I experience the same problems that others have described, such as issues with hyphens, importing, and so on. Personally, I donāt find these problems to be a major issue, and I can live with them, even if they are never fixed. I think LingQ offers good value for the money. If I didnāt feel that way, I would have left LingQ.
Nike is a goddess too.
LingQ can definitely handled this better, and you are right to be angry about it.
In the past I would slow down or stop my reading here hoping for a fix to come in so that I read in my perfect way. Perhaps it is just procrastination. I would be pissed off as well.
Later on, I would just find ways around it, I realize the most important thing is just to read more, instead of waiting around for perfection.
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Audio syncing problem cost me a lot of time I think because I wanted the audio to be synced perfectly, Rooster tools helped me with syncing, Eventually, now that AI audio on LingQ is decent I donāt use audio from audio books anymore. So no need to deal with sync issues these days.
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In French āĀ»ā would get split into separate sentence in sentence mode. I complained about it. Later I just preprocess the books and removed all the spaces before āĀ»ā. Which solved the problem, I carried on reading.
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There were also various other ePub importing issue, but I eventually figured out a series of step/fixes to do to the files before import. I canāt be bothered if LingQ will implement any of the fixes, because I need to read now, not wait around for a fix. If I can figure out a work around I use it and move on.
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There were also various color issues on word highlights in the past, instead of waiting I just turn off the highlighting and carried on reading.
The dash issue doesnāt bother me, In general I donāt bother too much about lingQ or highlights anymore. I can just treat all dashed word as new word, compound words. I donāt care if my new/known word count balloons up due to to that.
Most important thing is to just read more books. I just have a list of books and content I need to finish to reach that 5 million word of content read (not word of reading stat but counting actual words in the content).
Regarding the dash issue, below I search and replaced the dash with a different kind of dash, each line is a different type of dash. Will this be a good work around ?
https://www.contentharmony.com/reference/dash-types/
So far LingQ even with bugs works well for me even after trying other readers.
If LingQ service is not good, you should just cancel subscription and/or do a charge back for āfailure to deliver serviceā ?
Isnāt it sad that this seems to be the consensus?
That peopleās opinion of Lingq is that they are so woefully incompetent that it would be silly to expect anything better from them?
Isnāt LingQ embarrassed?
Yea, this has been me. I think this is the right attitude to move forward with most things in life.
But also, LingQ should do better. I mean come on, they should have even just a little bit of shameā¦
I guess we are all in this together, to the bitter end, like the band on the Titanic. ![]()
Better learn to swim fast, lol.
I always think of lingQ like a bicycle training wheel⦠a training wheel that is rusty, worn out, dented and bent in weird ways and the bolts are coming loose but its still a decent training wheel. It does what it is supposed to do for most parts. After several falls, you eventually learn about all the kinks and how to deal with them. You still canāt cycle but you have become good with this training wheel, an expert with it. You have learnt how to use duct tapes, hammer, super glue and wrenches.
You ask your dad to fix it but he never gets around to doing it. Maybe dad figured that you wonāt be using the training wheel forever so why bother. Maybe he want you to be cycling without the training wheel. He doesnāt seem concerned about all the bruises and broken teeth. Maybe next week he will fix it or maybe next week you wonāt need the training wheel.
Come to think of it, I have actually become very good with Calibre, Aegisub, Notepad++, AI tools, ePubor, Audacity and various automation tools on mobile and browser, thanks to LingQ.
This has become a popcorn worthy thread.
My two cents are - developing software like this is complicated. Itās not like creating a streaming site or an indie game where you can rub two brain cells and a few thousand dollars together and have a polished product.
You find nuance every day. Something can always be improved, fixed, added. Small changes can create big ripples if youāre not careful, and even when you are there is often something you didnāt account for.
The next point is Online Language Learning doesnāt have the same draw or audience as something like Netflix or the top 10 games on Steam. It is more an intellectual hobby that takes large amounts of time and dedication, it attracts a certain type of person and people with more free time (retired, students, manics etc).
Budgets are significantly lower, talent is pooled from lower income countries and less experienced developers.
Iād say the peak of Online Language Learning was COVID, more people with free time and more money being spent on programs like LingQ.
If someone gave them a few million bucks to improve the product then you would be right to expect perfection. You canāt expect the world from a $200 lifetime sub.
True. Except the strange thing in this analogy is that supposedly the dad also regularly uses the training wheels, and plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. He also rides around the neighbourhood telling everyone how great his training wheels are
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Anyway, at least we can bring some levity to this thread.
I hear everything you are saying, and agree with most of it, but the thing is Iām not looking for perfection, I donāt think anyone is. But we can surly at the very least expect it to be āas good as it was last weekā and not āat least itās not as bad as it will be next weekā¦ā ![]()
I forgot about that, now this image is stuck in my head. Anyway dad did add a bell for the bicycle and gave me a whistle in case a stranger tries to abduct me.
Honestly some features dad added were good. Auto plays and auto reveal translation in sentence mode made reading more faster and allows for easier 1 hand use, Ai audio, bulk import and etc made things easier. I havenāt had much complaints since,
I will say that as much as it irritates me that something that was working perfectly well was messed up, it is no longer as buggy as before; that is, I can select these, I can assign them meanings, I donāt open the page and then have them disappear before I can either select or unassign them but still have them show up as unknown words when I sort courses by unknown words.
It annoys me, but I can live with it this way.
All this talk about how this issue should or should not be easy to resolve, or how this is or isnāt a big issue, or how we can work around it, is really quite irrelevant to what this post is about.
If the original response had been that this was not a priority, or that it wasnāt certain how long it would take, or that it wasnāt clear what the issue was, all that would have been fine (I mean, it would have dissapointed some people, but it would have been a reasonable an clear response). Instead we get this whole timeline of gaslighting and misleading that OP started this thread, quite correctly in my opinion, to complain about.
Say what you do, and do what you say. This should be the basis of every reliable business. LingQ has clearly demonstrated they donāt follow this principle.
I have been following this problem since the beginning. Up until yestarday, Iāve been using a band-aid solution: manually separating hyphenataed words in edit lesson as they would appear. But today it went crazy. As I go to edit lesson to make my word separation, the whole lesson gets buggy , a bunch of words get stuck together in the phrase, a total mess.
Iām also pretty amazed at how a few users come here to defend the platform as if it were some super-complex military software managed by a humble, amateur team, like really? This is a paid service, and weāre in the middle of a game changing advance in AI, coding included.
The least we could expect was greater transparency regarding what is happening behind the scenes. If it were a free service, perhaps we could settle for the team not feeling the need to keep us updated.
Agree that action is more important than words.
After 3 working days since complaint, and receiving no reply, the next logical step for good clients to do is take action. Clients need to vote with their wallet to ensure the right message is sent to the business and other clients.
I just want to leave a few words, not as an official business response to this issue, but to share my view from inside the company. The hyphen problem has not been handled well, thats for sure. And I do apologize for that. As someone already said in this thread, it wasnāt done out of malice or attempting to hide something, but as a genuine problem that we took some time to fix and we didnāt make the necessary effort to be cohesive in our responses to you and others that came to us complaining.
Please do keep in mind that sometimes information gets lost even inside the company and not everything is 100% clear, whether its business requirements or development and what is being done exactly to fix the issue. We are a small team, and everyone works very hard to make the best product that we possibly can, and sometimes issues can take a long time to solve and several attempts are made along the way that just make things worse. Ultimately a decision was made to just handle all hyphenated words as a single word, so we could fix most significant issues that users were experiencing. This might not be the best solution for everyone, but we hope you understand and we will continue to take feedback and review it going forward.
As far as the product itself, we are making significant efforts to improve every aspect of the product, and yes, we are actively rewriting major parts of the apps. Android is well on its way to get the newest reader and library redesigns, which I hope you all will be part of when the beta is launches in the coming weeks. Web and iOS are also in active development and will come a bit later. As a personal note, my role in the company has been significantly expanded, and as far as I am concerned, in the coming 3 to 6 months, we will have a much better product to offer. For some of you, that have been waiting years for this, I know its absurd to ask for more patience, but I hope you stick around and help us get to the next stage, where the focus is on offering quality services that you enjoy coming back to every day to help you on your language learning journey. Please do send me all your feedback, including issues you have had for years, or just share it here, and I will make sure to make it a priority.
Thank you. I do appreciate it. (albeit as an unofficial response)
Letās test this out⦠Please separate hyphenated words ![]()
First, thank you for the response and the insights. Do I understand correctly that the decision was taken to avoid further bugs while trying to fix the hyphen issue? If this is so I plead you to separate hyphenated words again in the new reader. It is just the better way to handle this and I am here to discuss this in case someone has another take on this ![]()
Iāve inquired internally for more details on how we will approach this going forward. The current solution is in fact temporary while we work on the long term solution that consists in having hypenated words as phrases and not as individual words. That means theyāll be highlighted together while still allowing you to interact with each individual component word independently, and they wonāt affect lesson word counts in the same way. This change will be made as part of a more comprehensive reader update as Zoran mentioned on his first response.
The update will allow us to more easily fix bugs in the future. Unfortunately, we canāt forecast with any degree of certainty when this reader update will be done on all platforms. But the architectural work is already underway and it is the top organizational priority.
If Iām understanding you correctly, that hyphenated words will be initially highlighted together as a phrase, but you can still interact with each single word on their own, and choose to lingq them individually, or together, or ignore one and lingq the other etcā¦?
Then this sounds perfect! ![]()
Thank you so much for the detailed update. ![]()
Great that it will also be easier to fix bugs in the future.
Yes, thats right. We hope to have this ready as soon as possible. Thank you for voicing your concerns, we will make a significant effort to not have a similar situation again in the future.
The cramming words together in a big mess thing isnāt just happening with hyphens, itās doing it all over the place randomly, in both old and new lessons and courses. Even in languages that donāt use hyphens, and in a connected language like Arabic it makes the random sentences or phrases it happens to impossible to read.

