Thank you for all responses. I’m very glad to hear that some of the changes I suggested are already in the pipeline! It’s so great to see that you never stop to improve things at LingQ
@Steve: I agree with you that it all depends on where we are in the language, but I think that LingQ shouldn’t be geared only to beginners, should it? Let’s say, if I were to start learning Russian or Korean, I would prefer to have five options to choose from, but for English or German that’s too easy for me. And I would like to improve at LingQ both my more advanced languages and those I’m learning from scratch as well.
@dooo: No, in fact I never use community generated lingqs, I prefer to look up words for myself - then I remember them much better, even if I make less lingqs a day than some more “active” lingqers. I like the transparent interface, statistics (I think I’m somehow addicted to increasing all those numbers) and, of course, the whole community of people who are as passionate about learning languages as I am.
I don’t know if we can offer the choice of cloze tests, 1) a blank with five choices, or 2) just the meaning. We will see what is involved.
However, if we can see the meaning, do we really need the sentence as in a cloze test. Would it not be better to have another kind of test based on the meaning, such as a scrambled list of words in one column and a scrambled list of meanings in another column and ask the user to connect them?
perhaps you’re right. It was just what I saw at LWT and thought what a great idea it was, but maybe you’re right that it’s a little bit redundant. To my mind it just helps remember the words better and to recall them actively (which I now need to work on most!), but it’s up to you and other lingqers to decide whether it might be worth implementing. As I said, your ideas with matching things would be perfectly okay for beginners, but not so demanding for advanced learners.
The more I think of your proposal for a type of cloze test where we get the meaning and we have to write in the word (if that is in fact what you mean) the more I think it is also a good idea. I don’t know what the technical issues are, and we do not want to confuse people, but the more different ways there are to play with words and test ourselves, the better, I think.
Crosswords are more difficult I would imagine, Michele.
I agree that would be very good to have a test to improve active vocabulaire, not mere passive acknownegment of words, And I think that yes the phases would be necessary, for providing context to the meanings and directing a little bit the recovery of the word.
