I’m new to LingQ and to learning Mandarin Chinese.
I tried watching a YouTube video in the list. It moved quickly from page to page, and now I have a hundred “Known Words” added, that obviously I don’t know.
After some research, I finally found this was caused by the setting “Paging moves to known”. Now I can either delete the words one by one and still be left with incorrect stats, or reset that language and lose a few days of progress. (EDIT: I finally chose the later and restarted from scratch)
I have read good success stories about LingQ and I want to think about it positively, but that does not give the best first impression when just getting started.
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Stick with LingQ and give it a fair trial, it takes time to get used to it. It isn’t always the most intuitive system, and it has a lot of features.
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One advise I can give is to through all options in your account setting, review them and eventually ask questions about them if something is unclear. At least it will help to make the most of the account settings.
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I find it hard to believe that LingQ still uses this harmful default interpretation of page swiping. In my opinion, this shows how little value LingQ’s designers place on usability. Instead, they add feature after feature, making the usability problems worse and worse. When will they finally hire a competent and ruthless usability czar?
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I am not sure that the problem is competence. From my personal perception of how software is developed nowadays, I would assume they simply don’t care. It’s the same in computer games industry. And even companies outside the IT branch usually don’t care that much about how to improve in order to keep the customers they already have, but instead focus on how to gather new ones. Constant growth and such…
Constantly adding new features attracts new customers and keeps a surprisingly high amount of the residing ones happy. You will easely see, when reading through forum threads, how criticism is often discarded by other users as negativity. If people have paid long enough for a product they will begin to justify everything that’s happening so they don’t start feeling like they may have made a bad decision paying for that product.
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It’s a bad feature, but overall the software is great for helping you learn a language, broadly following the “Comprehensible input” approach.
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Is this a guarantee for quality?
Lingq is wonderful, life-changing, and I love it, but…
- “Paging moves to known” being the default was a terrible choice they made in the design – hope they re-think that. It probably confuses most new users.
- Lingq’s implementation of “known words” is also problematic. There are many posts on this. Here is a post of mine that links to some of them: I've recommended LingQ before in the past, but - #85 by AvecLeCoeur
Good luck!
I hope you stay and continue learning Mandarin!
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