Hi,
This is my first posting in the lingq forums. After lurking for around two years, I finally registered and bought a paid membership today. I am an “advanced beginner” (=loser) in Chinese and I am very curious how lingq can help me.
I vaguely remember that there was a discussion a while ago about how to make lingq more appealing to new people. So, I thought that it could be interesting to describe how I, as a fresh customer, have experienced my first day on lingq. Of course, I will only write about the bad things. If you pay for a service, you take the nice things for granted
First comment: Lesson difficulty varies a lot
This is something that a friend of mine also noticed immediately (not for Chinese).
You can find extremely slowly spoken courses and extremely fast spoken courses. It is nice that you have material that is speed-wise close to how a native speaker would speak, but such courses should be marked in some way. Especially for a beginner it is quite frustrating to click through a long list of courses, trying to find a suitable one.
Difficulty of vocabulary also varies, even inside a course. You follow a beginner course, the lessons 1-8 are about general stuff (where do you live, where do you work, etc.) and then, in lesson 9, you find this dialog:
That can be a problem. Is it because he does not trust you?
That is possible. I do try my best but he does not seem to like me.
How do you know that?
Whatever I say he disagrees with me. Sometimes he does not know
much about the nature of my work, yet he still criticizes me. Whatever I do
is not good enough for him.
This is not exactly beginner material… Maybe I should simply accept the fact that lesson 9 of this course is too difficult for me and instead try finding another course. But such a “course hopping” sounds extremely inefficient to me. Moreover, this particular course is telling a continuous story running over 10 lessons.
Second comment: Dictionary is too dumb
I was quite disappointed that the dictionary function is so dumb and far away from what a computer could do to support the student. The offered word translations seem to be independent from the current context (=the lesson currently studied) and show all possible meanings of a word (the dictionary on my book shelf shows at least an example sentence for each meaning). It is up to the (clueless) beginner to pick/guess the right meaning. For a beginner, context is the most useful thing in language learning and especially in Chinese it is extremely important to know in what kind of sentence pattern a word appears. I have also the impression that free tools like Chinese Text Annotation - MandarinSpot or the Perapera plugin for Firefox do a better job in identifying word compositions. For example, lingq separates 并 and 不 in the sentence 但是他好像并不喜欢我 which does not really make sense.
Third: Quirks of the user interface
Some aspects of the lingq user interface seem to be more user-unfriendly than necessary.
Example: I click on “Learn” and the list of courses appears. I click on a course, see the list of lessons, and start with lesson 1. Then I remember that I already finished lesson 1 this morning. I click the “back” button in my browser because I want to go to lesson 2 and… I am back to the list of courses. On the other hand, if I click on the name of the course in the lesson view, I end up in the library, which again looks completely different.
I have also not found out yet how to split new words. For example, lingq tells me (by the blue rectangle) that the composed word XY in the sentence W X Y Z is new. Let’s say that, after consulting the dictionary, I come to the conclusion that XY are actually two words or that WY is one of the billion sentence patterns in Chinese (see comment above). I can extend the blue rectangle to WXY or XYZ or WXYZ but I cannot select X or WX, not to mention WY or XZ.
That’s it for the moment