Hi, I’ve been using lingq for a couple of months now. For the first month, I could barely use it because it was so slow at first to the point that sometimes one could wait a day for a page to turn.
Now I’ve got a VPN to speed things up and as such it is useable now. However, I don’t see there is anything wrong with lingq being used in China, I mean it’s not blocked specifically by the government (like say the NY Times is). It’s probably more a matter of not having hosting within the mainland which is slowing things down.
This really needs to be sorted out. Learning Chinese as a foreign language is getting more popular and the Chinese are eager learners of many foreign languages not just English. There is a huge market to be tapped here.
I have recomended lingq to a number of Chinese friends but what’s the point? They will not be able to enjoy the site unless they have a vpn.
Yeah many Chinese people also asked me about lingq and would try it but most of them don’t want to go through all the hassle with installing and using a vpn. Loading lessons more or less works for me even without a vpn but downloading the audio definitely doesn’t.
I’m afraid we have no immediate plans to put a server in China. However, we do recognize there is an issue there and would love to do so one day. Hopefully as LingQ grows that will become an option.
I just found out today, as I was lingqing on my 3g network, everything actually works without a problem even without a vpn (even audio will download (doesn’t work without a vpn on my wifi at home), lessons load normally, of course no google translate but otherwise fine).
On a similar note, however, I think the option of ‘download playlist on 3g’ actually doesn’t work, I had it turned off, but still upon opening the lessons the audio would get downloaded. Maybe a bug?
That setting should only prevent the audio from downloading for items added to your playlist while on 3g. Lessons need to download the audio in order to play it and work separately from the playlist. Playlists are treated differently because you can add multiple lessons to your playlist at once and they are all downloaded so this setting is there to prevent this potentially large download from occurring on 3g.
