Today I attempted to import my Spanish word list from Duolingo. So I pasted a plain list with 1 word per line, as stated in the user interface.
I had around 4500 words in Duolingo, and the LingQ interface reported (after quite a long import time) 1695 new words found, which seems reasonable.
Then I got MINUS 9918 coins for today as a ‘bonus’ for importing these words.
I guess it will be a bit challenging to reach the PLUS 200 points that is my daily target…
WAIT, there’s more…
Not only was my ‘earned coins’ reduced by nearly 10.000, the ‘new’ words all seems to have been imported without any meaning, and when there has been a ‘match’ with my existing vocabulary, the ‘lingq values’ seem to have been reset to 1.
No my number of ‘known’ words has also been reduced significantly.
When you import words to your account, these words are added as LingQs (unknown words you saved to vocabulary). The reason why your Known words count and coins decreased is because all these words that you had marked as known earlier and received coins for making them known, are no longer considered known when you added them to Vocabulary. You also lost all coins you previously earned for making them known.
This explanation makes no sense to me:
It implies that a vocabulary simply CANNOT be imported from any other tool that a learner uses. Because if you do, any word that already exists in the LingQ database (and there will be MANY of them) will be OVERWRITTEN. So any current ‘recognition’ (level 2 ‘recognized’ and above) will be LOST.
Overwriting each of these words creates a DATABASE INCONSISTENCY in the in the LingQ vocabulary database, with a LingQ level 1 (‘new’) combined with NO SELECTED MEANING of this word. To my knowledge, there is no way to achieve the same inconsistent state when using the system in a normal way - if you make a ‘blue’ word into a ‘LingQ’, you are also forced to select a meaning of that word.
So if the system is designed to work in this way, you should really review that design!
That’s how it works at the moment. We’ll see what we can do to improve things.
This just happened to me. Over 5k negative coins, and a bunch of words with no definition. I was on the fence about continuing to use LingQ before and thought maybe importing words would give me more accurate ‘new words’ percentages, to figure out what to read next, but not only did my known words go down (??? by hundreds(!)) but now I have blank words and tbh it doesn’t seem to have increased any of my percentages.
So, overall a pretty big L, I wish I could just undo it now, there was no benefit from this at all.
If you imported words to Vocabulary, and some of those words were previously marked as Known, they are automatically removed from the Known words stats and that is why you lose coins you earned when you previously marked them as known. That is how it works.