Removing English words from the word count?

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Hi guys! I started importing a 120-year-old German text from Gutenberg called Märchen und Erzählungen. I called the first lesson the preface because it’s an actual preface in English to the German book. Later, when i clicked through the pages to check it, the LingQ system counted all these English words as known words. This caused my German word count to rise.

What can be done about this? The word count is wrong, sure. Can it be fixed?

And is it best to delete the preface since it’s not really a lesson and it’s not in the targeted language?

I just love these old beginner’s texts!

2

Well, you can go back to the preface and tell the system to ignore those words: go through each word and press x or click on “ignore word”. It may be a bit of a a pain if it’s very long, though.

3

Thanks for responding! The preface is at least 400 words in English, which I didn’t know at the time. I’m not going to click ignore for each word.

I’m asking what’s the administrative fix.

If I delete the entire preface from the lesson series, there’s no way to click ignore for each word. But what impact does that have on the word count?

We need a developer to give a definitive answer.

Does anyone know the name of the developer or the technical staff?

4

The staff will eventually reply, let’s just wait. In principle deleting the staff should have no impact on word count.
I love those old language books, as well

5

Hi LakeviewJoy,
Sorry but you’ll need to click on each word and ignore it, there is no other way. If you just remove the lesson, your known words number will stay unchanged and English words will still be counted.

6

Well, you can learn so many new German words that those few hundred English words included in the count will become statistically insignificant. Just sayin’…

3 Likes
7

I like the way you think! In the long run you’re right. But for the moment it’s a false number and it’s distracting.

8

I believe the database administrator could:
1.) do an SQL query for all words in my account uploaded around 9am EST today (or whatever time a lesson called “Preface” was uploaded to my account)
2.) check to ensure the result contains about 400 records added in a one-minute period
3.) delete that result

Correct?

And then I will delete the lesson called Preface.

9

@LakeviewJoy - We aren’t able to manually delete data from your account I’m afraid. Your best bet is probably to delete all your German data and start again since it looks like most of your known words are those you just added. You can find and go through any previous lessons you have done again just creating LingQs for those words you don’t know and paging to move the rest quickly to known. To reset your language, go the Languages Tab Login - LingQ.

10

great idea, thanks!

11