fonts, line spacing and text highlighting style options;
  • Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic specific fonts;
  • Significant improvements to text layout in the reader;
  • Improvements to paging and switching between sentence and full text mode
  • Enabled full text selection in the reader and in the word popup, with Copy functionality
  • Improved design and more statistics available in the Statistics screen in the Library
  • Text-to-speech voice options
  • Local text-to-speech plays if internet connection is bad or not connected
  • Follow System option for the app’s theme
  • Prompt audio generation for lessons without audio
  • Fixed issues in the Review activities
  • Several improvements to the UI
  • Bug fixes and stability improvements
    iOS App
  • New language stats view
  • Sentence editor added to Reader
  • Bugfixes
17 Likes
2

When importing a long book in txt format or simply importing an ebook, it only creates one lesson and the full text is not created in more lessons.

3

Thanks for this Mark.

I didn’t even realize this as I was so used to the previous way that I didn’t even see it. :smiley:

That’s why these updates could be so useful, we do things on autopilot that often we don’t even see things or go into the settings for months anymore.

And also gives a better flow on what you are doing and how often you change and improve things.

1 Like
4

@elcastillo Can you check again now? In some cases it takes more time for additional parts to appear, so please take a look and let me know if the complete book is up now.

1 Like
5

I noticed that with the last update on IOS whenever you turn a word to known or ignore it it skips to the next blue word. This is kind of annoying because every time it reads out the new word, which often is at the end of the text. On the android version it doesn´t skipt to the next blue word. Is there a way of fixing this or at least to turn this function off in the settings?
Did anybody else notice this?

6

Thanks for the reply! Yes. It seems to me that when you have a ‘properly formatted’ book (that is, with the correct paragraph breaks, and sentence breaks) it adds the book nicely and creates automaticaly the next lessons. However, if the text file is not ‘properly divided’ with said breaks, the whole book will load (or try to) in just one lesson (or will only create one and not the rest of lessons since each lesson has a word limit), which is insane and will cause your screen to freeze or outright close your browser haha

7

Please detail which bugs you fix. Some of my behaviour using LingQ is done to specifically avoid bugs. I’m particularly looking forward to the bug fix on Android to manually reduce the number of times the lesson has been read/listened to. Also, fixing the words counted many times whenever you close/re-open the app would be great too. Amongst other bugs. Thanks.

8

Quick question - I believe at one point someone from LingQ mentioned that auto-generated TTS would be coming to web at some point. Am I remembering that incorrectly, or is that just still coming a bit later?

9

Yes, this is still coming for web. It is now high on our priority list so should be out soon.

3 Likes
10

Since I’m not sure when “very soon” is for the Android app is and don’t want to lose track of this thread, I’ll go ahead and comment that I hope it includes:

  • support for bold and italic text (hopefully an easy fix?)
  • support for images (I cannot open lessons with inline images at all)
    I’m probably a week or two out from starting my next book, and partway through uploading is when I realized it uses a lot of formatting (including different fonts) and several images to tell the story. I’ve managed to work around the fonts with the bold/italic alone, but without those either it will be difficult to understand the story/voice changes. I switched to plain text for any images that were letters/notes in the book, but there are still some graphic images that are essential to the plot, and I can’t pull those lessons up on Android at all, with or without the images displaying.

I will note that some of the earlier issues I had since starting with Lingq in February seem to have improved or resolved since applying the Mar 27 update, so thank you for continuing to improve the platform!

11

@redtomato - Neither one of those issues is really on our radar so thanks for pointing them out. They will not be in this update for sure but will be added to our list to be worked on in future. Can you provide a link to a lesson that isn’t opening for you so we can follow up on that issue first?

12

The new Android version should be available to most of you now. If not, it should be available in the next few days and should contain the following significant updates:

  • Tablet support;
  • Fonts, line spacing and text highlighting style options;
  • Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic specific fonts;
  • Significant improvements to text layout in the reader;
  • Improvements to paging and switching between sentence and full text mode
  • Enabled full text selection in the reader and in the word popup, with Copy functionality
  • Improved design and more statistics available in the Statistics screen in the Library
  • Text-to-speech voice options
  • Local text-to-speech plays if internet connection is bad or not connected
  • Follow System option for the app’s theme
  • Prompt audio generation for lessons without audio
  • Fixed issues in the Review activities
  • Several improvements to the UI
  • Bug fixes and stability improvements
1 Like
13

@nfera - What is the issue you are having with reading/listening on Android? Also, what is the issue with closing and re-opening the app. On Android, words are counted when you have a page open for a specific period of time or longer. If you read a page and then close the app and re-open it later and have that page open for a while, it is counted as being read again.

1 Like
14

This only happens on iPad I believe and there isn’t a setting to disable it. We will look at adding a setting to turn off this option. It is convenient when ignoring a bunch of non-target language words.

15

If you are doing a reading a lesson on LingQ Android, then you navigate away from the app, when you return to the app, it will count that same page again, all words on that page, as if you’ve read the entire page a second time. But obviously, you don’t, cause you just continue reading, where you left off. I don’t know how long the page has to be opened for before it counts it twice, but either I’m too slow to go to the next page, too slow of a reader, or the timer isn’t functioning properly. I don’t know. Whatever the case may be, it’s not functioning as it is intended.

For example, if you have a 10 page lesson and you navigate away from the app twice because you received a message or a phone call or to check the weather on another app or whatever, these are the pages you will see counted:

1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 = a total of 12 pages counted

At the end of the lesson, when you click ‘complete’, you will see ‘read 1.2x’, which is obviously incorrect, because you only read it 1.0x.

Then, as others also mentioned in the below forum thread, because everyone has the same issue, they manually use the ‘-’ button to reduce times read. Some reduced it to 0.0x then used the ‘+’ to put it back to 1.0x. But the ‘-’ button does not work! So everyone who has been doing this has been getting the inflated wordcount from keep reopening the LingQ app in the middle of a lesson PLUS adding 1.0x to every lesson. (The reason they reduced it to 0.0x in the first place, then to add 1.0x is because you can reduce only in intervals of 1.0x, as opposed to intervals of 0.1x, which would be ideal.)

And this is not mentioning the times, which sometimes happen (haven’t figured out when exactly yet), when you reopen the app and it’s not on the exact page you left it on, but skipped back several pages, so you have to swipe three times to get back to the page you started on (and they are counted to the word total). So, in reality, the pages counted might look like this:

1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 = a total of 14 pages counted

Check out this thread for more details:

The temporary fix is just to fix the ‘-’ button to make it work (instead of only superficially showing that you reduce it in the lesson, but not actually reducing your total wordcount in your overall stats), then everyone can manually reduce the inflated numbers on our end.

Thanks for your hard work, Mark. :slight_smile:

16

Actually, Mpampalitsas, I can’t get this to happen on phone or iPad. Where are you seeing this? What version of the app are you using?

17

Thanks, we’re looking into all of this. I hadn’t seen this thread. We’ll see what we can do here.

1 Like
18

Thx!

19

How do I get to use specific Korean fonts on Android? I don’t see them in the dropdown list. Thank you.

20

Hi Mark,
I got the 5.4.1(350) version for Android this past evening. I’m seeing an issue for lessons that don’t have audio. The lesson comes up about the same speed as before, but the creation of the audio never finishes…it just is giving a yellow “spinner”. Before we would see a percentage of progress as it creates the audio. Ultimately, currently this never finishes. Before it would only take about 30 seconds.

I’m on android 12 if that matters.