Help us make LingQ better!

We are asking all Premium members for your help in making LingQ even better for all users.

You can help the LingQ Community in the following ways:

Incorrect Translations

Many of you will have noticed translations that are either in the wrong language or not accurate translations. Help us edit the popularity and language of these translations. You will now see an Edit option on the blue pane or when viewing All Translations in the yellow pane. Click Edit and you can adjust the language of translations or indicate that translations should be removed. This will help make Popular Translations better for all users.

Please also make sure that when creating your own translations, the language of the text you are entering matches the flag to the left of the translation field. Users doing this incorrectly are what lead to the wrong language hints in the first place.

Typos in Lessons

There are also sometimes typos in the lessons that we notice as we are learning. All of us can now edit all lessons to fix these typos. Any updates you make will affect other users as well so please be sure before making edits. Content providers will have the opportunity to revert any changes they donā€™t agree with.

Word Splitting in Asian Languages

Likewise, for those of you studying Chinese and Japanese, once you can edit all lessons, you can also edit all word splits. We ask that you adjust splits so that the text is split into words. Compound words and phrases are possible to create from words so we want to make sure we split into components that are words. Obviously, if splits push words together, users will no longer be able to click on those words.

Thanks in advance! With all of your help I think we can really improve the quality of the lessons and translations and make the LingQ experience even better!

As always let us know if you have any questions at all about this initiative.

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I appreciate the efforts.

I donā€™t think the new ā€œyou met your goalā€ popup is goodā€¦ Itā€™s like interrupting my reading to tell me that I can stop reading now if I want to.

I think you could graphically put something by the activity apple so people can tell whether the streak count includes today yet or not. But I donā€™t know that I would update it until the user has left the lessonā€¦

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I disagree. I really like the popup, (but maybe it could be put somewhere else.)

Agreed, popup is just an unnecessary distraction. I would also like to see an option to create my own language goals, like words of reading or hours listened.

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Mark - this seems like the perfect opportunity to give guidelines regarding definitions. What kind of things are acceptable, nice to have, unacceptable. Guidelines and examples for each language would be nice.

  1. I often see hints in other languages, but Iā€™ve problems to identify the language they are in. They look like eastern european languages like Polish or Czech, but Iā€™ve no idea where they are from. So it is difficult to set the correct language.

  2. Will this effect the LingQs Iā€™ve created for myself? Can other change my carefully made LingQs, because they donā€™t like the format or the length etc. of them?

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Iā€™m also against the fact that anybody will change the translations and hints to the lingqs that Iā€™ve created for myself spending some of my time by comparing the translations in different dictionaries and thinking about their accordance to the context of the content.
If somene likes my translationns, he/she can use them. If not, they can create their own hints.
And I am strongly agains this new "improvementā€™ which let everyone put their corrections in all lessons and podcasts. Irt can put the lessons into disorder.
If some students have any questions or they have noticed the mistakes, they can write to the provider. Only the obvious slips of the pen should be corrected without the permission of the provider.

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I donā€™t think people can edit other peopleā€™s lingqs, just make them less likely to get proposed to people looking for a hint.

Otherwise this could create problems for people who study unsupported languages.

That said, I canā€™t even find this LingQ-editing functionality. I can thumb hints down, but I could do that before too.

What about quality control, Mark? How are you going to make sure that edits are correct? Arenā€™t you asking too much of the community as well? Why not hire editors? Not everyone has Lingqā€™s and learnerā€™s best interests in mind. This is going to be a big mess with everyone having ā€˜editing rightsā€™. I donā€™t think the honor system can work here.

To the community: Please do not edit my lessons and courses. I have proofread everything that Iā€™ve uploaded. Of course, nothing is 100%. So, if there is a problem, please bring it to my attention. I will fix it immediately.

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Same for me. Please let me know if there are problems with my lessons, and Iā€™ll take care.

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@Oxygen, Miznia - In the end, there is no obvious way of doing this that some users will not like. The popup is easy enough to close, however, and we want to make sure users see it. We feel this helps users understand what they should be doing and encourages them to continue.

@Beware - Creating language goals is a separate issue and one we would like to have eventually.

@Wulfgar - The definitions are personal first, so we would never tell users how to create them. We share popular definitions so that other users can choose ones they like or create their own.

I was also very careful with the Portuguese lessons I uploaded and I wouldnā€™t like anyone else to edit them. So, if anyone finds a typo or mistake, just let me know and Iā€™ll fix it myself.

  1. Yes, that is a tricky one but do your best to move it to the right language. Itā€™s already in the wrong language, so if youā€™re also wrong, the net result will be no worse. Over time these definitions should end up in the right place.
  2. There is no ability to edit hints in this new functionality. You can only move them to a different language or mark them to be deleted. Either way the version of the definition shown to other users is the only thing affected.

Nobody can edit translations. They can only move them to the correct language or mark them for deletion. As for lessons, the original of all lessons is always preserved so that if someone does make incorrect changes, the lesson can always be reverted to the original by the content provider or administrators. Or, if the content owner approves the changes, they can update the original to reflect the new version. Often users want to fix issues right away as they are using a lesson and donā€™t want to have to wait for the content creator or admin to fix any issues. We think this just makes the experience much better for users without any great downside risk.

All Premium members should see an Edit button beside ā€œUse a popular translation from the communityā€ in the blue and yellow popups.

@Imani, Vera - I suggest we see how it goes with this. As I said above, the original of all lessons is always there and you, as the content provider, can revert to it anytime. No great harm should arise. Of course, if we see that there are problems, we can always remove this access again. But, it is worth seeing if we can improve the user experience for everyone since not all content providers are as conscientious as you both.

If it has that effect thatā€™s great, I just think it will tempt other users to stop at 13 when they wouldnā€™t have before. There are days where Iā€™m tired but I have to maintain my streak, so I open a lesson and maybe make 50 LingQs because Iā€™m not keeping track of the count.

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Hmm, not seeing thisā€¦ In any case will we be able to (in effect) vote to unflag things that have been flagged? Really most of the time I see some hint has been flagged, I donā€™t think there is much wrong with it.

You canā€™t vote to unflag, all you can do is delete or move to another language. Flagged hints are reviewed by editors and are unflagged at that time if required. You should see a little edit control above the list of Popular Translations.

Hi Mark, Iā€™m curious to see how this experiment goes. Itā€™s great to have the opportunity to finally fix some errors in lessons I had been studying that were a bit of an annoyance. Letā€™s hope the majority of users use the editing option to help the community and not to hinder it.

Iā€™ll take this chance to give my two cents on the three areas you mentioned: incorrect translations, typos in lessons, and word splitting in Asian languages. Hopefully the feedback is useful.

  1. When I see a LingQ community hint that is flat-out wrong and can mislead users, I try to flag it and certainly appreciate it when others do the same. However, I frequently see hints that have been flagged even though they seem correct, so Iā€™m not convinced that the flagging system is having the intended result overall. In some languages, many of the most popular hints have been flagged for no apparent reason. For me, though, the benefits of the crowdsourced hints have far outweighed any rough edgesā€¦they can sure come in handy when dealing with a word thatā€™s not in its dictionary form.

  2. Although they may be infrequent, Iā€™ve definitely seen misspellings in the shared library content. While theyā€™re not much of an issue if you already are fluent in the language, the occasional typo can really waste some time if youā€™re new to that language and trying to look up a specific word form. Iā€™ve been on plenty of ā€œwild goose chasesā€ trying to look up new words on LingQ that ended up being typos, although to be fair, plenty of those were in content I had imported from around the web. Itā€™s likely that Iā€™ve memorized a few misspellings without even realizing it, since itā€™s not always easy to spot them.

The typos can be especially frustrating in languages such as Korean or Finnish that can have many subtle variations of a word form. Since they are not as heavily LingQed as the more popular languages, there are often no community hints to go on for a particular word. If dictionary searches come up empty, you often have no way to tell if itā€™s a misspelling or if itā€™s just a new suffix or particle combination you havenā€™t learned yet. So being able to fix typos to save future users some time seems like a great feature as long as everyone is careful with it.

  1. Lastly, the word parsing in Japanese content has given me some issues from time to time, though Iā€™ve noticed that the more I read in the language, the less of an issue the quirky word splits are. The parsing was probably the most confusing in the lessons that were kana-only and of course got much better in the lessons with kanji.

In light of this, I went ahead and tried out the edit feature on Part 4 in the ā€œJapaneseLingQ - Eating Outā€ series, which had a couple major formatting problems (Eating Out, 4 - Ć£Ā‚ĀĆ£ĀĀŸĆ£ĀĀ— Ć£Ā‚Ā‚ Ć£ĀƒĀ“Ć£ĀƒĀ¼Ć£ĀƒĀ« Ć£Ā‚Ā’ Ć£ĀĀĆ£ĀĀ Ć£ĀĀ•Ć£ĀĀ„). Everything was crammed into one long line on the first page, with the second page consisting of just the syllable 恆.

The 恆 should have been connected with ć¾ć—ć‚‡ on the previous page to form ć¾ć—ć‚‡ć† (as part of č”Œćć¾ć—ć‚‡ć†). I remember trying to create a LingQ a while ago that combined the ć¾ć—ć‚‡ with the 恆, but it wouldnā€™t stick because it crossed both a sentence break and a page break. Even when I manually created the LingQ through the Import Vocab feature, it still wouldnā€™t show up in the lesson.

To fix this, I edited the lesson so that every line of dialogue is on its own line and there is no longer a page consisting exclusively of the syllable 恆. The edit took very little time, and hopefully the changes make the lesson much easier to read.

In the end, I think the key is to see if the majority of folks can be responsible with the edit tool and not create a headache for content creators. Thanks for giving it a try, and letā€™s hope for a positive result!

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