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The_Ginger_Bumblebee

gb   United Kingdom

Why are my imported lessons being cut into smaller lessons?

January 28 at 19:02

Hi everyone, I've been importing transcripts and audio files that are approximately 30 minutes long into a personal course, but they keep getting cut up into three separate lessons! It probably wouldn't bother most people but it makes everything very messy in my mind when I look at LingQ. Is there a way of preventing this?

Thanks,

Kim

Seby0815

de   Germany
February 03 at 12:52

I have found a solution that works for me. The "splitting" of the lesson doesn't happen when the text you import is just one block of text with no paragraphs, meaning that the words are only sperated by spaces.

I don't know if this works with very large text (like 10000+) but I import Harry Potter chapters and long YouTube-videos (30 min+) like this and it works just fine. The lessons take a bit longer to load but thats worth it for me because I HATE it when a chapter is split randomly or even mid sentence.

Fer.weh

de   Germany
February 02 at 13:33

I must say, I don't really care. The limit could be 1000 and I would not care. I still would just read one lesson after the other.

LILingquist

us   United States
February 01 at 00:39

This was one of the early "improvements" to LingQ that sucked. It used to be a 10,000 word limit, then it was 2,000, then I think 4,000 if I remember correctly, now back up to 2,500 it seems.

The recent big overhaul they made compounded the suckage by making it non-scrollable and instead into a page-like format to try to be cute making it more like a book. Too much "form over function" in the latest update. It's gotten a little too gimmicky and gamelike, similar to other platforms that don't really do anything.

kindl

us   United States
January 29 at 19:33

Agreed, it is not a bug per se but an established size limitation. It does not bother me too much but it seems like a reasonable enhancement request. Unless there is a technical reason for the limit (accessibility to older devices with less memory maybe?)

SeoulMate

gb   United Kingdom
January 29 at 20:47

The decision to limit the size of lessons was taken around 2014 because people with slower Internet connection were finding it difficult to go through lessons. This was 9 years ago and Internet connections have become much faster since then, so it would be nice if Lingq could look at this again and offer the option tonhave longer lessons.

SergeyFM

ru   Russian Federation
January 30 at 06:13

It seems to me the problem is not the internet speed. It is the inefficiency of the platform itself.

The architecture hasn't been well thought out, and it means one needs a supercomputer for a server just to load a lesson that's even slightly longer than a children's song.

I had high hopes for the all new LingQ5.0, but nope, it turned out to be just a restyling so to speak - the old steam engine remains.

I was disappointed at the time and have since learned to just use and enjoy what I have.

bamboozled

de   Germany
January 30 at 07:02

Here is my understanding of the underlying issue:

Fundamentally LingQ works by taking a list of all unique words in a lesson and comparing it to a user's database, which contains all words they have marked known, LingQed or ignored. This process happens on the server before the lesson opens and allows the client (web or mobile app) to show the relevant colors, saved meanings, notes etc. Since this process has to happen before the lesson opens, it's rather performance critical.

To illustrate this, for me it took about 40 seconds to open one 2000 word lesson at one point about half a year ago. The performance has been improved in the mean time and it takes only a couple seconds for me now. But I would understand if LingQ is hesitant to touch this limit. There is only so much optimization possible, and there are basically two variables left, the user's database size and the number of unique words in a lesson.

Personally, I would like an option to use LingQ as a regular e-reader, clicking on or hovering over a word would open the dictionary. This mode would not require the lessons be split or processed at all. But it could only ever be an option due to the lack of features users have come to expect from LingQ, e.g. word highlighting number of unknown words etc.

nfera

au   Australia
January 30 at 11:41

As you mentioned, it depends on the size of your list of Known Words, LingQs, Ignored Words, etc., but as a comparison, a ~2,000-word lesson (probably with a list of ~50k words) just took me about 4.5 seconds to open on Android. I think it might also depend on server load and other factors, because sometimes it takes quite a while longer to load a lesson for the first time. Though, performance is something the LingQ staff have been working on recently, as mentioned by @mark in his recent update post, so maybe I'm remembering times from a few months ago.

Personally, I don't find the splitting based on a ~2,000-word limit very inconvenient. The only problem is when the lesson splitting also requires audio splitting. There are several bugs and issues with this at the moment. This is inconvenient...

EDIT: Oh, and when you import multiple videos/content into the same course in quick succession, it does not auto-sort the split lessons... It ends up with video 1 part 2, then video 2 part 2, then video 1 part 3, etc. A complete mess, which is an absolute headache to clean up.

If raising the word limit for each lesson were to reduce the incidences of these inconviences, that's something worth considering.

bamboozled

de   Germany
January 30 at 13:09

When I started here on LingQ I mainly worked with YouTube videos, curiously the word limit for those was set to 4000. This was true all through 2021, but since LingQ 5 rolled out the regular 2000 word limit has been enforced. The current limit is rather inconvenient for this application. The system used to be able to squeeze a 30 minute talk / video into one lesson, now it's three. Doubling the current limit could provide relief on that front, since most(?) imported YouTube videos are under 30 minutes long. This would also work around the audio splitting problem.

Anyways, there is probably not much use in discussing, in the end it's up to LingQ to decide what to do. I have no doubt that they are well aware that many users would prefer longer lessons. But it also they who know the limits of the limits of their systems.

nfera

au   Australia
January 30 at 17:06

Both the audio splitting problem and the sorting problem are issues which LingQ needs to eventually solve unless they really allow lessons up to 10k+ words. But, you're right. Doubling the lesson size would mean that a significant portion of the YouTube videos wouldn't need to be split. I think, if LingQ keeps improving the performance, it's definitely worth reconsidering the lesson size limit.

I think it's still useful to discuss it. At times, when they stop to take a breather, LingQ does listen to suggestions and customer feedback. There are various features, which have been changed or added due to user demand and complaints.

jmuehlhans

at   Austria
January 28 at 23:35

Is that what's happening when you import from e.g. YouTube and you see 2 lessons with the same title, but one has an attached "(1)" behind the title? That happened to me a couple of times but I was not sure what's going on, because both would show different durations, but summed up they would not result in the total duration of the lesson. And when I clicked them, both versions started at the very beginning and played all the way through the end. I thought that was just an import or display error...

MarkE

us   United States
January 28 at 19:55

I completely agree it makes my course feel so cluttered when they separate a chapter of a book into a bunch of separate lessons. I think they limit 2000 words per lesson.

MarkE

us   United States
January 28 at 19:59

"I really wish I could import ebooks and have one lesson per chapter as opposed to X number of sub-lessons per chapter."

Yesssss Totally!!!!!

SeoulMate

gb   United Kingdom
January 28 at 19:55

I am glad I am not the only one bothered by this. Unfortunately on Lingq every text you import will be split into chunks of 2500 words. I really wish I could import ebooks and have one lesson per chapter as opposed to X number of sub-lessons per chapter. This word limit per lesson becomes increasingly frustrating when you are a mid-intermediate to advanced learner.

Ginkgo58

au   Australia
January 29 at 20:10

I also find this makes importing private podcast episodes a bit of a mess because the sound files don't then match up with the text of the podcast.

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