Updates to LingQ 5

We have pushed a lot of updates in the past few weeks. Here are some of the key ones.

  • Updates to the review activities to make the layout more responsive to fit lower resolution screens/devices.
  • Setting added to toggle between standard width text, wide text and 2-column text in the reader.
  • Increased height of the sidebar widget and reduced margins to allow more information to display and to show more information on low resolution screens.
  • Improved performance in Firefox
  • Improved performance when displaying course lessons in Lesson and Course popups.
  • Transliteration fixes in the widget for Japanese and Chinese.

In addition, we have pushed many bug fixes too numerous to mention. As usual, let us know if you are finding additional issues.

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Just wondering how the fix to the inflated word count is coming along?

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Firefox has improved for sure, thanks to that and to the other fixes.

I hope in few improvements that will speed up our study time avoiding us to do too many clicks and/or being able to use more keyboard shortcuts without constantly having to break the flow between keyboard and mouse. I have a series of suggestions but I’ll keep them for now.

1 only thing in this answer, on iOS lessons with audio are not automatically added to the active playlist. Could we have them also in the Web version? I have to constantly delete many of them from the active list to keep it clean. In v4 there was an option in the settings to avoid that automatic behavior. Could you add it back, please?

Thanks.

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Hi Mark,
Thank you and your team for your continued efforts.
Unfortunately the
Don’t seem to be working for me, see here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qJcQ6PFj0QKKd5LdGqjZtd72RETPMGML/view?usp=sharing
Or is this the intended behavior? I had assumed that the choice, e.g. for Pinyin is supposed to stick when moving to the next word. Which is how it works on the iOS app.

Also, I still experience the bug where translations from Google briefly appear, and then disappear from the sidebar / widget. I’ve reported this previously (video from the 3rd, but look the same today).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BwdzXhlA_qti2rPRJALnm4Q_-5w3c14G/view?usp=sharing

Can you reproduce these issues, or is something borked on my side? Is there any information I can provide? I see this on Safari and Firefox, deleted the website data etc.

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Just to follow on from bamboozled’s comment. I am still having similar issues with mandarin transliteration. I do notice however if you manually click words instead of using the keyboard, the transliteration doesn’t flip back on every single word. This solution however is only partially helpful though as every time I move to the next page, the transliteration switches over again.

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I’ve just taken a look at the page source, unfortunately I’m not a web developer, so I couldn’t figure anything out. But I happened to notice a typo “cantonose”, (certainly unrelated). Also another thing is that Cantonese lacks a special case for the font style selection (t.getFontStyles). The user can set things like “Rubik Regular” etc, but it probably should be in line with the other Chinese languages and Japanese and only allow “Traditional, Bold” etc.
(Sorry I realize this is unrelated to the issues at hand, feel free to ignore)

Firefox is finally usable again, thank you!
When reviewing words, I often have to scroll now to see all possible translations whereas that didn’t happen before. My resolution is 1920x1080, so that shouldn’t be a problem. I’m using a desktop with a big screen, after all.

“h” still doesn’t work and when I’m in the text editing a meaning, the arrows often don’t work.

There are courses with new words where none of the lessons actually has any new words.

Is there a quick way to review only the new words (as in the blue ones)? There are a lot of courses I already completed where there are supposed to be new words (maybe because the headlines now are clickable or because of bugs) and I don’t know how to review those words quickly.

Thanks!

Excellent! Being able to toggle between different text layouts is a game changer.

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Hello,

Keep in mind that you can now create additional playlists. If you want to have specific lessons in a playlist, create a new playlist and add those lessons you want to it. You can then just ignore the Active Playlist.

Yes, it’s an awesome feature multiple playlists now.

But I want to keep my active playlist clean like my library and on iOS it’s not added automatically and in v4 there was an option to avoid this automatic behavior. So, it doesn’t cost much just to align it on v5. What would be the benefit for a user to have hundreds of lessons over there that they don’t want to?

I’ve already deleted probably hundreds of lessons because even each 1 minute lesson is added as well.

You can’t even move those lessons to other playlists because there is no option for it. And (I don’t know if you fixed this yet) but if you have lessons on those playlists and the relative course is not added to the continue studying, the time of listening is not added to your statistics.

Thanks, we’ll look into those issues for Cantonese.

I’m not sure what you mean by having to scroll but we have done what we can in the sidebar. I see that h seems to work with the fixed sidebar but not the popup as the small popup doesn’t have that option on it. We could look at expanding the popup and focusing the cursor in the meaning field. if you’re editing a meaning, you have to save it in order or the arrows to work.
Blue words show in the Words popup in the sidebar. Click the Vocabulary List option in the Vocabulary popup in the bottom right.

@bamboozled I see the issue with the transliteration. It defaults to the option you have selected in your settings. It seems when you click from word to word it remembers that you have the other script showing. I think this is probably the bug we should fix. To have it revert to your default in all cases seems the correct behaviour to me.
The disappearing translations issue is quite strange. I can’t see it myself but I will pass this along for further investigation. Do you have specific conditions on your computer or settings? You are going from Chinese to English?

We may add this setting but I’m afraid it isn’t a high priority. You will need to just ignore it until then.

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The problem with the translations occurs only when no community translations are available and the system asks Google for a translation. When languages have fewer users here on LingQ, it becomes more common. Examples are Cantonese, Chinese Traditional and Romanian. But I have seen this in all languages I study, for example on names and nonsense words.

I had looked at the browser console and verified that the translation was requested and received. On February 18th I sent an email to support, where I included some screenshots of that.

Just to make sure, I just reproduced this on Firefox on Romanian and Cantonese, but it was relatively rare so it can take 20-50 words. Maybe you want to try this course Login - LingQ
So for example I just opened this lesson:
Login - LingQ
On Safari and got it right away on the word “雇人”.
Additionally tried Microsoft Edge, never used this for LingQ, but reproduced as well with the same word.

This is on macOS 12.2.1, Safari 15.3 and Firefox 97.01, Edge 98.0.1108.62. But I saw this on another computer as well. I’m not aware of anything special here, all ad-ons disabled / none installed. Just pressing the right arrow key, not a mouse user.

I’m talking about the SRS. Sometimes, when the list of translations gets too long, one of the four options to choose from is more or less hidden and I have to scroll. That wasn’t the case before. No, I use the fixed sidebar and h doesn’t work for me at all.
I’m trying to use the cursors while editing to remove a letter or change/ add one. I could use the arrows before to do that.
But I have to do that for each lesson, correct?

Thanks. I’ll keep deleting lessons for now. I’m sure you’ll find a solution. Or even just a button to delete all lessons in the active playlist at once. Either solution is ok.

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The new update made YouTube videos extremely stretched on 4k screen. It is pretty much impossible to watch and go through text at the same time. I have written an email regarding this issue but no one has answered.

Thanks for your work.
The navigation and short-cuts seem to be working better for me.
I’d like to be able to remove or rename playlists.

1 Like