I can see there are plenty of automatic tags for verbs and similar but I haven’t seen any for substantives.
So, I was wondering if LingQ can generate tags for substantives as well. In this case, for German, it would be useful to have the immediate tag “DER, DIE, DAS” just below the substantive as indicated in the example below. I suppose the same technique can be used for any other language that needs it.
This is very useful because any time we click a substantive we can have the immediate answer without having to open a dictionary. Yes, it’s true that some substantive have more than one gender but it doesn’t change anything because in this case there will be more than 1 tag displayed and would eventually require more digging but for the vast majority it would be extremely helpful.
As a German speaker learning Italian, I might exactly have the same problem as an Italian speaker learning German XD… the articles differ a lot between the languages (not only between those two…) So tags for the grammatical genus would be helpful
But my question would be: How are those auto tags created anyway? Sometimes there are more tags, less tags, wrong tags… are they mixed with the tags set manually by other learners?
Also I think that they are displayed differently in the desktop version (where I only see them in the LingQ list and while repeating) and the mobile app (where I can see them also during the lecture when I click a word)
Hm, I just had a thought…
For German: Maybe you (LingQ programmers) could combine the tag with another action!? When someone tags a German word as a “Substantiv/ Nomen” (engl: noun) or “Name” (engl.: name) the word could be shown with a capital letter in the vocabulary list. I just don’t know how to make it work, if a word could be a noun and e.g. a verb. with very different meanings.
That could eventually provide a new layer of precision, but LingQ doesn’t really distinguish between nouns and verbs when we read anyway (this is something different from tags). However, it’s true that applying a capital letter as an extra instruction could improve the precision of tagging. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a big deal because that type of word would simply have more automatic tags. It would be nice if the “der die das” tag appeared as the first tag in the line, though.
Well, maybe there is a logic, who knows, we never learn those in our native language. But German is very nice with learners because it’s not 2 random gender but 3, just to make it fun.
As you point out, there’s a problem when the word can be both noun and verb. I wouldn’t want the word getting autocapitalized if I’m looking at the lingq of it being a verb-that would be even more confusing I think. What probably should be done is simply, when the LingQ is brought up, it takes on the capitilization of the word you clicked on in the lesson (but only when viewing from the lesson). I could be wrong, but I think that’s what happened prior to LingQ 5.
Of course, then what happens in the vocabulary section?? Maybe everything just lowercase there. Or if it is clearly a noun and only a noun then it is capitalized. Maybe that would be too confusing as well.
Not sure Eric about the autocapitalized stuff. My concern is only about autotagging below the word as I indicated with the screenshot above. So, if the software understands from reading the text that a word has a capital letter can distinguish it from a verb conjugation and so apply the tag as a noun (der die das). In this case it wouldn’t apply that tag if there is no capital letter. This can be done in German only, I suppose, or other languages that have the same rule of applying capital letters to nouns.
PS: I actually don’t know about vocabulary list either. But that would be another topic for another feature request.
I would argue there is hardly any logic behind that (given the fact that synonyms for the exact same thing might differ in genus). If there is a logic, because this and that come from here and there and is derived from… it might be easier to take it as random and just remember it XD Hail English, where there is a genus but nobody cares if “the” sun is male or female haha
