Please respect the language of the dictionary

I am starting into Polish and a lot of the User Hints are in Italian. In a way, I don’t mind, since I read Italian. But in a way I do mind since other users, who may not understand Italian, may be relying on these user Hints .

Normally the language of the dictionary will match the interface language and we will not have a problem. If you change the language of the Hint into a language that is different from the interface language, you will cause problems for others.

Please try not to do so.

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It is the same for German <> English. I’ve found a lot of hints in other languages. Most of them were Polish, Czech, Russian, Chinese etc. I guess users use German or English as a reference language because the dictionaries in their languages are bad. Then they ‘forget’ to change the language flag when they add the meaning in their native language or they simply do not know that they should do it. It is an extra step and they don’t mind because it doesn’t affect them.

I always flag wrong user hints. Also I’ve worked for HOURS on the wrong user hints when I had access to the user hint editor, and I’ve corrected a lot of them. By the way, the user editor had a terrible user interface. The selection options were poor and the functionality was very basic. It was more work than it could be, and the logic of it was strange. For example I only want to see and correct hints for the languages German/English/French but I see the translations for ALL languages of a hint. And ‘unflagging’ of a hint was only possible for all languages. But I can only judge it for these three languages, not for Chinese or Russian.

In the end some editors deleted correct hints because they simply didn’t like them, not because it was wrong! I myself lost some of my hints that were definitely not wrong.

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Users should be able to select which flags/languages are shown when editing User Hint (make setting where one can thick check-boxes).

Right now there is a mess if an interface language is not in English. For example my interface language is German, but my dictionary language is English, if I want to add German flag to my hint it is really too much of a hassle (German is between French and Greek, although it is Deutsch).
And if I want to add Latvian, Russian or French flag I should scroll up and down and sometimes needed flag is right on the edge of drop-down window and impossible to select.

P.S. Sometimes I see perfectly fine User Hints flagged you should add an option for users to un-flag hints.

Hi all,
I joined a while back but have only just started to use the site and so I have some questions on this topic.

Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to use the dictionary? Is it possible to make notes for just myself or is all of the stuff I enter shared? Is there a difference between these hints and the lingqs we are encouraged to make?

I have put in a few notes for myself on some of the words and phrases in the texts I’ve read.Things that weren’t defined or where I wanted a different meaning from the ones offered. Are all of these going into some shared dictionary? If yes, I will be more careful (but it will also be a lot of work to be careful).

And, what do we do about words with multiple meanings - is it ok to just put in one particular meaning that is relevant to the text?
thanks

This is a great news by the way. I look forward to a video with you, Steve, speaking Polish and talking about your impressions of the language.

@asergienko: Welcome to LingQ.

Here are my responses to some of your questions. To the other questions I have no answer.

“Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to use the dictionary?” So far as I know, there is not tutorial specifically for using the dictionary (but I could be wrong). There are some rather general hints here: Lesson Help

And help on how to create LingQs is here: LingQ / How to create LingQs

“Is there a difference between these hints and the lingqs we are encouraged to make?” No.

"I have put in a few notes for myself on some of the words and phrases in the texts I’ve read.Things that weren’t defined or where I wanted a different meaning from the ones offered. Are all of these going into some shared dictionary? " I believe the answer to this is yes, the notes you add to a hint go into a shared dictionary.

“And, what do we do about words with multiple meanings - is it ok to just put in one particular meaning that is relevant to the text?” Yes, it is okay to put just one meaning. You can, of course, add more meanings, at least until you run out of room.

@donhamiltontx: thanks for the welcome and for the info, I will check out the links in your post now

It is worth checking with Support. As far as I know, Notes stay private, they are not seen by other people using the Hints.

Notes are private.

@all - Just a heads up that we’re looking at ways of streamlining the flagging of hints to make it easier to deal with incorrect hints.

Also, just confirming that all notes added to LingQs are private.

Alex, not only flagging of hints should be streamlined, also to add the hints in the correct language should be clearer.
It is the dictionary language in your setting which decides which flag you get for your hint. So of the dictionary is too poor for your language and you set another language, e.g. English, you will get another flag, and it is NOT possible to change the flag for each hint, it is too difficult to find your native language. That is why English hints are polluted with hints in other languages.
I myself has set the dictionary language to Dutch, but the dictionary of google shows the some tabs with Dutch and English. So if the translation in Dutch is too poor I look at the English one. But if I use a conjugation lookup, I get the English flag, and I always change the flag (after long searching through the cumbersome flag list) to Dutch, but I can imagine you do not care if you have to do this with each word.
Silvia

@silviad - Thanks, that’s a good point. We’ll see what we can do here.