German - Compound Words on Lingq?

Hi everyone,

I’m learning german on Lingq for a few days. Since the begining I’ve noticed something wrong, Lingq doesn’t detect the whole word when they are compound.

Zum Beispil : “Aufstehen” - “Mark Steht um 8:00 auf”
Lingq is detecting “steht” as “to stand” and not as to “get up”.

And also, the verb is detected as a different word with another form.

By the way I’m learning german with Assimil and Duolingo for the basics and some grammar exercise.
I’m using Memrize for the vocabulary, but maybe can I switch to the Lingq SRS method ?
Then I’m learning with Lingq and some german youtube videos and netflix for the “content” to add somes inputs.

For now I’m struggling to find a place to Lingq in my learning routine. Maybe I don’t know to how use it properly.

Regards.

Yes, it’s a certain difficulty with the German verbs with separate prefixes that exists in lingq.com.
In this case I recommend you to make a link with the whole phrase containig such verbs.
However, it will be no so diffuicult after you know generally about the verbs with separate prefixes.
For example, you can use my German lesson “Trennbare Präfixe”:
Login - LingQ

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Evgueny has a good suggestion…just save the entire phrase. I mostly take a different approach though. First of all, don’t always select the initial meaning that pops up. You can refer to other “Popular translations” from other lingq members as well as various online dictionaries that Lingq is connected with.

In many cases some of the other “Popular Translations”, the user will have given the 2 or three meanings for the word, and in many cases they will also make an entry for the various separable prefix versions and meaning. You can select one of those…You can also select more than one translation. I prefer to have them all on one line since in the app you can only see one at a time unless you drilldown.

If nothing in the popular translations are suitable, you can always add in your own, complete with separable prefix translations.

So for your example above (steht) you might select or create a translation that looks like this:

to stand; (auf)stehen = to stand/get up

or
to stand; steht…auf = to stand up

There’s also a notes section you could use, but of course you need to “drill down” to access that.

You’re correct, it keeps track of every form of the verb as a different word/lingq. You can always put the base form of the verb in your translation so you can refer to it, but in time you won’t really need to do that as you learn the patterns.

Others may disagree, but I wouldn’t even bother with the SRS here or anywhere beyond the first 1000-2000 words (if at all). I think it’s an extremely inefficient use of time. When I first started German I used Memrise. That is SRS based and I think it was useful in the beginning stages, but at some point you can become a slave to it. Once you get to a certain number of words you can spend so much time reviewing that you never get to learning new words. And if you’re short on time, this is not good. If I went a day or two, or maybe a week, if I was on vacation, I’d have a couple of hundred or more words to review. No fun. To get to the amount of words you need to be proficient in the language it really isn’t feasible. So fortunately I found Lingq. You want to read and listen, read and listen. In Lingq it’s great because if you get stuck on a word, you click and you see a meaning. Or highlight a phrase and you get the meaning of the phrase.

The other great thing is that if you’re reading, the words are within full sentences, and in the context of the story or material that you are reading. Much better than learning individual words in isolation.

If you are not on a subscription, lingq is going to not provide much as you can’t do very many lingq’s. (I’m not sure if you’re still on the “free” version). Check out some of Steve Kaufman’s videos on linq and language learning on youtube. That might be helpful to sort out the confusion, as well as the help videos on this site.

Sorry for such a long post, hopefully it’s helpful.

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Just to address the original point of this post: there is nothing wrong with the way LingQ detects compound words. “Aufstehen” is the compound word here, and LingQ will detect it as such. “steht” and “auf” are two separate words that can be used in and of themselves in many contexts, or can form a compound word together. And when used in the example sentence, they become separated parts of a compound word.

It is the context of the sentence that determine their meaning, and it is OUR job to understand that. In German, you could from a sentence like: “Mark steht mit der Langsamkeit eines müden, kranken Tieres, das an durch Kater verursachten Kopfschmerzen leidet, um 8:00 auf.”

I don’t think we can expect LingQ – which is designed to mark and look up individual words – to identify the compound meaning of the two words in the above sentence. As evgueny and eric pointed out, we can mark and note the meaning of those words so we can learn to recognize these types of patterns, but the way LingQ handles these is the right way for this platform.

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Thanks t-harangi. It’s also worth pointing out that all German verbs get verb tags attached to them when you LingQ them. For verbs that form part of separable verbs, all possible separable verb forms are also shown as tags. This is a good indicator that you should be looking to see if there is a separable verb in the sentence.