Is Any Chinese Learner Missing Pinyin? - Language Forum @...

Uhusofree

Sweden

Is any Chinese learner missing PinYin?

May 23 at 17:40

for the past 2 days I’ve lost pinyin in both reader view and sentence view on known words and phrases. This is occurring on both the iOS and desktop version. I even created a new account to test if it was isolated to my premium account. The results were the same no pinyin on known words and phrases in reader view or sentence view. Is any other Chinese learners experiencing this, LingQ support says everything is fine on their end but I would prefer to hear from community members. thank you in advance.

procion

Russian Federation

Thursday at 18:02

Well, I dislike this update.

I want to have pinyin over all characters, this way it forces me to think in term of sound, which is what I’m struggling with. It’s easy to recognize the characters, but it doesn’t mean I remember which syllable is it, let alone it’s tone. I want to be constantly reminded about it in a passive way, while I’m reading.

Also Lingq tends to split words wrongly. I disable the all blue highlighting and only look for words, I'm curious about. So I don’t want to have selective pinyin, because it gives a hint how Lingq (probably wrongly) splits words and distracts me from figuring it myself.

This behavior should be configured in settings.

Uhusofree

Sweden

Thursday at 18:34

Agreed it’s a terrible “fix” of something that wasn’t broken at all.

zoran

Serbia

May 25 at 22:22

Hi everyone, just an update here.

Transliteration is now only shown for blue words and saved words with status 1/2/3/. It is not being displayed for known or ignored words.

fabbol

Switzerland

May 26 at 01:26

Thank you for the confirmation.

I repeat myself, but for the sake of concise feedback: I urge your developers to return transliteration to the popup. Either as a default (as it was before), or as an available option.

This was my preferred use case, and I can’t imagine I was alone. I’m currently forced to emulate it by cluttering my saved translations with pinyin instead.

Uhusofree

Sweden

May 26 at 05:26

Thank you for the update. Transliteration on every word in sentence and page view was extremely useful for beginners in non-romanized alphabet languages. I think by removing the option it raises the threshold that will prevent new learners from utilizing LingQ. While I’ll adjust my learning on LingQ habits around this change I do hope your team will reconsider the removal.

Happyfist38

Taiwan

May 24 at 06:21

The Chinese Word Separator chrome extension is helpful if you don't want to alter LingQ settings to display/deactivate pinyin.

zoran

Serbia

May 23 at 22:12

As mentioned in my email reply, Pinyin is controlled in the settings. If it gets turned off in the popup because you tap on it, you can bring it back by toggling the setting off and on again.

fabbol

Switzerland

May 24 at 00:49

There seems to be no way to have pinyin only in the popup as of the newest update. Previously, pinyin or traditional characters (but sadly never both) were part of the popup even when they weren't displayed above the text.

This should be reverted ASAP, as it has deleted the best use case!

Uhusofree

Sweden

May 24 at 06:55

3 days ago when I had pinyin toggled on, as I currently do Pinyin was displayed over every character whether it was a known word, a blue word or a lingqed word. Now regardless of whether I toggle pinyin off and on in the settings the only displayed pinyin is over lingqed words not known words or even lingqed phrases. I believe I’m toggling the correct settings as you can see in the attached screen capture. Is this how the Pinyin is currently being displayed in LingQ, exclusively over yellow lingqed words? if so that completely changes how I study Chinese in LingQ.

bamboozled

Germany

May 23 at 18:03

The behavior I see:

on web:

Transliteration -> Off -> Pinyin still shown in sidebar / pop-up, no Pinyin above text
Transliteration -> Pinyin -> Some words (no color, blue, yellow) have Pinyin above them

on iOS:

Transliteration -> Off -> no transliteration at all not in the pop-up, not above the words
Transliteration -> Pinyin -> Pinyin above yellow and blue words also in pop-up

Personally I don't use transliterations, including Pinyin, and would prefer not to see them at all, so I actually like the way it is on iOS now. But I agree there was definitely a change in behavior with update 5.3.3 on iOS. I don't use the website regularly so I can't comment if anything changed there.

bamboozled

Germany

May 24 at 08:12

I think there are four configurations a user might want:

(T = Transliteration)

T above the text for all words and T in pop-up / widget
Only blue / yellow words get T above the text and T in pop-up / widget
No T above the text but T in pop-up / widget
No T at all

Currently, only use cases 2 and 4 are served, by setting it to "Pinyin" or "Off". To my benefit, 4 was newly introduced. 1 and 3 seem to have been removed.

I tried a few other languages:

Chinese Simplified / Traditional / Cantonese:

Pinyin: T only above blue / yellow words and for all words in popup

Japanese:

Romaji: T above all words and for all words in popup
Hiragana: T only above blue / yellow words and for all in popup

Russian

T only above blue / yellow words, T for all words in the popup

Japanese Romaji appears to be an outlier.

Uhusofree

Sweden

May 24 at 08:39

Thank you this is exactly the confirmation I needed . As you stated pinyin is only appearing over blue and yellow words for simplified Chinese. Where as 3 days ago it was appearing over all text. Exactly like Japanese Romaji. Something has changed and it would be nice if LingQ support staff acknowledged this change. Again thank you for your help it’s much appreciated.

zoran

Serbia

May 24 at 16:33

I'll ask our team to look into this. Thanks for all the details.