I love Lingq, but I hate Lingq

I have something I just need to get off my chest for anyone who will listen. Maybe someone from Lingq, maybe users of Lingq.

I have used Lingq for about 4 years now off and on. I’ve been a paid member, and I always was happy to pay the small fee associated with this program.

There is no doubt that Lingq has helped me learn a lot! I use every tool I can on this website, and I don’t think I’d be nearly as fluent as I am today without it. The fact that this website is so simple in it’s approach, but it combines so many time consuming tools into one page that’s not time consuming at all has helped me. For example, making a new set of flash cards every day would be a pain in the … But, the fact that every morning I wake up with a new set has really helped me out.

Also, the fact that as learners, we’re not told what to study, how to study, or when to study. Instead we are given a platform of many tools that help us study, has made this website so incredibly powerful.

That said, as grateful as I am, there are a lot of problems with Lingq that make it so unusable, and make me hate paying the 10 bucks every month.

So. Many. Bugs.

I know Lingq has a development team that is constantly working on fixing bugs, but there are so many of them. The fact that the chrome add on doesn’t let me important articles, the fact that if I copy and paste articles, the formatting comes out incorrect so I have to edit and correct, the fact that I can’t use the flash cards on my phone anymore because my words aren’t showing up.

I get that you guys want to have a really cool website and app with all these features that are all shiny and make people say wow. But for a second, can we please backup, just be simple, and make things work?

This is not me trying to bash any person, or persons. This is a frustrated customer who would just like a completely working system.

Above all, I just want my flash cards back on my app. (No, I don’t have android. Yes, I have the latest version of the app. I posted a few days ago about my issue, but still waiting to hear a resolution).

Anyways, I finally had to deactivate my account because I was paying $10 bucks a month for features I couldn’t even use.

I hope soon I can comeback to this website, and use it once again without all the bugs.

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Even though it’s all been said before, you summarized it beautifully.

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@shawncfer I’m very sorry you are so frustrated. We are trying to do many things with a small team and I agree that we don’t always perform the way we should. Believe me we are frustrated as well. Believe it or not, we are taking steps to improve our reliability and performance so we no longer get these kinds of comments.

I do apologize for the issue on the mobile app. I responded in the other thread and we will get that resolved for you so status 4 words do show up in the Daily LingQs. As for the Chrome Extension, it has been working very well for me. It can be affected by the site you are trying to use it on. If you find a site that is giving you problems, just let us know and we can then try and figure out the issue. If it’s another issue with the Extension, let me know.

Regarding the copying and pasting, there is no good solution here. Whichever way we choose to deal with pasted text, we end up annoying some users. The same issues happen when pasting into Word or Google Docs. How to deal with pre-existing formatting of text is not a simple matter. What is the issue that you are facing?

Hopefully, if we can resolve some of these issues, we can convince you to come back.

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The bugs are certainly very annoying. I think most people would rather the bugs get fixed than see new features. When I have the time, I often try to report bugs on the forum and quite often they get fixed. Sometimes I worry that I sound too negative when I do, but if so, it is because it makes little sense to post on the forum about all the great features that do work.

Despite the bugs, I still find LingQ extremely useful. When using LingQ on a normal computer, I have almost no problem with bugs, even though some do exist. When using LingQ on the iPad, which I very often do, I have to struggle quite a bit.

Here is the bug that has been annoying me the most recently: I have been reading a lot of texts on the website using my iPad and everytime I click on the hint field in a LingQ to edit aa hint, I am taken up to the top of the page and have to scroll back down to where I was reading. This is really annoying.

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Hey Mark,

I appreciate the response! I know you all at Lingq are composed of a small team, and I understand you all are trying to do everything you can to make it the best platform possible. Please understand that there are a lot of upsides to this website. You guys have put together an amazing website, something that I would never be able to do. I just get frustrated when I see that new features have been launched or the website has been redesigned when in reality, the priority should have been ironing out the wrinkles.

As far as the flash cards in the app, that was probably the most annoying thing for me. I felt like it was a bug, but I really got no response. The email response told me it was supposed to do that, which my question was “why are we being sent 25 lingqs a day if you only want us to study half of those, or a third of those”. I never got a response after that, and sometimes the best way as a customer to see that an issue is being worked on, is just a simple reply saying, “we are working on this now. Sorry about that”. Therefore, I really appreciate your response.

As far as the chrome extension. The website I use it on the most is elpais.com. First, every time I click it, it seems that the bar will pop up, and then quickly disappear a second later. Not even giving me time to click anything. So then I click it again and as soon as the bar pops up, I have to quickly move my house and hope it works.

That said, I used to click on '“lingq here”, but the page would take forever to load. I also used to have the problem that sometimes the words would highlight blue and yellow accordingly, but every time I clicked on blue words, nothing happened.

Admittedly, I haven’t used this part of the extension in quite some time because of the frustration. Though it would be nice to lingq next to pictures on the website.

As far as inporting the page: for he most part, it works okay. The problem I have with this feature is that often times it removed spaces from between words, and then a word is highlighted blue. Not because I haven’t studied it, but because it doesn’t exist. This happens once every two or three sentences. The original website does have those spaces, though. I haven’t been able to figure out any pattern of when the missing space happens and where those words fall in a paragraph. It just seems to be random.

When copying and pasting text, I understand there’s always a problem with formatting, even in programs like word. However, word has added in a festure in either its newest version, or second newest version, that lets you right click and the paste text with destination formatting. Is there a way to do something similar to that?

Anyways, I’ve rambled for far too long. I really appreciate your help. Like I said before, sometimes it just takes an actual person responding and saying, “we’re doing what we can!”.

Seriously, but, do you have anything useful to add… Serious comment.

I thought it was useful to see that somebody agrees.

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Many people sympathise, but few would cheerlead it on with such vigour.

I totally understand your frustration. There was some confusion about what should be happening on the app but that has been cleared up and reported and we will get that sorted out.

We always have to try and balance out development of new features vs improving existing features. On the one hand trying to make sure existing users are happy while also trying to make the site more appealing to new users. As I said, we are focusing on improving the user experience and performance over the next period. There are significant changes coming as part of this since many of the performance issues are a result of legacy code that has been built on top of over the years.

Regarding the extension, now that you mention it, I have noticed the odd word being joined together when I import Italian. I just click to ignore these but if they were happening more frequently, it would no doubt bother me more. I will take a look at el pais and see if we can’t reproduce the issue and fix it. We are constantly working on making the Chrome Extension more bulletproof. It is difficult when grabbing text from any site on the web to anticipate all issues so it’s helpful when bugs are pointed out. The on page functions are more difficult to maintain so have tended to lag. We will get those working as well although I find the additional functionality available when importing to LingQ to be much more pleasant in the end.

We will take a look at your suggestion of how to deal with pasting. Maybe there is something we can do here although right clicking in the browser is not an option unfortunately.

We appreciate the feedback!

Well, sympathizing definitely adds to the discussion, but I’m surprised he didn’t nit pick the post for not being specific enough or being clear enough.

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I would have been happy to have just seen some good old fashioned pedantry.

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@Colin Johnstone Not to worry. Keep reporting issues. If things are frustrating, we need to know so we can try and address them.
Unfortunately, the bug you mention below is not going to be that easy to fix. Trying to control the interface in the mobile browser is just more difficult than in the native apps. Again, I encourage you to use the iOS app for studying lessons and reviewing hints on your iPad instead. It does not have the problem you mention. I realize that the web version has more features than the mobile app, for example allowing access to this forum. We are going to be trying to move more and more functionality to the app over time so this is no longer the case. But. in general, we are going to be focusing resources more on making sure the mobile app works well than on trying to get the web app to work fully in the mobile browser. We will take a look at this issue but there are no guarantees.

Honestly, I still find the app unusable despite the recent update that fixed the main issue. There are still some bugs that make it very difficult to use and I plan to do some testing and post a little list of them soon on the forum. The main problem however is the design of the app. I can’t read a text when every time I select a blue or yellow word, a bar slides across from the right side and covers half the text. Also, the fact that the bar on the left side is perminanty there instead of just appearing on demand is really annoying.

Actually, until recently, I was reading long texts on the website on my laptop. Although it’s not as comfortable as holding the iPad, I could still read for hours on LingQ with the laptop on my lap. Unfortunately my laptop broke so now the iPad is my only choice.

Laptop is to be put on the belly.

I don’t use any of the apps.

I use the app pretty regularly and I find it works pretty well. If you report the glitches you come across, we will try to get them fixed. The right side thing and the lesson list in landscape view are things are aren’t going to fix now but we are aware that some people would like to see things differently. We are currently redesigning the app so we will see if we can do something about those things then. If the lesson list bugs you now, you can always use the app in portrait mode to get rid of it.