There are still problems with words with an apostrophe. For example in French in the sentences “Ça n’a pas d’importance. Vous n’apprenez pas l’allemand?” are “d’importance”, “n’apprenez” and “l’allemand” are marked as one word an I’m not able to create a LingQ for “apprenez”.
That was the compromise we had to make in this instance. We have had to treat all words containing apostrophes as words which means that a part of the word can no longer be saved. You will have to lingQ the whole thing which shouldn’t be a problem in so far as learning the words goes. 
This is for a language like french with a lot of konjugations and shortening words in this way
a) not convenient, because I save the same word with a lot of different shortened words in front of them
b) the dictionaries don’t work
c) leads to a strange word counter.
I’m not glad about this.
I know that there are general issues with the site that we need to work on, and sometimes the specific needs of one language cannot be properly dealt with for the short term. However, this is not an acceptable solution for French. If we cannot look up words with apostrophe in the dictionary, and if the user’s hints for these words do not work, we will lose a lot of benefit.
I agree this does not prevent a person from using French content, but it is a serious inconvenience and I am sure a solution can be found. It was working before.
I hope we can get back to this subject as soon as programmer resources are available.
The present solution is in fact better than before (when I first joined LingQ in August). Before, if you lingQ the word “L’intention”, you will get “L’”. In practice I find this problem more a hassle than a serious inconvenience since there aren’t that many such words in a text.
In my lessons are a lot of such words.
@Cantotango: In the version that we had before August, there was no problem to LingQ words without apostrophe. The solution should be to LingQ “intention” without the “L”.
For me this problem is disturbing too. I always open another window, and create a new LingQ in the vocabulary section. This is very often the case and time consuming.
I think there is some confusion in this thread! The system used to cut off the part of a word after an apostrophe so we fixed it to include the apostrophe in the definition of a word. That means that those words are now shown in blue highlighting including the apostrophe. Therefore, you now have to LingQ the word including the apostrophe. We are not able to let you just LingQ the part of the word after an apostrophe. If you do want to do this, you can in the vocabulary section although it still will not be highlighted in yellow in any texts. We would like to be able to cover all possible ways to select words but this is the compromise we had to settle on. And, quite frankly, as a French learner, I don’t find it to be a problem. It is just another word form.
Sorry to bring back an old thread, but to Veral, are you even able to save words with apostrophes anymore? For me, it looks like it can save but when you refresh the page it still comes back blue saying its a new word and no hint.
hi, i know this is an old discussion, but i’m rather new here and i’m also experiencing these issues.
@mark : you said the apostrophe is now part of the definition of a word, and the reason for this was to fix some problem. i can’t imagine many situations in which you would want the apostrophe to be part of the word. were there many people impacted by this problem?
because it seems to me that by applying this kind of fix, it had had a major negative impact for a lot of other people, especially those learning french and italian. as veral explained, every combination with l’, n’, d’ and others creates a new word, which means you have to create a new hint, and because it searches for the combination, no matches are found in the dictionary.
i realise that there are ways to deal with the problem, but it’s quite cumbersome and frankly quite annoying, as it is a frequently reoccuring problem. like i said, it seems like the fix did more bad than good, so i’m hoping this will get corrected. after all, the more of these little annoyances that get fixed, the more we will all be able to enjoy the process of learning languages
anyway, thanks for all the good work you guys are doing. i’ve only been using lingq for about a month, and despite a few minor glitches like this, the site is great, and i’m sure it will be a big help in the remainder of my “language journey”
my best wishes for 2011!
The apostrophe is part of a word because of English:
wasn’t / weren’t
don’t / doesn’t
…
ok, i hadn’t thought of those cases, and i suppose english is probably the most popular language here.
i’m still hoping they’ll find a solution that is convenient to everyone though.
The reason why this fix was implemented is because previously words would be cut off after the apostrophe, meaning " l’anglais " would show up as " l’ ", so the solution actually is an improvement over how it used to be. However, as we continue to refine the site we’ll see if anything can be done to remedy the issue that you bring up.
We’re glad you’re finding LingQ useful, and despite the few bugs here and there, we hope that you’ll continue to enjoy using the site to improve your language skills
Ok, thanks, and I will.
When I import my own contents, I put a space for every word with apostrophe.
For example,
Ça n’ a pas d’ importance. Vous n’ apprenez pas l’ allemand?
I don’t have other solutions for now.
(Sorry, I didn’t read every message here, and this is quite an old discussion. After, I will read it again if possible. )
dillemme’s solution is a good one. But even better - maybe it could be incorporated into the LingQ system itself, so for lessons in your workdesk you could click a button which automatically separates the apostrophes, as per dillemme’s examples. This would be great for French and Italian (and maybe other languages). I’m sure there are exceptions though, but would it be feasible to implement ?
The Add/Remove Spacing that is available in Chinese and Japanese doesn’t actually affect how phrases are LingQed, it just changes the way you see it.
It would certainly be possible to automatically add a space after every apostrophe, but this would affect a lot of people that don’t necessarily want these spaces. We could add a toggle spacing button, but it unfortunately wouldn’t solve the issue at hand.
Alex - maybe I’m missing something, but if people don’t want to see the spaces they don’t have to press the button. And if the button adds the space which allows LingQ to recognise it as two separate words, then doesn’t that solve the problem ?
@Jamie - Actually, adding the space would not affect how LingQ sees the word just as in Japanese or Chinese, showing and hiding spacing does not affect how LingQ sees the word. We are not likely to add a method of inserting spaces after apostrophes. On the other hand, we believe we have resolved the apostrophe issue that is still affecting some words. Unfortunately, it will take the rest of the week or more for the repair process to complete for all texts and words in the system. However, by next week we hope the remaining apostrophe issues will disappear.
Splendid news! Thanks.