Access in China

I can’t get on lingq in China without a VPN.
been a few years since I’ve used it, but I was wanting to try lingq again, but I only get a ”timeout” from the the browser when I try to access the website. And in the app I just get infinite spinning of the loading circle.
so if I want to use it, I would really like it for you to sort out whatever is going on with your server that makes it unusable in China.

LingQ stopped working in China a little over two years ago after some “upgrades” to the Great Firewall. I would also like to see this fixed, but I’m skeptical they have enough users in the mainland to make it worth the trouble. So long as you use a VPN you should be fine. I’ve been using it that way for the last two years without any major difficulties. Occasionally I lose connectivity with my VPN while I’m in the middle of a lesson and I have to go back and re-LingQ words, but otherwise it works as advertised.

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Thanks, my nephew is workin on learning English and I’ll have to see if he can deal with the technical hurdles of using the VPN to use it.
I haven’t seen any other apps for that do the same things as lingq that also work in China…

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We are familiar that some users from China have issues and are unable to access LingQ properly. We will do our best to find a solution as soon as possible.

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Yes, you need to use a VPN, a Good VPN in China. I am living in China, and had problems in the past, but with a VPN LingQ is usable.

Keep in mind, this is in’t likely to change, as a result of the tremendous amount of news articles that are available, along with translations being accessed via Google Translate in many cases. The Great Firewall isn’t going to allow you to access this website, for a combination of several different reasons, but the news articles and connection with google will create the problem. This is important to keep in mind, because most of that being banned in China, any assocation with that and LingQ are unlikely to have any changes. That which makes LingQ great is also what will prevent it from being widely used in China. I guarantee that several Chinese would love to use this website (I even have a private student who became aware of LingQ before he met me), but they have no way to access it. It is unfortunate, but it is not LingQ’s fault, nor do I see them having any logical way to change this without severely hurting what makes LingQ great.

I’m sorry for the sour news bobafruit.

I’m in China too. It’s also the issue that I’m considering to subscribe or not.
It seems the lingQ sharing feature, lessons like this Login - LingQ are part of the reason. anyone share contents like this will be very easy blocked.
It would be possible to build a lite version for China , only focus on personal language studying .

It’s almost certainly because LingQ allows importing and sharing of news articles from ‘unharmonious’ sources like NYT, VOA, RFA, etc.
Before the blockage you could circumvent the great firewall by importing articles from those sources into LingQ. Obviously that’s a no-no.
I use LingQ primarily for reading news in Chinese, so I sincerely hope they don’t kowtow to the censors.

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I’m skeptical they could satisfy the censors anyway since LingQ relies so heavily on user-contributed content. It would require extensive moderating. Some of the popular upper-intermediate content on LingQ is now blocked. For example, 锵锵三人行, which was once very popular in China, is now mostly wiped from the Chinese internet. The Australian-based Chinese podcast that’s popular on LingQ (I’m forgetting the name of that program) would also need to be blocked. I would bet that many of LingQ’s own Chinese podcasts would no longer be Kosher as they touch on a number of topics that are now deemed sensitive. And all indications are that it’s only going to get worse. Next it will be 罗辑思维, 奇葩说, etc. I’m happy that LingQ is investigating a possible solution, but I’d be surprised if anything can be done.

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someone shared a novel called 致命弱点, and I was completely unable to find an audiobook on the Chinese internet (my VPN is slow and was taking a long time to download the audio from LingQ)… well after reading some way into the book I understood why :rofl:

I suppose they could launch a version for China that only included English and therefore avoid the need to curate the Chinese language content…

Another reason you couldn’t find the audiobook is that there isn’t one. The uploader recently imported a lot of content using a text-to-voice generator. The AI voice-over is surprisingly good, so it’s a little hard for non-native speakers to tell.

You could read the news: 澳籍人员杨军涉间谍罪在华被捕 曾写过政治间谍小说-中国侨网
It’s not about the book contents, but because of the writer.

Here’s a recent article about the author from a more credible source, also in Chinese: 杨恒均:中国起诉澳大利亚籍华裔作家“间谍罪”案闭门开庭审理 - BBC News 中文

I just imported it into LingQ. He’s been waiting for two years and has yet to be sentenced. More than likely his arrest was politically motivated and he committed no real crime. Pretty common in China, unfortunately.

“Pretty common in China” “more credible source” is your point of view, not that of the Chinese .

Thank you for reminding me that all 1.4 billion Chinese people have the same perspective.

I agree. Unless you’re willing to devote a huge portion of your budget to censorship (“moderation”) forget about user generated content in China.