Some Chinese characters can't be highlighted or LingQ'd

I don’t know why but the following characters can’t be LingQ’d for me: 为, 样, 百货公司. They aren’t being noticed for some reason. For example, when 为 appears in the word 为什么, LingQ only notices 什么. I don’t know if this is happening in all lessons for me or just “Who is She?”

It’s likely an issue specific to this lesson - would you link me to one of the Who Is She lessons where this is happening? This should help us figure out exactly what’s going on here.

Actually I have been having issues with Native Podcast Transcripts Project - Mandarin, and Chinese Professionals. Anything I have imported is fine. But the last 4 or so lessons from the LingQ library have had issues during the past week or so. I have done lessons from these courses in the past with no issues, but it seems something changed recently.

Also, they are shown as “new words” on the right with all the other “new words”, but only about half of these show up as blue in the text. These characters also cannot be manually selected. When you are finished reading though the text and lingQing, the text is completely white and yellow, but the right side still says you have new words.

Exactly the same problem I’m having.

Sure, here you go. Login - LingQ

Turns out someone else reported the same problem Tuesday so you guys are probably already working on it. I should have checked the forums a bit better before starting this thread. Unable To Select Words (Chinese) - Language Forum @ LingQ

Just a heads up that we’re looking into this issue now and hope to have this fixed and working properly very soon!

Thanks a bunch in advance.

Thanks from me as well!

I am having an issue with the Lingq system putting the wrong words together. I am unable to separate them. For example: 小心翼翼地不把门碰动 - Careful not to touch the door. I want to mark “碰动” as a new word, but the system makes “门碰” a word. If I highlight just “碰动”, the system makes it “门碰动”. I don’t know how to correct it.

I don’t believe it is possible to change how LingQ puts characters together at present. This is one of the issues that needs to be fixed.

Yeah, it sucks, I find it helps to switch directions left and right. Sometimes one way works and sometimes another way works. Other times selecting one character will select the two you actually want. It isn’t perfect, and you may have to ignore it until the next article. If you see it again it is important to remember, if you don’t there was little point to highlighting it in the first place. The more you progress the less important this problem becomes.

Sorry for the trouble! As noted above, this is related to the word splitter we use for Chinese. We do have it in our list to eventually allow users to manually adjust the word boundaries so as to improve the splitter, though it may still be a bit as we’re working on a few other site updates in the meantime.

alex, you haven’t made a single improvement to Chinese/Japanese since I’ve been here, or at least you haven’t fixed anything I’ve brought up. The closest you came to it was, after changing to a rare font in Chinese, you changed it back. Why do you consistently shift Chinese/Japanese to the bottom of the pile?

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Not just for Chinese, but for other languages as well. It’s tougher to find time to spend on language-specific enhancements. However, a lot of discussions are happening behind the scenes.

One of the more immediate things we will be exploring is the option of showing Pinyin (and other script conversions) in the blue popup and yellow popup. I’m hoping we’ll have this implemented in both the iOS and Android apps before the end of February (assuming it’s not extremely difficult!), and from there we will switch our focus over to the website and do the same.

As an intermediate learner, that change would be damaging rather than helpful, so I hope it will truly be an option.

But what you are talking about is an enhancement. Why are you doing enhancements before fixing problems? The problem that the op brings up occurs in every article I load. It’s a small percentage of characters, but I would think a programmer would be very concerned that it’s impossible to create links at all in these situations. Also the parsing issue, the spacing issue - why wouldn’t you fix these before doing “enhancements”?

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I have to say I agree on this one. It is something that can be really annoying for the Chinese learners. Since all definitions are user generated we should also be able to select what part of a sentence we wish to give a definition to. I cant figure out what the “splitter” is useful for

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Certainly, I understand your concern here. I realize my post above was worded poorly, so let me just clarify one thing.

App development is largely separate from web development, as we have dedicated developers for Android and iOS, and dedicated developers for the web. This means that we are simultaneously working on different projects for the different platforms, but the pace of development for one platform doesn’t typically affect the pace for another, since the teams operate mostly independently.

What I meant by “we will switch our focus over to the website” was that if the Pinyin, etc. is received well on the mobile apps, we will then look at also adding this enhancement to the website.

By the way, the spacing issue was fixed yesterday on our test server, and should be included in the next update.

The parsing issue is one that affects Japanese as well. This one is high up in our list, and based on our current speed of development I estimate we’ll begin on this one probably early next week. Initially I’m not sure how big this project will be, but we will at the very least begin investigating this further some time next week.

Does this mean the long promised but suddenly put aside Cantonese will have a chance soon? Don’t forget you disappoint quite a few people in this matter.