I’ve just started using LingQ to learn Russian, but it seems only maybe one out of five words are translated. In order to find the meaning of a word, you have to click on ‘New Hint’ and look in the dictionary on the side.
Is this the case for the other languages as well? I’ve been using the French edition as well, but I imagine that it is far more popular which is why more words are already translated?
Yes there are fewer “user hints” in Russian than in French. for example. We Russian learners are the trail blazers for those that follow. I have created over 30,000 LingQs and had to look up most of them myself. You should find a lot of words already with Hints unless you are quite advanced.
It will also depend on your Dictionary Language in the system. If steve has created hints for Russian-English but you are trying to go from Russian to Japanese, you won’t see steve’s hints, and will likely not find that many hints since we don’t have that many Japanese learning Russian on the site. I am just guessing at your Dictionary Language from your country flag in your profile.
It’s a common problem regarding to the ‘unpopular’ language pair.
For example, 99% of italian words don’t have a translation to russian, so I always have to translate them by myself. It’s annoying, but I hope the next generation of students will get a benefit from my work 
Mark, can you shed some ligth on how it really works? Is the saved traslation immediatly become visible as hint to other users studying the same lesson?
Or, Niksa, one day we have so many people in Russia studying Italian at LingQ that it won’t be a problem. Meanwhile you are a trailblazer!!
Yes, Niksa, hints are visible to others as soon as they are created. The 3 most popular hints are shown.