i wish to be on that list one day!
many kind regards xxxx
I suggest that the monthly honour roll include the monthâs champion creator of lingQs.
I would say a good 1/2 of my blue words donât come with a user hint, and it is more when I import content. LingQing takes time. I just donât see how those of you do it so quickly. The only way I could see LingQing going more quickly is if the first definition were automatically put in as a hint (I can dream).
The issue I have isnt that other users arent putting the EXACT hint or exact meaning or exact dictionary definition. When I make my own lingqs I dont put exact definitions as a hint either I put a hint that means something to me. I have a HUGE problem with people who are putting completely incorrect hints or hints that mean nothing to meâŚ
I donât understand how anyone could just pick the user hint that is there without even double checking what it means? I wish I could just TRUST the user hints there but I just cant =p. Iâve seen user hints that were VERY VERY OFF which are similar to people saying âpommeâ in french means âorangeâ in English⌠Sure eventually this mistake would correct itself overtime but wouldnât you want to know that POMME is apple from the get go??? I know my example might be kind of extreme but point is Iâve made the mistake of trusting some user hints and Itâs confused me much more than help ( at least for Korean so far)! I also think that Taking the time to look up the word and practicing to read it a couple of times while looking it up, helps me to LEARN the word and its meaning. If i just just quickly click on other user hints just to change blue words to yellow words I feel like Im not learning anything.
I also import my own Korean lessons soo 98% of words donât even have a user hint anyways. Soo i have to go through the dictionary either way.
Yes for me the lingqing process is VERY SLOW and I usually cant do more than maybe 50 words a day If i have the time but I definitely donât think its a demotivating chore. I feel like its a much needed process however Iâm just REALLY REALLY SLOW at doing it. I honestly donât have any suggestions to making it faster or more enjoyable. Personally I donât feel like I should be doing it faster.
I mostly concentrate on listening. I listen to lesson many many times up to I can recognize unknown words. Then I lingQ them. Therefore I lingQ not much.
Listening often is powerful. Listening repeatedly pays dividends since we notice more the second and third times, and often these phrases continue to ring in our ears. On the other hand, pressing forward to new content increases our passive vocabulary. I like doing a mix of each.
We all have our own ways of learning. However, since many people who come to LingQ do not understand what to do, nor why, we will continue to encourage people to create lots of LingQs. It kind of pushes them in the right direction. I do not think our targets are onerous.
Just a follow up to the ways of bookmarking lessons.
Jeffâs elegant solution, scroll down until you donât see any blue words, doesnât really work for me because I find it annoying to make blue words known one at a time, and, in Japanese, the words that are blue are not really words sometimes because of the word spacing system (not complaining, I realise how hard this is to achieve). So I donât want to make them known because they COULD be words that I do not know in another context.
Misstakes solution, make a giant LingQ when you finish, works better for me, but sometimes the LingQ is lost⌠if you have a colon in the LingQ all after the colon is lost, so it is no longer giant when you go back to it. Also if you make a LingQ that is bigger that one line, the text disappears. Finally, if the LingQ works properly, when you delete it, the text that was in the giant LingQ cannot be LingQed until you refresh the browser. But all in all this is the best solution so far.
All of you who are editors, we have just implemented a flag which allows us to edit or remove incorrect hints from the system. If you come across incorrect hints as you use the system, you can click on the little red flag on the blue LingQ popup and we will know to edit that LingQâs hints. Thanks for the help! And, as always, any of you who do want to become editors who can edit content and help us weed out bad hints, just let us know in which language you want to be an editor and we can set you up.
Someone said, way back in this thread: âAre we competing for the LingQ crown?â
I talk to [too] many students who plateau / get demotivated / underestimate their language abilities and face a real danger of giving up. Although the LingQ system isnât a cure for all ills, getting a bit competitive with your LingQ activities can really help with all these problems. Competing against someone else, or trying to make the monthly top 20, or trying to fill in all my LingQ activity columns for a given period, has stopped me from giving up in both Russian and Japanese when the going got tough.
So I say: âWhen will we be getting a LingQ crown and what will it be made of?â
There are some rubbish hints and some of them were created by me. Back in the old days before mouseover functionality, you had to create a hint when looking up a word. If you couldnât find it in the dictionary, you either had to delete the LingQ or type in your best guess, figuring youâd come back later and amend it. You canât flag a hint âbeware, dodgy definition!â though it might help if we could.
We have some improvements coming shortly to hopefully help in this regard, Helen. We will also eventually award a crown. What will it be made of? Gold, of courseâŚ
I personally like creating LingQs, mostly because Iâm very OCD and like making lists, watching my numbers go up, etc. 
That said, hereâs my 2 cents about the LingQ system after trying it out in both Spanish and Japanese: sometimes it takes a bit of effort to create âqualityâ LingQs. What I am saying is that the quick way of simply mousing over a blue word and picking a hint is not always sufficient. I like the system, but often itâs just not âsmartâ enough. For example, in Japanese it often partitions words quite weirdly and grabs only parts, parts that are words, but in that context make no particular sense (example: word âwakarimasenâ, the LingQ system insists that âmaseâ is a separate word). This means I have to highlight what I want to LingQ myself and make a new hint. A lot of people might simply not go to all this trouble.
In Spanish I like my nouns to have an article attached to them, so that I can remember the gender more easily. The system doesnât grab that for me automatically, so I have to edit the LingQ myself.
I apologize in advance, I donât mean it as super harsh criticism, I think the idea is brilliant and I obviously like using the system and watching those blue words become yellow then disappear :). I just think this might be one of the reasons some people are simply not creating LingQs.
I think the rewards of creating LingQs are many, flash cards, yellow highlighting, statistics, and increasingly accurate prediction of the new words total, and therefore difficulty level of tasks, allowing the learner to progress gradually.
People donât LingQ more because it is a little like work. We need more incentive, or coercion to make people LingQ. It is coming. A boxing glove comes out of your computer and hits you if you do not LingQ enough! Coming soonâŚas well as an electric shock from the keyboard.
I must say the bookmarking technique suggested upthread by Misstake http://www.lingq.com/learn/ja/forum/1/9358/?page=2#post-59859) really helped me. I actually have an Activity score above 500 now!
One thing I still have challenges with is flashcarding. Something about the flashcard interface slows me down. Currently I get 50 LingQs of the Day and there is no way in the interface to bookmark where you are. So the expectation is that you should go through the flashcards quickly.
I usually get through the first 10 and then I âzone outâ. One solution might be get a convenient bookmarking technique for flashcards so that I can automatically start from where I left off, and go through them slowly throughout the day. Another may be to decrease the number of LingQs of the Day I get, but I dont really want to do that. I think I could study them all if conditions were right. What I am doing now is previewing them in the LingQs of the Day email, letting myself cheat as much as I want. Then I can hopefully go through them very quickly in the flashcard mode.
My goal in 2011 is âLingQâ 25 new words per day. That is normally done in 30 minutes plus another 30 minutes for more listening and reviewing. In total 25 x 365 = 9125 new LingQs in a year.
For me that is fun, no work.
E.g. I watched a French film last Sunday, now I go through the 250 unknown words in the French subtitles for 10 days. Then I will watch the film again.
Or I read interesting stuff from LE FIGARO.
Correction: My goal in 2011 is TO âLingQâ 25 new words per day.
I find creating the example a bit inconvenient.
I like to create proper example sentences. The example field populated by default usually has the sentence cut off. So I have to cut and paste from the text.
This used to be an easy task in the past: select, control-c, control-v, and I am done. But now, selecting a sentence would automatically create a LingQ for that whole sentence. So I need to workaround it by carefully selecting the complete row (or multiple rows) with my mouse outside the text box, copy and paste it in a text editor, select the specific sentence again, and paste it into the example field.
This inconvenience is the major reason why I sometimes skip creating LingQ. I would love to see some improvement in selecting the text for cut-and-paste.
Thanks.
Just open the print version of the text in a separate tab or window and C&P the sentence from there.
Then you have to follow the texts in both windows.
Have you tried copy and pasting in Quick LingQ mode? You can highlight the text you want normally then and then open the LingQ from the My LingQs list and paste it in.