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!