Thanks for taking the time to write such a well-thought-out response.
Yes, please!
Also, if the “Finish Lesson” checkmark could be somewhere else, rather than in the exact same location as the “next page” right arrow. If that were moved, that would be a huge cause of joy for me personally. Right now, all it takes is trying to click the last “next page” arrow once, but fumbling and clicking it twice by accident, and voila! I’ve just marked all the words in the lesson as “known,” including the ones on the final page which I haven’t even read yet. Imagine ALL the vocabulary words you were intending to study in a lesson suddenly disappearing. Not cool.
It’s true we don’t all use LingQ the same way. I can’t be the only person who goes through a lesson more than once, and who doesn’t want, in the first pass, to click on any of the blue words. Quite often I like to read aloud or listen to a lesson first, focusing on pronunciation and basic comprehension, but not worrying about any unfamiliar words, just getting the gist through context and getting exposed to the sound and flow of the language. Then I can go back through the lesson a second time and study all the blue and yellow words. I’ll know I have finished a lesson because it will contain no more blue words. BUT if I accidentally click “Finish Lesson,” then not only can I not find in the lesson the words I intended to go back and look at, but also the lesson itself will be marked as having zero blue words, hence finished. It’s not a small thing at all, because if all those blue words turn white (not yellow, mind you, but white), then I have to go back and carefully read through the entire lesson all over again to try to find the words I was intending to study, in context. (The context of the new words is extremely important for Chinese, at least, because sometimes what might be marked as a new “word” might actually be an odd juxtaposition of the second half of the preceding familiar word plus the first half of the following familiar word, or only the final two syllables of a familiar three-syllable word, etc., and the given definition of the LingQ in such cases might make no sense in the context (for that same reason). Looking at such words in context, it’s obvious that they need a little space/grouping adjustment, whereas just seeing such words in a list without context they can be rather baffling.)
One idea would be to have the option: “paging turns blue words to yellow (status 1)” and “finishing lesson turns blue words to yellow (status 1).”
Another idea would be that “known words” would show up in the vocabulary list (under the “vocabulary” tab) rather than just completely disappearing. Even if they were marked white with a check mark and no definition, as long as they would actually show up in the vocabulary list, that would still be preferable to what currently happens.
Hope that helps.