I apparently have this enabled AGAIN after turning it off at every opportunity. While importing a lesson, I inadvertently racked up 74 known words and 973 words of reading while doing neither. I don’t even know why this would be an option for any user of this app. Maybe if I was fluent, it would save some time but I bet the number of fluent people using LingQ are few and far between. I’ve used this app for two years and “Paging moves to known” is absolutely the most frustrating thing about the whole experience! Please delete this option or have the app make us confirm enabling it. Please!
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Even if you have the “paging moves to known” option disabled under the settings, this just means that when you click the complete Lesson option on the last page, all your blue words for the whole lesson will be moved to known. There is no reason to keep blue words. The idea is that you either need to learn them or they are known. (or you can ignore words).
If, however, you disable it and it gets enabled again, that means you probably cleared your browser’s cookies and reset your settings.
At the moment, we don’t have in plans to remove that feature.
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I have never understood this feature. You can move all the blue words to known at the end of a lesson anyway. Why does it help to be done one page at a time while reading? I’m sure there is a reason but I just don’t have a clue what it is.
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@zoran “There is no reason to keep blue words.”
There is 100% a reason to keep words blue: if you don’t know the word and haven’t looked it up. You may think, “If you don’t know the word, why don’t you look it up and create a LingQ?” The answer is a technique called extensive reading.
Here’s the Wikipedia article, which explains how it works:
Extensive reading is a very popular technique and is used by many language learners.
“The idea is that you either need to learn them or they are known.”
This is the idea of intensive reading. Extensive reading has a very different idea. Here’s an article on the iTalki blog, which explains the difference between intensive and extensive reading:
I know you are adamant about LingQ keeping this option for ‘paging moves words to known’, but I would recommend this is TURNED OFF by default. There are often people who have a problem with this feature (I see people posting on the forum). Secondly, there should be a setting to turn off ‘complete lesson moves words to known’. I imagine most users of LingQ would prefer this than the current default. Would the implementation of setting really quite that much code?
Many people have issues with this feature. Here are some other recent forum posts on issues with this feature (and remember that most people don’t post on the forums and rather begrudgingly put up with it):
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One reason to leave words blue is sometimes there’s transcription errors, or words are in the text but not said as part of the lesson. It’d be nice to just skip over these and leave them blue, since they actually haven’t been introduced yet.
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Let’s make questionnaire Who don’t like paging…
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Hi Zoran,
I have been here since 2009 and really seen lots of versions of the program. I have never criticised Lingq, on the contrary, always recommended it to my friends and it has been a great part of my life. But what I’m starting to realize is that when Steve was active here, the Lingq team was very friendly and open to people’s ideas. Now the attitude is take it or leave it. It does not mean you need to agree with all proposals, but I sense too much pride in the responses.
While the forums are just constantly flooded with bug reports, some of them repeating over and over again, there is a lack of humility from the team. Something has changed for worse over the years.
As for the automatic move of known words function, @nfera made an excellent remark about extensive reading. If I have a short lesson with five unknown words, I agree that there is no reason to keep them blue. I may create lingqs with no big effort. But when I am reading a book at Lingq, having a cup of tea and very limited time to relax in the evening, I just want to enjoy the story. I may add some known words or create lingqs, but I do not have to, I may just leave blue words and nothing will happen. This is the way I acted for years, either dilligently working on a lesson (intensive reading) or just reading for pleasure and I had a full control over added words to my statistics.
Actually the same applies to ‘times read a lesson’, with manual control it was always fine, now I’m seeing some wierd numbers like 2,35 read. The idea that if I keep a lesson open for a certain time, I am reading the text is just wrong.
I know our comments will not change anything, but I am convinced that these functions should be optional.
Ps. In fact I was able to access Classic mode for a long time after the new version appeared, but recently while still named classic, it already adds all blue words to known automatically and I can’t escape from it.
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TL;DR: the default is frustrating, but LingQ is awesome overall; my thanks to the team
The existence of the feature makes complete sense. I’ve just never understood why it was enabled by default. I recommend LingQ all the time and think that the team does an excellent job. Even so, I recorded my own usage/helper video the last time I got a friend on here. In it was a list of settings to change. If someone has a huge head-start in a language based on using other platforms, it makes sense to turn on “paging moves to known,” but otherwise it’s among my recommendations to turn it off.
I’m a software engineer on a small team and work on a web platform with a wide variety of users, so I get the difficulty in pleasing everyone and having to choose priorities. Even though I’m critical of the defaults, I urge everyone to try to step into the shoes of a (probably small) team trying to support people who have a variety of usage patterns, preferences, and devices. They do a great job of it. Could it be better? Sure, especially if we all wanted to pay $50 a month to have an expansive team implementing our every desire, including storing our reader settings on their servers instead of in the browser cache. Personally, I think I’d prefer the status quo.
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I don’t think there has been any change in the team’s attitudes or openness to ideas in the 10 years since I first joined.
I agree the default for “paging moves to known” is bewildering and I’m not sure why they didn’t change it to default to off with LingQ 5.0. One who is new LingQ is already needing a soft landing into this world of reading and listening and figuring the tool out, without something magically turning everything from blue to known (a new user is still even trying to grasp this concept). I’d say the same for the “completion moves to known” part. I’m not sure if there’s any kind of warning about this on the complete part?..if there’s a warning then it’s less of an issue (but still probably confusing). If there is no warning then there should be.
As for leaving words blue…Frankly, I think the user should be able to do what they want here, but one CAN do this (unless I’m mistaken). Just don’t click the “finish lesson” button at the end. I’m not sure if there’s a desire by those wanting to leave the blue words to also mark the lesson “finished” even though there are blue words? That’s a bit of a conflict which I don’t think is really resolvable. I think the majority of folks using the tool would probably like the definition of finished on a lesson to include having changed all blue words to known or yellow. In Lingq 4.0 it was more of an issue because your reading stats didn’t update until you mark the lesson complete. With the autotracking this is not an issue. It’s not perfect, but now with the ability to tweak the stats in finer increments this works well enough and better reflects what I’ve done for the day (it often takes me two or three days to get through a full lesson with the limited time I have).
As a fellow developer, I’ll echo Brandon’s sentiments. I think the team does a great job with limited manpower. It’s difficult to please everyone and in my opinion LingQ is the best tool out there for language learning.
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The only thing I could every come up with is if someone already knows much of the language but is new to LingQ, then this would speed up things. i.e. if I’m at C1 or C2 level this would help go through lessons quicker and get the numbers up to where I’m at.
As a beginner in the language and especially as a beginner to LingQ I think this is a baffling option to be turned on. Not intuitive at all. There’s a lot more “tips” in Lingq 5.0 so it may cover this option, but I think it is probably still confusing for the user on whether they should have it turned off or on…they are just trying to grasp this “new” way of learning a language. Having it default to “on” makes it seem like that’s what one should do, when it is absolutely NOT the best choice for beginners or newbies to LingQ.
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Just curious, can’t you just leaven the lesson as “unfinished”? This will leave your blue words. Or is there a reason why you would need to mark the lesson finished? I totally understood in LingQ 4.0 as finishing was what changed your words read count, but now with autotracking it seems less of a need to mark a lesson finished, but potentially there is something I’m missing.
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I think I get what you mean, because you would be setting words to known early in a lesson that would then appear later unhighlighted, which would be good. It would only help them early on since later they would already have set most of their known words to known using the automatic set-blue-to-known function at the end of the lesson.
Why would somebody want to keep so many words blue when doing extensive reading? Surely you would want as many words as possible to not be highlighted when trying to read through lots of material.
@ericb100 There are a few benefits of pressing the ‘finish lesson’ button, as on the page, it has the following:
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you can easily adjust the stats, because autotracking has for ages had many bugs and errors with it (maybe you’ve seen all the bug reports on the forum?), so you end up readjusting almost every single lesson. Even bugs aside, with the current setup (unless it was changed again idk) it does not record that you reread the same text again, so you have to change that 0.9x to 2.0x read.
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a button to remove the audio from the playlist for lessons I do not want to listen to again later on
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a button to go to the next lesson
It’s true all these can be done other ways, but it is very convenient they are all in the same place, on one page. Otherwise it would involve many clicks (per lesson).
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@ColinJohnstonv You don’t want to “keep so many words blue.” You just want to read with miminal interruptions. And to do that, you usually choose texts with very few unknown words. So it’s usually only the occasional blue word. The general recommendation from the linguistics studies usually is no more than 1 in 50 words be unknown.
@jahufford Exactly! I really don’t know how to deal with words, which are, in the context they are introduced, names, but they are also words. For instance, the word Jade is both a name of a person and the jewel/colour. If you encounter this word as a person’s name, how do you deal with it? Do you lingQ it or just mark it as ‘rubbish’ because it’s a name? If you bin it, then you might encounter it next time as the definition jewel but it isn’t blue anymore.
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@Mariotkd - I can’t comment on what LingQ was like ten years ago, but I am aware that staff don’t always see forum posts directed to them. So even this comment may not have been read.
For instance, @zoran’s comment on this thread was a copy-paste of previous posts (see the hyperlinks in my earlier post) and even after my above post debating the merits of it, he still used the exact same post, copy-pasted, in another thread several days later.
So maybe he didn’t even read the above post anyways? I don’t know. If he did, well… how do I say it… it was probably not the most ‘customer-service-friendly’ thing to do.
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Here is another example why ‘complete lesson moves to known’ is a very bad idea.
I am learning Italian and, as you can see in the screenshot, in the article, they quoted an English tweet. Now I have to manually go to every blue word and bin them. On this page there are 24 blue words, which I need to bin. Because, if I don’t, then these words will be marked as known, when I click ‘complete lesson’.
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I just accidentally did this for the first time on a very short lesson because I was testings something out with the flagging words feature (without refreshing the page) that I’ve been having a problem with in another topic 
No warning messages this time. I’d love to get the warning every time — similar to the warning you get that liking your private lessons makes those lessons public.
Edit: I just double-checked there was no checkmark at the end of the lesson before paging words to known, so how are people supposed to know the lesson is finished now? (A green hue?) @zoran / @LingQ Team:
Easier to tell on Chrome with the white space in the lesson:
But not on Firefox:
Is this a bug?