Wishing for a little more transparency with LingQ 5.0

Open Forum
1

Edited:
I don’t know how to delete a post. So I’ll edit it instead.

Originally I had issues with a purchase done under the impression that the moth after the purchase the program would be upgraded to solve some of the issues I had.
This did not happen and I was sad/annoyed.
However I still use and love the program so no need to complain, when I could be studying. :smiley:

Given that there isn’t much to do except wait and the forum already have several posts about waiting for 5.0 I’ll reduce this post. I guess you can still comment if you want. But else just let the post fall away.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Merry Christmas and happy studies.

16 Likes
2

In my life I’ve never seen any product get released at the initial estimate date. Ever. Especially if it’s a software. In my work, we’re currently waiting on several very promising products that were slated to roll out in April of this year but still haven’t. And that’s completely normal and expected.

When LingQ, or anyone else hints at new releases, my response is always “That’s gonna be neat.” and I go back to working with the tools I have now. And yes I do look forward to using newer, better, shinier tools when they arrive, but the reality is, it takes a lot of tweaking and debugging to make a product releasable, so expecting it to meet any kinda deadline is just counterproductive.

And I’m sorry, but the whole idea of “transparency” when it comes to product development is kind of an odd expectation. No company is ever “transparent” when it comes to new stuff. That’s not how business works. Companies don’t OWE your upgrades. Apple doesn’t owe you a new iPhone, and they don’t have to tell you what’s gonna be in it if and when they release one. They hint, leak, announce, and roll them out as they see fit.

I was around for the LingQ 4.0 release and beta testing, which took months and months after the initial hints of it – and that was actually big a jump in usability of the site, probably more so than the 4 - 5.0 jump will be. At the time I was looking very much forward to the release, but the idea that LingQ somehow owed me a release date and “transparency” about it has never crossed my mind.

12 Likes
3

Hi t-harangi.

It seemed that what I tried to convey in the post did not go through clear.
And you also seem to place some words I never said.

I actively use LingQ and as I said it is the best software out there for language learning.
I enjoy the tools as they are now, but there are room for improvements.
The LingQ staff definitely do not owe us or me any thing, and I never said that.
I did say any info would be greatly appreciated, and I would wish for that to happen. But not that they owe it.
I also said that it is expected that delays will happen, so no worries there.

However, what I tried to convey was that; with the announcement they made, people invested in their product believing the announcement to be true - Given that it was said in several places and from different staff.
This does not mean that their product is currently not worth investing in (I believe it is). But understand that for some it would have been preferable to wait with the investment if the announcement had said that updates to the software would be over half a year away and not a month.

In all fairness, LingQ could keep silent all the way up to release and nothing would change. I’d most likely still love the product and keep at it for however long I desire.
But given that there was such a clear announcement given about September, and we are now in late December. It would be lovely to hear any updates on what’s going on. Not that they owe it, just that we are all very excited for the future and what the team can bring on the table.

Hope that clears it a bit up.

Best regards.

11 Likes
4

Steve said on twitter that we’re going to have to be patient. i interpret that to mean it’s not coming in 2021.

1 Like
5

Ah, did not know they had a twitter account.
Not really something I have dealt with so I guess that’s on me. :slight_smile:
But yeah, I guess that is the only real thing that there is to do.

6

Yeah, it’s just that there are other threads on this forum where people keep asking the same thing and LingQ gives the expected answer of “we’re working on it.” And that’s really all they can say, given the amount of debugging they probably need to do.

I’m sure the LingQ team wants to release this as much as you want to see it, but it’s a small company and they probably don’t have an army of coders – and even if they did, that still wouldn’t mean they’d meet original completion goals.

A delay from a September estimate to December is nothing when it comes to product development. When I hear September, to me that just means “September, unless we find a major bug that sends us back to square one, in which case: April.” So yeah, sometime between now and April, you’ll probably have 5.0.

2 Likes
7

I couldn’t agree more, t_harangi. And quite honestly, I don’t want to sound rude, but I think this post is senseless.

The LingQ Team has always maintained a very productive and close relationship towards the community, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for any kind of obligation to show us details about the ongoing development processes they have.

I also bought an annual account around November, but because I’m already very satisfied with my experience here and with the current version of the site, and not because I somehow expected the new version to be released soon. By the way, I hardly believe that the announcement of the version 5.0 was a marketing move to gain more subscribers. I at least don’t see it this way. As you well said, delays are just common.

I just hope that the developers have peace of mind and do their best work, and that we continue to have the good support for this version of the site. And when LingQ 5.0 is out, I’ll be as happy as everyone.

4 Likes
8

Thanks for the responses. I’m part of the team and we underestimated the amount of time this would take. Apologies. However, it’s being worked on (and we’ve brought a couple more helpers on board). I’m not on the development side of things so I can’t say exactly how long things will take. The iOS beta has been out for a month. Android and web are up next.

8 Likes
9

That’s great to hear! :slight_smile: Wasn’t sure whether the beta was out yet or not.
And glad to hear you have some more hands helping.
Best of luck with the development then, and merry Christmas.

10

Thank you for the comments.

And I have to agree. In hindsight, I don’t think the post served much sense and I don’t want to clutter a already full forum.
I’ll see if I can remove the post. :slight_smile:

Just to answer quickly.
I know very well that LingQ is a small team for better and worse. They seem very close to their community, as I see a lot of the staff active on the forum and that’s great!

I think where it rubbed me wrong, was that for me at least - and from what I could read on the forums, others as well - we were happy with the product, but not in a place where it was 100% necessary to have. One of the big annoyances for me (Among others) is the dictionaries are not very accurate and it’s common to find words that have been completely mistranslated. However that seemed to be one of the things hinted at being fixed in 5.0. And at the time there was a limited time discount of 35% for a year. So I figured I might as well buy that if the issue I have with the program is going to be fixed soon.

But it was not however. I might not have been done as a marketing move, to post on the forum. But it did affect me (and others) to buy their product.
In my case I would have preferred to wait until 5.0 was out and then invest for a year. because most likely I will not continue after the year ends, given where I am at with my goals/economics.

However that is too late, I signed off on, for me a large sum of money based on what I could gather of info. (I’m just a student so I do not have that much money).
Now it sounds to me, that I overestimated how much I could trust the time estimation posts. and that is my bad of course.

But the fact is that I still sit with a feeling of slight mistrust or disappointment (lacking any better word). I had hoped to use a full good year of a program that would suit my needs a bit better.

But now about half of it is in a state, where my Kindle, gives me a more accurate dictionary and that would have been preferable to use in the meantime until we see what comes next.

That being said, I have definitely used LingQ, Since I had already paid I found a way to use it again. I just shifted my learning goals a bit, trying to get some Swedish in.

Finally, I just want to say, that I did not want this post/thread to be as negative as it apparently sounded. As I have said many times now, I like LingQ I like the team, I think to do interesting and fantastic work. I was just sad that I spend some much needed money believing in a time estimate that to my knowledge sounded right.

As you said there are already too many posts complaining about the team/time, and I don’t want to clutter the forum,/bring negativity. so I’ll see if I can figure out how to delete the main post.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and merry Christmas.
Best regards. :slight_smile:

11

I guess it is annoying for the learners of languages that are scheduled for release under 5.0. Lingq has the material, they could lauch them right now, but prefare to work on a software update, instead of prioritizing language releases. But then the new software never comes.

It doesnt really concern me, since my langauge is already on here but if I where waiting on one of the languages that is supposed to be released with the lauch of 5.0 I would be really impatient and irritated right now and would rather have the languages on here, instead of the software update. I am perfectly happy with the current version of Lingq.

4 Likes
12

Re: "In my life I’ve never seen any product get released at the initial estimate date. "
In my career as software developer, software architect & IT manager in a big company I released nearly all products in time. But the people @ LingQ seem not to be real IT professionals… Some bugs in LingQ exist now for years and they will never be fixed. In fact, LingQ of 2013 was much better and faster than LingQ of 2020. With each iteration of LingQ: more gamification, more silly avatars, more golden coins, more golden apples, more roses… Sometimes I have the feeling that LingQ is a children’s game around unknown words… The only positive thing in LingQ is its (community created) text & audio library. That’s all. There are better alternatives for the rest. Merry Christmas.

13

I understand your opinion, but strongly disagree with you.

LingQ system, which allows users to import meaningful content from all over the internet, is just fantastic. In fact, the whole idea of learning primarily from authentic content through reading and listening is amazing and is at the very foundation of the site. The whole statistics system is also very useful and motivating, and I haven’t seen anything like that on other apps. Besides, in my opinion, I find the gamification (apples, coins, the daily/weekly goals, the streak, challenges, etc) very motivating and helpful. And of course, the library is also great, but, I’d say, only for beginner levels, since after that you can choose whatever you want from internet. Not to mention the community, always very willing to help. The system has flaws, of course, but all in all, it is the best language learning experience I’ve ever had.

6 Likes
14

This is a good response until you actually take into account the fact that the current (and all previous) iteration of LingQ spends most of its time broken. It’s perfectly reasonable to want a ‘newer, shinier’ version when the current one doesn’t deliver.

15

I agree with this. I’m waiting for 5.0 to be released so I can see if I want to resubscribe.

4 Likes
16

Which “dictionaries” are you using? If you mean others “hints” (i.e. the initial popup…ones that other users have entered and/or bubbled to the top of the choices), I agree…and to some degree I wonder if it would be better to just have it default to one of the real dictionaries. However, on occasion I’ve gotten a meaning from the hint when I couldn’t find it anywhere in any of the dictionaries.

The various real dictionaries themselves that LingQ provides (i.e. the third party choices) are excellent…at least the ones I’ve weeded down to. Some are better than others and some are better at certain things than others. By the latter I mean, some may handle colloquialism’s better (dict.cc for German) while some may be better for full sentences phrases (deepl). The default, in sentence mode is google translate which usually is good enough, but when it doesn’t seem to strike the meaning or is incomplete then I’ll check some of the others.

Sorry, you don’t have the ability to do that with Kindle. I’ve used it and while it has decent translation, it’s not perfect and doesn’t handle all situations well…like google translate.

1 Like
17

yeah I was talking out the user created ones.
I could never get the other dictonaries to work for me in Russian.
I went through all of the variants that LingQ had/have, but for 90% of the time they could not find the word. I don’t know if I did something wrong. But if I did, I’d say it’s not the most intuative. :confused: If you know how to fix it please tell as I would love to have proper dictonaries in LingQ and not the user created.

That’s what I have on my Kindle. 90% of the time it can find the word, and gives me the root defenition in Russian, and if I swipe left the english translation. It’s super handy and I love it. That’s all I wish for in LingQ at the moment.

18

Ah ok. I’ve not tried Russian except to decipher the alphabet a little. There are some folks here who have done Russian in LingQ though…If you haven’t already, I suggest making a separate post specifically on the topic of “what dictionaries are people using for Russian in LingQ” and express your difficulties and see if you can get some help that way.

Also, another thought…if there is an online dictionary that you know of and like that’s not on LingQ…it’s possible you can get the LingQ team to add that dictionary. I’m not sure what Amazon/kindle uses specifically, but I think I’ve seen where Zoran has been able to ask the development team to add a dictionary relatively quickly…

19

Surprised to see you still posting here.

1 Like
20

I also bought a yearly plan on the basis that lingq 5.0 was immininent and yet here we are 7 months later.

4 Likes