Will the site ever support Traditional characters for Chinese as the main “alphabet,” if you will?
I currently have the setting to show Traditional but all this does is put them in tiny font above the Simplified text, and it doesn’t show up as the standard font when doing recall exercises or in the Lingqs Of The Day emails.
This also led to a funky glitch involving imported lessons and the Android beta.
I found a news article written in Traditional, imported it to Lingq (using the Chrome auto import thing), at which point it converted everything to Simplified. I then went to my phone and opened the same imported lesson and it showed everything in Traditional!
Hallelujah, I thought.
However, all the words that were in Traditional on Android but were Simplified on the PC were un-highlighted (ie, not new and blue) but were also dead links that could not be clicked on.
For now we support only Simplified characters and I am not sure are we going and when to to support Traditional characters too. A few years ago we were looking at the possibility of supporting traditional characters to support Cantonese, but it proved to be much more work than we anticipated.
Here is Steve’s reply from other forum thread related to same subject:
“With regard to the traditional splitter, we did, as Hape suggested, look at converting the traditional to simplified for the purpose of splitting. We then had to deal with the issue of how the characters would display in the LingQ widget. The splitter relies on a dictionary and our dictionary is based on simplified characters. We tried a Traditional character dictionary and it did not work, and so we found another source and in the end, things just got more and more complicated, not to mention the fact that Cantonese has some characters that do not exist in Mandarin. We decided that if we cannot do it simply and properly, we were better to back off. I am disappointed since I wanted to work on my Cantonese.”
I know at the moment LingQ automatically converts traditional into simplified text when you import it. Would it not be relatively easy to add this conversion as an option on the import, so you can choose to work with traditional (with limited capability) or import as simplified for full use of the system?
We added Traditional Chinese yesterday. There is no content in it yet but feel free to start importing. Enjoy! We plan on adding the Cantonese mini stories when available.