Fees

Hello,

I’ve been using the website for a few days and I’m quite excited about it. However, today I discovered that I cannot request members to review my writing unless I pay extra money for points. Moreover, the cost is ridiculously high. Not being a very fluent speaker of any of the languages on the website, my chances of earning points by tutoring and correcting others’ work are not high, and this leaves me with a very bad taste in my mouth. I’ll keep using LingQ’s audio lessons, but sadly I’ll have to take text correction requests to other websites who apparently understand better how crowd sourcing really works. I mean, no money should be involved in voluntary give-and-take between people, and definitely not a few dollars for a tiny text.

@ilyakogan - welcome to LingQ. We are sorry to hear about your disappointment. You can be a tutor in your native language. Although Hebrew is our beta language, there are quite a few learners you can help. Also, please keep in mind that you can contribute lessons to our library and receive points for that.

@ilyakogan

I’m not sure if I’m correctly understanding your point of view here. So do you think that people should just help us to learn without getting any reward or recompense for their time and effort?

If so, would you extend that concept to other areas of life too? If, for example, your car needed to be fixed, would you expect to find a mechanic to do the job for free?

Do you think society could function on this basis? Would people be motivated to work for you without reward? And if they did so, would they be very likely to do a good job?

I don’t think the price is ridiculously high for text correction. However, I do wonder if it would not be a better move for LingQ to make text corrections free. This is because there are other good websites that LingQ is in competition with such as Lang-8 and italki where one can get genuinly free text corrections. Maybe it can be done on a limited basis, such as texts submitted publically, and not to specific tutors, that are below a certain length can be free.

@ColinJohnstone - While it’s not completely free, learners are free to set the points award value for their request. If someone likes, they can submit a 2000 word text and offer 1 point as a reward. Whether or not it will be completed for that price is another question. The price that shows up when submitting a request is just the recommended price.

@ alex

Sure, but who is going to want to submit a 2000 word text for 1 point when the recommended is much higher? Very few people would be willing to do this. I would feel really bad if I submitted a text here for anything less than the recommended price. I have been submitting Russian texts for correction here, but I plan to move over to Lang-8 and only use the LingQ exchange services for having the texts recorded afterwards. I don’t think it is unreasonable to have to pay a small amount to have texts corrected here, but it makes no sense to do so when there are free alternatives that seem just as reliable.

@Colin: I’ve often seen a ridiculous low number of points offered for correction. I don’t know if you ever had done a writing correction. I can assure you that it is a lot of work if it is done properly. Even the suggested points are low compared to the time a proper correction takes. English seems to be a lot easier to correct than French or German because of the conjugations, the genders and the cases.

I had tried Lang-8 some time ago and it didn’t work out for me. I had put much more effort in than I got back. Others may have different experiences. It is up to you to test it.

What I do here is that I spend the points that I earn for tutoring to pay for the tutoring that I need. So it is really an exchange and the currency is the LingQ points. What I not do is answering to open requests. And I expect at least the points that LingQ suggests.

The good thing with LingQ is that everyone can use the features he/she likes, and combine them with other services

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I just wanted to say that Prinz Wladi and Vera said everything I wanted to say.^^

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Ok, I’ve checked Colin’s profile: no correction done, no conversation hosted.

Da sag ich jetzt mal nicht mehr dazu.

“I plan to move over to Lang-8 and only use the LingQ exchange services for having the texts recorded afterwards.”

I’ve never used LingQ for corrections, but I’ve had lots of experience with Lang-8… it’s a good site, but you get what you pay for sometimes. Just take a look through some of the English corrections to see what I mean… sometimes the corrections are even worse than the original. You’ve really got to take the corrections you get there with a grain of salt.
Maybe it’s the same with LingQ corrections, but I get the impression they have a higher quality…

Vera, the fact that I have hosted no conversations and done no corrections (actually I did one, but no points were ever awarded) says absolutely nothing and is completely irrelevant here. I don’t understand why you think it is relevant. Maybe you can explain.

I said nothing about tutoring or paying for tutoring. I said nothing about submitting texts privately to individual members. I said nothing about any of the other features on the exchange here. I only was talking about public requests for text correction. My point is that paying for corrections makes no sense when corrections which are probably of similar quality are done on Lang-8. I used Lang-8 for a short time for German a long time ago and found it very good (by the way, in that time, I did 63 corrections for English texts, having submitted only 21 German texts).

@ lynkusu

I have seen a couple of corrections to publicly submitted English texts that are pretty bad here. I guess if you want the corrections to be really reliable, you should submit them privately to an individual tutor here who you trust.

It may be that the public corrections one gets here are better in general, or it may be the better at Lang-8. This is something I will probably test with the corrections I have already got for Russian here, which I plan to submit to Lang-8 as a test.

@Colin: It is relevant in terms of being able to judge how much work a proper correction is.

@ Vera

I have regularly corrected the English for entire masters dissertations, phd theses, and scientific journal papers on very technical subjects. I know how much work it is. I can imagine German may be more difficult, but I don’t know. Remember, my suggestion was this

“Maybe it can be done on a limited basis, such as texts submitted publically, and not to specific tutors, that are below a certain length can be free.”

The reason I gave for this suggestion was just that basically identical services are free elsewhere. The only reason I can see for paying points here is if I want to submit the texts to specific tutors who I know are reliable.

@Vera
Da irrst Du Dich gewaltig!

Die LingQ Statistik zeigt nur an, was mit Punkten bezahlt wurde!

Alles was ohne Punkte gemacht wird, ist nicht sichtbar.

j;-)

"I have seen a couple of corrections to publicly submitted English texts that are pretty bad here. I guess if you want the corrections to be really reliable, you should submit them privately to an individual tutor here who you trust. "

The same for German, Spanish and French!! and maybe for all languages!

j:-)

I’ve moved to lang-8 for corrections as well, just like Colin, and I’m very satisfied. I post a few sentences in German every day, and there are super-savvy members who make great corrections to my texts. I also enjoy correcting others’ work, and on lang-8 it’s much easier to find texts to correct than here. There are hundreds of new submissions in English every day, so it’s very easy to earn points (unlike here), and I can also help with some other languages. I’m still using LingQ for listening comprehension (including Vera’s AMAZING texts with her pleasant voice! Thanks again, Vera :slight_smile: )

Yes, I remember my German texts would be corrected really fast on Lang-8. There is a never ending flow of English texts to correct. I think this is just because there are so many people there learning English. Remember, you can still get your corrected texts recorded here if you want to listen to them. The only place on the internet I know you can get text recorded for free is Rhinospike, but I went through some of the stuff there and the quality was terrible. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Jolanda wrote: “Alles was ohne Punkte gemacht wird, ist nicht sichtbar.”

You can do it this way but in my opinion there is no reason now not to use the exchange. Even if you build a language learning couple you can pay your partner with points and get them back if you do a correction because with the new system you will not loose any points. I understand that before it has made a lot of sence to find a language learning partner, and not to use LingQ. But now you don’t have the 25% reduction any longer if the points stay in the system.

@Colin: If you have done corrections you should not how much work they are. Now I understand your statements less than before.

@Ilya: I posted several English requests on Lang-8 and got only a few corrected. In German I did 3 times of the corrections I got back. And I never knew if I could trust the corrections. Here on LingQ I know a lot of tutors that I can trust. I can assure you that there are huge quality differences in the corrections. As I’ve said: I don’t answer to open requests any longer. A lot of them offer to less points in my opinion. I don’t work on a text for 200/300 points that needs a correction of 40/45 minutes. In this time I can host 2 conversations and earn 1,000 points.

@ Verb

Text corrections can go anywhere from extremely easy for really well written texts to extremely difficult for terribly written texts. My comments on this thread have nothing to do with the difficulty.

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