That would mean no blue words, and you’d have to already know which characters go together as words. It could be a single character or a group of two, three, or four, etc… A good tool to use though is something like Google Chrome’s popup Chinese dictionary. When you hover over one character that is part of a two or more character word, the whole thing is highlighted and the definition pops up. I usually use that more than the dictionaries in LingQ.
In my experience, the more words you link and know, the less faulty word detection will be a problem.
When I first started with Chinese here at LingQ it was quite bothersome to manually ignore all the characters highlighted together as blue unknown words that were not in fact single words. As your vocabulary increases and you have ignored many false words like this it begins to get more accurate, and the only characters highlighted in blue are actually new words (usually).
The only problem with this is for the beginner to know when something is meant to be a new word or separate characters. It was easier for me because I already knew a lot of Chinese, but I always thought this would have made a headache for the beginner trying to learn Chinese with LingQ to first recognize false new words and then manually ignore them so they don’t show up highlighted again in later texts.
We plan to eventually enable a way to manipulate the word boundaries for Asian languages. We have no plans to disable automatic word identification. Thanks for your patience on this.
I also noticed that I cant ignore words that are falsely detected and select the characters I want. If I want to select the last character of a group of characters that the system think is a word I would get the whole group highlighted in blue. I get the same result if I ignore the group and try again. So I can’t create my own groups this way.
This made me stop learning Chinese here at lingq. Now I wanted to start all over again but I had forgotten this issue.
If you ask me, as a customer, I would prioritize this very high (higher than the avatar).
way to much work but thanks for the info xuedaolao.
Could we at least have the option to turn it off? In that way it won’t confuse newcomers, who would have no idea that this does not work.
If we could turn it off, we could create our own lingqs correctly.
How about moving Chinese to not supported languages?
Surely LingQ is just using a regular expression in the background to detect word boundaries… There must be some excellent working examples on the innerwebs.
“If you ask me, as a customer, I would prioritize this very high (higher than the avatar).”
(Now entering LingQ complaining mode). Yes LingQ seems to have some confused priorities if you ask me.
-Arabic didn’t work correctly, so they just removed it.
-Chinese doesn’t detect word boundaries – this is basically “Functional Requirement #1”
-The reading interface has declined. Pop out dictionary? Features like “Move to Next Lesson” *(more below) are basically hidden. Annoying Pokemon, a background that is distracting, no option to make the font bigger or smaller
-Extremely long release cycle – 6 months is WAY too long. Why not release new, small features every month? That way we’re not bombarded with changes and the LingQ guys aren’t bombarded with bitching.
About the “Move to Next Lesson”. I really don’t understand the logic behind this one. It was nice at the bottom of each lesson. A simple link. Now this has been moved to the “Gear” drop down. Not sure about everyone else… but when I see Gears I think of “Settings”. Move to Next Lesson is not a setting.
Finally, this has bothered me for the last week. From the blog: “The Lesson page is arguably one of the most important pages on the site…”
The Lesson Page is the most important screen. There is no other screen more important to us than this one.
I have not given the new reading interface a proper go yet since I have been enjoying lots of amazing hospitality in Swisscheeseland, but I am now in London and ready to give it a shot and will be posting my thoughts soon. Spatterson is right about the Gear thing. I would click on a gear to change the settings (font settings, choice of interface theme,…). Also, I think he is right about the lesson page being by far the most important part of the website. It is one of the most important pages in the same way that the video watching page is one of the most important pages on YouTube.
I have used the Chinese LingQ a bit and I don’t think the word boundaries are terrible. It could certainly be improved though, but it is useable still.
I agree the next lesson link should be at the bottom of the text. We will be putting it back there. We, too, prefer shorter development cycles with smaller changes, but sometimes this is not possible.
Regarding Chinese, the splitter is the best splitter that’s available. At least it was when we last checked into this. Yes, it’s not perfect but it does work for the majority of words. We would love to spend more time perfecting the Chinese functionality but unfortunately anything we do for Chinese only affects Chinese and does not improve the experience for anyone studying all the other languages on the site. And, since Chinese is not one of the more popular languages on the site it is hard to justify committing the resources to do this.
Turning off word splitting is not an option because our system needs to have some way of identifying word boundaries in order to be able to track words and provide statistics. We are aware of this issue and hope to be able to improve it someday.
Mark, in what way are you using this bug-praise-report-system?
How are you handling this compared to what comes in via the forum?
What is the preferred way for bug-reporting?
I’ve been complaining about Chinese/Japanese word spacing for some time, but my complaint is different. I don’t care too much that the splitting algorithm sucks. I just want the spaces displayed between “words” removed. Real Chinese and Japanese script doesn’t have spacing, or more correctly, it has a very small distance between characters that doesn’t get bigger if there is a word boundary…like this:
一串隨機字符
Right now we have a choice between a large spacing and a medium spacing. Can one of you support guys explain why there has to be a space displayed?