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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When I first joined LingQ, I was so frustrated on the first day that I deleted my account. Then I received all of the welcome emails explaining how to use it, LOL. So I gave it another shot and became hooked.
My two cents is I love the default of words you don’t need to look up automatically becoming known words. It’s nice that users have the choice to disable this, but per the original post here new users might accidentally rack up some “known” words they don’t actually know and then not be able to easily reverse that mistake.
I do think there could be a better “start here” introduction for new users that they can access BEFORE doing anything else. The new user emails take some time to arrive and the new user doesn’t know they’re coming, so by then they could be ready to tear their hair out (I certainly was.) And, they could already have made mistakes that aren’t easily reversible, like the known word mistake mentioned.
Hope this feedback is helpful!
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Is anything?
It’s the only way that I’ve made progress in Greek.
Research suggests it helps classes of students better than other methods.
What do you mean by the comprehensible input approach ?
I dont think anyone denies that learners need lots of real input in the intermediate and advanced stages.
Every time I read someone’s complaint about the “Paging moves to known” feature, I marvel. This is one of the most useful features of LingQ, especially for those who read a great deal each day. It speeds up the process of marking known words tremendously. And it can be disabled if desired. I get that LingQ isn’t the easiest system to learn, but this complaint is one I don’t understand at all.
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When you page, what is the approximate average number of words you are moving to known? As this number gets larger the next question is - ‘How are you learning words so quickly?’.
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My take is that it depends totally on whether you are a beginner with LingQ or a new language. Or if you are already an experienced LingQ user or at eg intermediate language stage and are able to consume large volumes of content.
For beginners, this automatic set-to-known can be utterly baffling. The simplest solution I would have thought is just to set the default to off for this feature.
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I’m a very experienced LingQ user. I don’t use paging moves to known. I don’t understand how people can learn new words that quickly, regardless of experience. Can people who use paging moves to known provide more detail on what they are actually paging through? How many words are moving to known on the page on average? How did you learn them all? It can’t be by reading on lingq, as they get moved to known as soon as you page. Do you know them instantly?
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I think it depends on a few things like (1) proximity of target language to another language you know, (2) whether the target language is inflected, and (3) how you decide to treat proper nouns like people’s names, cities, product brands, etc. For #1, for example, if you know one Romance language (or even just English for that matter), you are going to see a lot of cognates and immediately recognize tons of words without ever having heard or read them before. This happened to me when I started Italian (after studying French, Portuguese, Catalan), where I’d keep paging through almost all the words at beginner/low intermediate levels since I recognized at least 80% of the words and had no need to stop and lingq them. The same thing happened to me when I looked at Norwegian after studying Swedish. For #2, as an example, once you know the base form of an inflected verb and how the patterns work, you’re going to immediately be marking all its variations as known even though you’ve never heard or seen them before. Using French as an example, once you know the verb “parler” means “to speak” and understand its inflection patterns, you’ll know all the different forms for present, preterite, past participle, present participle, infinitive, future, conditional, etc.–in other words, once you know the inflection patterns, you need to learn the base word only once and then will be able to add many variations on this base word. These add up quickly, especially at the beginner/low intermediate levels. For the final point, some I think some people don’t want to take the time to ignore all proper names, places, etc., so they just page through these. I tend to take the time to click through and ignore them with Romance and Germanic languages. But it’s not always so clear to me that that’s the best idea when you’re dealing with highly inflected languages. In Armenian, there’s a word for Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, and then a word meaning “in Yerevan” (Yerevanoum)–should I continue to ignore this word, or should I count those locative forms as separate words since I understand what the suffix “oum” means? If I count them, that means that every time I see “in + city”, “in + country” etc., I’m going to be racking up words I know without ever having seen or read them. For Greek, should I count the different cases of proper names - Kostas vs. Kosta - as known words since I learned to distinguish among the cases for its different forms or just ignore them? If I wanted to count them, the page-to-known feature will grab many names.
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LingQ Maybe it’s not the best, but right now it’s the only choice.
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Another variable is the user’s reader text settings. How many words are they seeing on the page to page through.
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You probably would, if you would read the reasons people complaining about this give. 
In addition, just because you don’t understand a complaint it doesn’t mean said complaint is invalid. So you are not really giving an argument, you just state your opinion. Valid, but not useful, to be honest.
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Let’s say there are 5 blue words on the page. I recognize 3 of them on sight, and I have to click on two of them. I don’t click on the 3 that I recognize, and paging moves those to known. Those 3 may be cognates, or I just know what they are because I’ve read/heard/seen them elsewhere (because I end up reading not just on LingQ). So paging moves to known speeds up the process. Admittedly, with almost 42000 known words in my language, I’m learning 50-100 new words a day at this point. It’s much slower in the beginning.
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