I’m going through my articles and there are some lingqs which contain a word I would like to add, but sometimes another character that shouldn’t really be there is tacked on.
For instance, I come across 吃苹果 when I only want to add 苹果. Is there any way of separating the 吃 from the default lingq the article has created?
There is a little pencil button, that shall allow you to edit the term, a double click on the term (in the editing widget of a lingq) does the same (the whole old term is gonna be in yellow afterwards until you reload the page).
This kind of problem is the reason why I separate meaningful words manually before sharing my own contents, but I believe that in the future it will be possible to separate automatically meaningful words on LingQ because there are softwares that allow us to separate words.
The following is an example that I often use to separate words automatically.
(Sorry, this software is written in Japanese, but I am sure that you can find this kind of software in Internet.)
Pinconv 4.17
http://www.karak.jp/pinconv/pinconv417.html
However, now, there is another minor problem about separating words.
For example,
可 有 人 却 不 认为 “诚实” 应该 是 人 人 具 有的 好 品质。
I want to LingQ word 具有 in this text, but there is already a LingQed word 有的, so I cannot pick up 具有 in it even if I edit the text such as “人 人 具有 的 好 品质”.
I don’t know what to do for now. Only one solution is… to delete the Linged word 有的.
Let’s go back to mrgrill’s issue.
If there is a LingQ ed phrase “吃苹果=eat an apple” in a text, it will be difficult to LingQ only one word 苹果.
So, I will ask a programmer of LingQ what we can do to resolve this kind of problem, too.
If you find LingQed word “吃苹果” in your personal content, you have right to edit this text, only one solution is to delete LingQ 吃苹果, then to LingQ 苹果, However you don’t have right to edit the other shared contents.
Thanks for all the help. Since I upload most of my own content for private reading I figured I could just just edit the article and separate/join the characters if need be.
However, the “具有” example that dillemme has described turns up from time to time and it is quite annoying.
Many thanks to dillemme for passing this issue on to LingQ’s programmers.
Overall this is a fairly minor problem in an otherwise excellent piece of software, and I’m happy to put up with it if nothing can be done 
@mrgill: The problem that you brought up was not existent in earlier versions of LingQ (before Dec. 2011, i assume). Before the new release you could easily create 苹果 out of 吃苹果. See also this thread: http://bit.ly/xMGnoX
This was possible, but now this feature has gone, see Lesson Help
“Can I LingQ part of a word?
Any word segments you select can be saved …”
@mrgrill - I see you’ve been quite active with Chinese – keep up the great work!
As eugrus mentioned above, you can create these LingQs manually by editing the term. These words won’t appear highlighted in yellow if they don’t specifically appear, but they will be on the Vocabulary page and will appear in your SRS.
The other issues brought up here are quite complex, but somewhere down the road we do hope to address them.
Thanks all