Study any language on Lingq

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1

Hi!

I read this in the email about Esperanto…

“Study Any Language on LingQ!
Remember that you can study any language on LingQ! Simply use a language slot for a language you don’t plan on studying.
As a paying member, you can import as many texts and audio files as you want and study from the comfort of LingQ. Open a dictionary in another browser window and start saving LingQs. Let LingQ keep track of your words of reading, hours of listening, Known Words total and more!”

I am a bit lost… How do we do this?
Can we learn other languages than the ones proposed in the Supported and BETA languages’ list?
If I could use Lingq for my studies of Hungarian, that would be really helpful :slight_smile:

Thanks for helping!

2

You can, but there are a couple of big limitations. If you want, you can import any language into any slot you aren’t using. The software allows you to make lingQs whether the language is actually supported or not. The two big downsides are:

(1) If the script of the language you want to study isn’t supported, then you have to use one of the supported scripts (or a combination of them) to represent the words. There are many symbols that will not lingQ properly and to know which do, you have to experiment some and then be consistent with your transcribing system when importing.

(2) There will be no pre-existing hints available. You have to manually input the definitions yourself.

Obviously some languages don’t entail circumventing the downside (1). A fairly minor point is that there is no content in the library for unsupported languages, but this is compounded if you must transcribe each lesson into your modified script. All of this said, it is possible.

3

All scripts that go from left to right, are supported by the site. It’s only RTL which aren’t. As long as you have the fonts, LTR languages will work.

4

Unless this has changed recently, that is just not true Imyirtseshem. I tried Devanagri script a few weeks ago and it did not work.

5

That’s strange. Maybe I got lucky! I would have thought that the support would just be Unicode based. I suppose we’ll get some information from one of the admins some time soon.

6

Devanagri shows up, but will not LingQ properly. Other symbols show up as an empty square instead of a character (on my screen at least).

7

Arabic is right to left and works fine except for the numbers, which get reversed. I never noticed anything wrong with the punctuation but I may not have been paying attention. All in all I found studying Arabic on LingQ quite smooth.

8

Not every language will work, as some languages have issues unique only to them (such as Hindi, for example), but the majority of languages should work properly on the site.

9

That’s strange, dooo. I had so many trouble with Yiddish that I gave up on it. Not sure what the problem could be but I’ll experiment some more.

10

Thanks for the informations… It works well indeed, I suppose for Hungarian there is no problrem because it is the Latin alphabet and only some accents are specific to the language…
By the way, if ever Hungarian becomes a BETA language, will I be able to transfer my Lingqs that I save right now to a new BETA language slot?

Thanks!

11

YEs. Just export all from the vocab page and then import to the new Hungarian slot. I did it with Arabic when it came online.

12

I have had no trouble with importing Amharic.

13

What issues does Hindi have?

14

It seems that each character of the script is treated as a word. For example, बात (baat) is treated as three words instead of one.

15

The issues will have to be worked out before the end of the month! :smiley: It’s winning by a long way hehe

16

I hope it’s a simple fix since there isn’t a standard romanization that distinguishes all the sounds. I would be delighted if Hindi wins out. Keep in mind, though, that it was winning by a long ways at one time last month and ended up losing by a couple of votes…

17

Actually, there are several systems which do correctly transcribe Hindi sounds. The problem is, transliteration is horrible, in my opinion. Books are produced in Devanagari.

It would be nice to see it win this month.

18

My point was that there isn’t a standard one, not that you can’t do it. And what do you mean by correctly? You mean consistently?

19

Can we not just use the method Google Translate uses? Whether it’s the best way or not, Google Translate is a convenient way of getting phonetic transliterations for LingQing.

20

Yes, I meant ‘consistently’, kcb.

Skyblueteapot: The big problem is getting LingQ to actually recognise Hindi words as words. What other users want to do with their lingq, isn’t really of importance. If people care about a consistent transliteration system, they’ll work it out on their own. The resources are certainly there and a guide could be made here in the forum too.