I recently found a great blog in Chinese that has accompanying audio, with each text around 3-8k words long.
Now, when I didn’t have the audio, I didn’t mind the autosplitting into the 2000-word chunks, but now with the audio that’s not very convenient, as I have to manually resplit that as well and it takes quite a lot of time. Having the audio separately in a different app/location would kill my flow as I like to pause and rewind all the time in app, plus the functionality of slowing down/speeding up.
Plus I really enjoyed the publicly shared Australian/Chinese SBS radio chat transcripts that were sometimes even 8k words long, each in just one lesson.
From what I understand, the autosplitting was introduced to improve performance, but from my experience I have had no problem at all with the longer lessons.
Anyone else wishes this possibility was reintroduced? I don’t know if I am an exception in this, but I would guess this is quite a problem for any intermediate+ learner that wants to import his own longer audio lessons, plus if a course has a lot of these long lessons, it gets quite messy after some time.
A long time you ago you where able to import up to 10 000 word long lessons. It was reduced to 2000 words, the main reason being (I assume) that the site runs smoother. While I understand the reasoning behind this change I still would prefer being able to import longer lessons. I use lingq mainly to read books and ideally one chapter would correspond to one lingq lesson. Raising the limit even to 3000 words would help a lot since in many of the books that I read the chapters are usually something like 2500-2800 word long.
I agree. That would help me too. Better would be 4,000 words. It is okay for me to wait a bit longer for the lesson to load. Everything else was fine in longer lessons.
Hi Branicek, I would also prefer longer chunks because I think splitting the text is ‘messy’. But about splitting audio, can you not just retain the audio as one file attached to the first part of the episode? What’s the point/benefit of splitting it?
Hey Tarris I already uploaded and shared some parts, I think it should be in the library now. But otherwise if you have wechat, the id is ayawawavip. It’s intended for women but I find it funny to read, because they share relationship troubles and she has some good answers, kind of a Q&A style. +audio recording which is great.
It’s that when I would read part 2, 3 … there is no audio with the text anymore that I can follow along simultaneously. A workaround easy way out could be to just upload the whole audio to all parts, and then one by one I would always know where the previous part ended, but it’s not so great
But I found other wechat channels with audio-text, like 经济之声 (jjzswx), or HUGO yesterday posted an audio recording too (microhugo), a blog on relationships too. Just search the wechat official accounts by 声 or 有声 and maybe you will find more.
If you wanted to extract the audio and download it (because wechat has an absolutely ridiculous player that you cannot even pause, pausing it will reset it back to beginning), i copy the article’s link, open it on my desktop computer’s chrome, press F12 to open google dev, play the audio, and the url of the audio will appear down in the console, then you can open that in a new tab and download it. Uploading it to lingq requires reencoding to 44100 Hz though (at least in the case of ayawawa it was 48000 and that’s not allowed here) so I use audacity to lower that and also split the mp3s
OK, I don’t listen/read simultaneously so that wouldn’t be an issue for me. You could also just upload the audio once to the first part and have two tabs open to listen/read at the same time.
Yeah, the change wasn’t a good one. I remember a discussion when it first happened and Steve K saying he liked it for some reason. However, unless there was a back-end/behind the scenes reason for doing it that I I don’t remember, it’s not good.
People just starting out are going to have shorter content. People who are farther along are going to have longer content and thus need more “space” to work in. If someone wants to read a chapter of a book or show transcript they will likely need more than 2,000 words. It also makes it easier for audio because the divisions of the audio will me more likely coterminous with the text. yes, there are workarounds (opening two tabs, listening on separate audio file, etc) but it’s silly to HAVE to do that. And it’s not like LingQ is functioning so much better since they’ve made this change.
Best case scenario: gives users the options to “auto-cut” at a threshold they input.
Worst case scenario: leaving things as is.
Something every user would find better: going back to the old way.
I agree. One of the reasons I’ve put a pause on my premium membership is my inability to import texts longer than 2,000 words. The limitation is unfortunate for more intermediate and advanced learners, in my opinion, a target audience that LingQ would do well to encourage and nurture.
A bit old topic but I was wondering if there is some chance for increasing the amount of words in one lesson? Very rarely books have all chapters shorter than 2000 words and now when I want to import a book with audio I have not only to manually split text but also split audio which is rather annoying. It doesn’t have to be 10000 words as in old version but some 4000-5000 thousand words should be sufficient.
I used Lingq significantly more in the days of the 10,000 word limit. I use other services, that allow long lessons but don’t have as good of an interface as Lingq, entirely more - if not exclusively - now. For the advanced student of a language this might be the deciding factor whether to stay or not to stay now. I just resubscribed to Lingq because I like the new integration with news sites. It looks like things are moving in the right direction.
Yes please , increasing the number of words would be very useful. I’ve just imported some lessons over 2,000 words with audio. LingQ splits it into two lessons but The audio is just on the first lesson.
Thanks for the input everyone. We are considering what we can do here. We will still likely default to 2000 words but we may be able to figure out how to extend that limit if desired. You will have to patient here. No idea when we will be able to get to this.