I’ve recently come back to Lingq as a premium user and whilst for the most part I am enjoying the experience, I am frustrated by the number of mistakes I see when I create lingqs.
I wish I had a made a note of other examples in order to demonstrate this problem but unfortunately, I did not.
The Chinesepod lesson “Lili and Zhang Liang 13: Dad Gives Advice to Son” contains an example of bad pinyin.
The pinyin for 初恋女友 is marked as chū liàn rǔ yǒu. Rǔ should be nǚ. I know this character has different pronunciations (and therefore pinyin) but I can’t seem to change it.
Also, I sometimes I find that Chinese on lingq groups character incorrectly. I can’t find the example I noticed recently so i’ve tried to recreate what I saw:
There was a phrase like - 怎么 可能 一点 都 不 难过. Lingq grouped the characters like this - “怎” “么可” not placing 怎 and 么 together. I couldn’t seem to change that either.
These small things are quite annoying because I’ve started paying again to use all of lingq’s services. I appreciate that Lingq is not perfect and things can always be improved and as I started before, I enjoy my language learning on here. It’s just that these things, for me, are somewhat niggling.
Changes, I suggest -
Being able to regroup characters in lessons
Offering the possibility to edit pinyin. The “reader” can edit the document and suggest changes and the original uploader can either validate these or ignore them.
I also started using LingQ for my Chinese studies. I am a bit disappointed to see that Chinese words are not split correctly.
Examples: 姓陆, 我姓, 姓林, 叫林娜 are not split, although they are no “valid” Chinese words.
As I pay 10 $ per month I would expect that this works flawlessly.
The mobile Android app is nice, but I often see the error message “LingQ not created”. Disappointing, too …
And a last one: why my forum posts must be moderated being a paying member of LingQ? Do you expect that paying members create spam posts here? I don’t understand it.
Moderation of your post might be due to the fact that it was your first post. I also use the android app but haven’t encountered the problems you have. I agree with your sentiments regarding paid accounts.
We hope to find a better splitter, but our resources and energies are directed elsewhere right now. If anyone knows of a better splitter please let us know.
Anyone who wants to edit mistakes in our lessons can obtain the editor pencil by asking us, I believe. We would appreciate it. It is a good idea, however, to check with the original contributor where possible.
I don’t think the moderation of posts is related to the status of the member. Rather, we have had people coming on here and spamming the forum. So we have chosen this way of prevent unwanted spamming. Nothing personal.
We are working to improve our mobile apps. Please bear with us.
The splitting algorithm is not ideal by any means. We have not found a better splitter. We are open to suggestions.
Algorithm: Get a list with the most important (approx. 30,000) Chinese vocab items. Look for the longest matching multi-character-word in the vocab list that matches the first characters of the text to be splitted. if not found, reduce length by one and repeat. if found, split and restart algorithm; if not found split after first character. etc, etc. Easy to implement.