Lingq still has problems dealing with some diacrits in Arabic

It’s been debated before, and the lingq staff generally seem to give the same response every time, namely that Arabic isn’t a priority… Still, I’d like to remind you guys of an irritating bug that has been in the system as long as Arabic has been supported:

Whenever a word has the accent mark “chadda” in it, it becomes unclickable… this means that it’s impossible to make lingqs of, or to look up a great number of words.
Chadda is basically used to mark the doubling of a letter… try imagining that all English words with two of the same letters next to one another would be unclickable.

Here’s an example المدرَّعتين
… you can’t click on it if it’s in the lingq reader, and it all seems to be because of the symbol " ّ " (chadda)

… it would be truly deeply profoundly positively wonderously magnificent if a LingQ programmer could take a look at this… it’s probably easy to fix for someone who knows what he’s doing, but we’re many lingq members who has has to live with this for years…

It also might be one of the reasons that Arabic isn’t a popular language on LingQ… if it worked smoothly, lingq would be an amazing tool to studying one of the world’s biggest and most important languages…

It’s time to give a little more attention to Arabic, lingq staff! We’ve waited long !

3 Likes

The writing of the shaddah is obligatory and is written in the manuscripts but in the typed texts it is usually omitted for convenience, which is a pity because it makes it even more difficult to read a language that is already difficult.
I have read some lessons from Lingq and usually do not write the shaddah in them.

Nevertheless - the lessons in which chadda is used, the word becomes unclickable. It seems to me that chadda is used in almost everything I import, so it’s not a rare problem.

This issue crops up repeatedly in the mini stories, and is just exasperating. Frustration with the system when dealing with an already difficult language is not what I’m looking for.

I am learning Arabic at LingQ. I just added the term المدرَّعتين to lesson 30 of the mini series and was able to LingQ it. Google translate said it meant “the two” and Context Reverso said it meant “armoured”. The Chadda showed up. This may because I imported the word, rather than it being in the text. Or it is an issue with different browser. I will check with our technical people on Monday. It is also true that some words seem not to stay yellow after I LingQ them. Has anyone else experienced that. I also don’t know if it is possible to show more diacritics at least for those texts that have them. I don’t know if that is an issue, or even possible. I am sailing along without them right now. I am a newbie at Arabic. Await comments from others on who we can improve. Bear in mind that we have limited resources and quite a few pots on the burner. No promises. BTW I will remove المدرَّعتين from that lesson in a while, but maybe someone can test it. Login - LingQ

1 Like

Even a page refresh causes the lingq for المدرَّعتين to disappear.

For why there are disparate translations see: B: The Dual of Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, and Verbs The above grammar point is common (in varying degrees) to other Semitic languages

Yes!! Diacritics are not handled by LingQ. This makes words with them un-lingqable, and they reappear in blue each time. At the time I was learning Arabic, this made LingQ not very usable for pure beginners of Arabic. (Together with the fact of too little short beginners contents). I myself imported short texts with and without diacritics. Very time consuming and inefficient. Learning to read with LingQ, by first trying to read with the help of diacritics, is not possible.

The correct translation of المدرَّعتين is the dual form of the adjective “armored”. Thus, السيارتين المدرَّعتين is translated as “the two armored cars”. However, in military usage, the noun can be dropped, so المدرَّعتين would also mean “the two armored vehicles”, like a tank, APC or armored car. The plural is المدرّعات = “the armored vehicles” and the singular is المدرّعة = “the armored vehicle”.

As a note for English speakers, “shaddah” is a better transliteration of that emphatic diacritical mark, “chadda” is the francophone transliteration. When you’re learning Arabic, it helps if you pick a transliteration system that matches your native language and then stick to it. Arabic is hard to transliterate into western languages, lots of confusion can be generated by switching systems. Wadi, oudi, and guadi are all the same Arabic word وادي rendered in English, French and Spanish transliterations, respectively.

Also, the shaddah has to be written because it represents a doubling of the underlying consonant. Most properly written Arabic texts will include them, even if they don’t include the short vowels. If you don’t include the shaddah, it would be the same as if you had written a double-consonanted English word with only one consonant. So, “writen”, “ofice” and “aple” instead of written, office and apple.

I just looked at that lesson and I’m stumped. I have no idea what the word لمدرَّعتين has to do with anything in that lesson. Is it a typo, or a random addition in an odd spot? No idea. Perhaps a native speaker can take a look and figure out for us.

Sorry for the confusion. I put it there to better understand the problem, and I was interested to see how if it was LingQable for me or for others. I will remove it. But were you able to LingQ it?

Yes, I just LingQ’ed it. So, that seems to be fixed.

But there are issue with words not saving. I will be looking for patterns. It may be diacritics. I hope to hear more form people on this forum. Meanwhile I will remove the extraneous word. Thanks.

I don’t really understand why it’s clickable in some lessons but not in others… but it might be a symptom of the same problem when you say that the lingq “disappears” once you return to it… I’ve had that problem too with words not limited to the ones using chadda (or shaddah)

Google translate often has problems with single words in Arabic. As someone else noted, the words means something other than what you found out, but I think that might på a problem on Google’s end.

It seems like the technical problem is that LingQ doesn’t use consistent logic to decide whether two Arabic words are the same thing. Like maybe at some point somebody wanted accented and non-accented words to match each other, but they didn’t change the logic throughout the code.

The most alarming usability problem that results from this, is that when you click the green checkmark to complete a lesson, these problematic words become known words, even if you LingQed them and managed to temporarily make them yellow. This could inflate your known word count quite a bit depending on what lessons you read.

1 Like

I am enjoying using LingQ for Arabic. There are issues as described here, but their influence on my enjoyment is minor. I am pleased at the amount of good content we have. I am proceeding much faster in the language than I expected, and really enjoying the language.

I should add that I made a report of the problem, with examples to our technical people. There are many language specific issues which is perhaps inevitable in a multi-language platform like LingQ. We will eventually get to them, but with the many issues in front of our technical department, it won’t be very soon. So please enjoy what the system offers, and accept some minor inconveniences.