Thanks for all the hard work. Definitely some good fixes. The apps are improving every day.
I did want to highlight one issue I’m seeing. I mentioned on the other thread but thought I’d post it here in the new thread…I hadn’t seen a response so not sure if it had been seen or not.
In regards to this fix in 5.4.4: Fix for generated lesson audio that didn’t start playback
This is working mostly well for me, except for importing from one particular source. I assume certain other sources may have the same issue, but anything I import from Nachrichten & Analysen: der globale Blick auf Schlagzeilen – DW, the yellow “spinner” is still there on the headphones symbol and if I click on it is says it’s still generating audio. Everything else I import it just has the headphone symbol, you click on it and it asks if you want to generate the audio. I’m not sure what is different about the lessons imported from this site.
I imported this article today:
In android app, latest version, I get the yellow spinner. In the iOS app I can generate the audio without issue.
Hello @mark@zoran. I thought here might be a good place to post several bugs, which I’ve recently encountered. Here are 8 bugs.
Bug 1/9 Android: When you click on word/lingQ, then send the app into the background, when you return to the app, the pop-up is closed. This happens in all occassions: with the definition pop-up, with the expanded definition pop-up, when you’ve opened a dictionary, etc. It is very annoying! I often have half typed a definition, send the app in the background, then when I have returned, the pop-up has closed and my half-written definition has disappeared and I need to rewrite it… Please fix this.
Bug 2/9 Android: Even though it was apparently fixed in the 5.4.4 update “Fixed issue when editing a LingQ definition” the issue of editing a definition still adds duplicates to the community definitions. For instance, because of bug 1 (above), every time I half write a definition, I have to click ‘save’ before I send the app into the background. In the screenshot below, I sent the app in the background to open up my browser to search for the English definition of ‘allegory’. I reopened the app and edited my definition. As you can see below, LingQ has saved both my definitions to the community! Both my actual definition and my half-written definition.
Bug 3/9 Android: LingQ records all offline activity on the date of which you reconnect to the Internet. If I am offline for two days, but still do my offline listening practice each day, I lose my streak and it is recorded I did all listening on the date which I reconnect to the Internet! This is not ideal, if you are trying to maintain your streak (i.e. motivation to study everyday), but are penalised because you don’t have daily Internet access.
Bug 4/9 Android: Community definitions don’t always appear on first click. This is pretty annoying. Please fix. See forum post for more details.
Bug 5/9 Browser (Firefox): You cannot post more than one image per forum post. This means I have to turn this post into multiple posts, so I can share more screenshots.
Bug 6/9 Android: The dates on the statistics are wrong. When you want to show ‘last 7 days’ it seems to show all time? See screenshow below.
Bug 7/9 Android: On the statistics page (see screenshot above), the cumulative graph is wrong. It is clear to see that the red graph is NOT cumulative. It should always be increasing.
Bug 8/9 Android: Some words/phrases are incorrectly highlighted. In the below screenshot, the phrase ‘a piedi’ is white, the word ‘a’ is white, and the word ‘piedi’ is white. This is meant to indicate that these are known words. But it’s wrong.
Bug 8/9 continued. Android: When I click on ‘a piedi’, you can see that the phrase is on level 4, so should be underlined. Furthermore, you can see that ‘a’ is level 3 and ‘piedi’ is also level 3. Clearly, how it first appeared (this phrase and these two individual words appeared white) was wrong.
Bug 9/9 Android/Desktop. Some phrases created on Android do not appear on the Desktop. I’ll show you four screenshots. Again, sorry for so many posts, but it’s not possible to post more than one image per post!
This is on Android. I already created a phrase for ‘come si spiega’, but, as you can see, it is not highlighted.
Bug 9/9 continued. Several hours passed and I decided I would continue the lesson on my desktop. As you can see below, phrase ‘come si spiega’ is not highlighted. Which I thought was funny, cause I made it a phrase this morning.
Bug 9/9 continuted. And by selecting the phrase, it appears that a phrase has NOT been created, even though I created it several hours ago. Plus, it appears that the rest of the lesson, including the last new word I lingQed, is up-to-date. I opened the Android app and Android has it recorded that I have indeed saved this phrase. (See the first few screenshots.) So, in short, it appears Android and the Desktop are not synced for phrases or something??
There are also a few other suggestions on functionality, which I’d like to suggest, which I find will make LingQ a more comprehensive tool.
Suggestion 1/7 Desktop/Android: Change the metric of % of new words. In it’s current form it is not very useful. % of new words currently = unique new words / total unique words * 100 = unique new words / (unique new words + unique LingQs + unique known words) * 100. This is not as useful as what it could be. It SHOULD be unique new words / total words * 100. For instance, if there are 50 new words in a lesson with 1,000 words in total, it would be 50/1,000*100 = 5.0%. This has a very specific meaning. This is how often, on average, I expect to encounter a new word. 5% of the time I will encounter a new word. What I want to know, when I’m selecting a lesson, is “How often do I have to look up a new word in the dictionary?” We all know, it’s really annoying, when you have a lesson, which every fourth word, you need to use the dictionary. The current metric LingQ uses does not answer this question. Sometimes, using the current LingQ definition of % of new words, you encounter a lesson, which you read a lot before you have to look up a new word. Occassionally, I start a lesson, which is very dense (like a book), so you spend so much time looking up new words and not much time reading. In those cases, I quit the lesson and have to find a new one. This is bad, as I wished I had found a lesson at my ability the first time… The current metric LingQ uses of % of new words does NOT differentiate between these two cases. By changing the metric of % of new words to UNIQUE NEW WORDS / TOTAL WORDS * 100, you can differentiate these two cases and you are much more likely to find lessons at your current ability. This is a better metric, which users can better use to select lessons at their ability. As of current, I have to do this manually.
Suggestion 2/7 Android: On both the lesson info and the course info pages, it should show the total number of words in the lesson and in the course. It is very useful to know how long the course is, like like it shows how long the course audio is. It’s useful information, which I’d like to know before choosing to study a course. Am I getting into a long course or is this a short course?
Suggestion 3/7 Desktop: Hotkey to pause/resume playing the YouTube video.
Suggestion 4/7 Android/Desktop: Ability to create phrases, which words appear over multiple pages. As mentioned here.
Suggestion 5/7 Desktop: After you import a YouTube video, which breaks up into multiple lessons (eg. 3 lessons), when you play the YouTube video on lesson 2 or 3, the YouTube video should START at the appropriate time. It always starts at 0:00, but if the first lesson was 9:30, the second lesson was 6:32, then when I’m on the third lesson and press play on the YouTube video, the YouTube video should start at 16:02. It’s very annoying to try and find the specific part of the video you are up to (usually it involves manually adding up the previous lessons in my head, but this is really annoying…). This should be reasonably straightforward to implement. You just add up the length of the audio file of lesson 1, that of lesson 2, and start from there. That’s what I do in my head.
Suggestion 6/7 Android: Add the function of ‘don’t play TTS when playing audio’ option, just like on the desktop version.
Suggestion 7/7 Desktop: Add a function of ‘don’t play TTS when playing YouTube video’ option.
P.S. Sorry for having to do this over so many separate posts!!! It’s just impossible to add more than one image per post…
P.P.S. I spent a few hours finding and writing up these bugs, instead of studying Italian (!), so it would be appreciated, if some of these bugs and suggestions actually get fixed/implemented. Thanks very much for your hard work!
Just in reference to bug 2/9 that I reported the other month, to give you an idea of how pervasive the issue of duplicating definitions is, here are two screenshots. All the definitions circled are definitions, which I created. This is just additional information regarding the bug.
@nfera - All meanings you create are added as Popular Meanings for other users. Even if you later change them. Our system doesn’t check to see if you have used this meaning for yourself or not. A saved meaning is considered complete and shared with others. However, as I see this, I realize we should take a closer look at trying to prevent edited meanings from being shared with others. Thanks for sharing!
Some lingQs have dozens of slight variations of an edited definition and it really does clog up the popular meanings section. Sometimes it makes it hard to find proper definitions when one has to scroll through multiple edits.
To give you a general idea of how many extra definitions I’ve made, look at my statistics below. I’ve only created 23k lingQs, but it says I’ve shared 31k translations, while only using 20k translations. And even though I probably end up writing most of my own defintions (half because of the bug 4/9 in my list below that it’s just so frustrating to expand the pop-on on Android looking for community definitions, but they aren’t there!!!), I still try to use community definitions, when I have the opportunity because it’s much faster, obviously. But as you can see from this screenshot, I’ve personally added more than 10k duplicate definitions alone.
