At the moment LingQ shows the percentage of new words of a lesson but I think this can sometimes be quite misleading. Just because I have 20% of new words in a lesson doesn’t mean I understand the other 80%. In fact, quite often there are many level-1-LingQs, that I have only encountered once and I wouldn’t even recognize them as words I have seen before (if LingQ wouldn’t mark them yellow), so basically they seem like new words to me.
So wouldn’t it be nice to have an indicator instead (or as well) that shows the percentage of known words of a lesson? This way, we can really see at first glance how much of a lesson we understand.
What do others think about that?
Edit: I’ve just realized that a known words indicator might be difficult to implement since LingQ is not saving all the known words (only if they were LingQs before). But still, I think it should be possible to give a percentage number of all the white words in a text, or am I mistaken?
I think that’s an interesting suggestion, it would be cool to see something like that. In the meantime I have a solution for you, though it requires a small amount of work:
With every lesson or import, LingQ indicates the amount of unique words in the lesson, and also the amount of blue and yellow words in the lesson. So you can do some quick math to find out the percentage of known words. For example, if the lesson has 500 unique words, 50 blue words, and 150 yellow words, you can deduce that you “know” 300 of the 500 words, or 60%.
That is an interesting point. We will look at what other information we can provide here. We do know which words are known even if we don’t provide a list of them.
It should be extremely easy to program in a percentage for known words and unknown words seeing that there is already a percentage for new words. And I just thought of a way that this could help even more. If we could search for lessons based on those percentages, that would allow people to find material at their level more easily than just Beginner 1, Beginner 2, etc. For example, searching for lessons with at least 60% known words, at least 25% new words (which would give an implicit max of 15% unknown), and a word count of 800-1200. I’m not sure if that example is the best way of setting up that interface, but something should be able to be figured out.
In theory everything should be easy but I can assure that it’s not. Plus, it all takes time and resources no matter how easy. In the end, things have to be planned and fit in to our priority list. We actually have spent quite a bit of time to trying to make filtering by new words work without tying up a ton of resources. We have still not been successful there. Adding additional values to filter by will use up even more resources.
Having said that, we understand why you would like to be able to do this and we would like to be able to do this too. This is a long term goal for sure and is something we should have time to look into in the second half of the year.
Adding percentages should definitely be easy. I have programmed for a living, and I can’t think of a reason why you would be able to show new word count and percentage, but only unknown word count without being able to add percentage easily. You just copy the code for how the new word percentage is done, then test.
As for adding new filters, yes, that would be a new capability, and could be difficult depending on how things are currently set up.
The difficulty is not in figuring out how to calculate it. The difficulty is in doing it so for all your lessons at the same time if you want to filter by that number. Or, even loading a lot of lessons with accurate data. A lot of computing resources are all of a sudden required across all users every time they load a list of lessons. Trust me, it’s not that simple. We understand the issues and plan on enabling functionality like this at some point in the future.
hello is there a update from this if its comming?. to be honest it taked ages on lingq to get things implemented. i hope you guys fix this or that there comes a better alternative on the internet.
Unfortunately, our update is taking a lot longer than we anticipated. We are making a lot of improvements to our back end to enable us to make future enhancements more easily. I mention the update here https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/updates-tips-and-known-issues/lingq-development-update. At any rate, we are still hoping to have the new words percentage functionality as part of the update or shortly thereafter. Thanks for your continued patience.
I would really like to see this update too. I am unable to read the link that Mark posted in his reply. Best of luck and hope to see this sooner than later.