markoSSS's recent topics

Given the recent interest surrounding dark themes within the community, I thought it’d be a good idea to share this post. Until now I had only solved this on desktop devices thanks to a chrome extension called Dark Reader. This method, however, takes care of the issue when using a mobile phone (at least for Android devices). I don’t own any Apple devices so I couldn’t tell you if it works on their platform or not.

At the moment we lack the option to list the language combination of our choice in the vocabulary section. We can only select the source language, but the target language is always set to the native tongue. It would be great if we could switch that just like we can while reading a text. I, for example, study from English even though my native language is Spanish.

Is there any chance we could see who liked a given post within the thread itself (hovering over the like icon or something like that). That would avoid having to leave the post and search through the notifications as well as seeing who liked posts from other users.

I created this course and forgot to add a description. I click edit and add the corresponding text but when I click save the whole thing disappears again.

Here is the note I wanted to add:

Grimms' Fairy Tales, originally known as the Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen), is a collection of fairy tales by the Grimm brothers or "Brothers Grimm", Jakob and Wilhelm, first published on 20 December 1812. Audio source: https://librivox.org

This is a continuation of this thread, which is currently closed.

I just wanted to report that the checkbox status in the profile language settings is not being reflected in the chat screen at the moment. As you can see, I have the checkbox unticked for English, but it still appears as learning in the chat screen.

I haven’t been able to replicate this since it only happens when I get a notification on the platform so I don’t know what is really going on but I’m gonna try to explain the issue.

I had this happen twice. The first time the notification message fell into an infinite loop by itself. It wouldn’t stop ringing and piling up on the lower right corner of the screen so I had to block all notifications from the site to stop it. On a second occasion, it would just pop up again each time I clicked on it.

I’m not very familiar with Chrome notifications, so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong but I think this might be worth checking.

(edit - moved this here to close out other ticket)

Hi, leo. Yes, I’ve just checked this and it seems to work as expected. Nice work!

One last thing I wanted to point out is that I find whitespaces to be a bit too narrow at the moment. I don’t mind it that much because I’m already an intermediate student but someone starting out could find it difficult to distinguish one word from another. I bring it up here because this is particularly apparent right next to numbers or symbols. What’s more, whitespaces in between symbols aren’t shown at all, as can be seen between the colon and the quotation mark in the following example:

I am using the latest Chrome version on a Windows PC and I see this no matter what zoom setting I use.

I find the forum a bit chaotic at the moment. I think adding additional subforums would help a lot.

For example, some of the existing forums could be divided as follows:

Other than English > Target language only forums (meant for native speakers or advanced learners)

• Chinese only forum
• German only forum
• Portuguese only forum
• Spanish only forum
• etc…

Language learning questions (in English, so that beginners and intermediate learners can post questions)

• Chinese section
• German section
• Portuguese section
• Spanish section
• etc…

Resources

• Language learning apps
• Language learning books
• Non-language learning books (novels, non-fiction, etc)
• Movies and TV series
• Podcasts and radio programs
• Music
• Language schools

Technical

• Website in general
• Reading Tool
• Write & Correct
• Community Forum
• Chat

Off-topic

• General
• Travel
• Sports
• Food
• etc.

That’s just an example of course. Ideally, subforums could be split up or reorganized each time they start to get a bit confusing.

I want to upload a novel I'm reading to the platform and, needless to say, don't own the rights to it. I don't find it practical to assign the entire book to one passage so I want to load each chapter as a separate passage and then group all of them as a course. From what I can understand the course would be visible to everyone even if I set all passages as private.

I haven’t enabled sharing on a passage because I don’t own the rights to it. Nevertheless I can see it listed in the library. I don’t know if it’s just me or anyone can see it.

I think many of us use other systems like Anki or have our own vocabulary lists, spreadsheets, etc. It would be nice to have the ability to import those into LT in one go. That would greatly reduce the initial workload for intermediate or advanced users, because they wouldn’t have to manually mark hundreds of words as known or learning when they start using the platform. Besides this would make the new texts statistics much more accurate right from the start. 

In German there is a category of verbs called trennbare Verben (separable verbs), which are somewhat akin to English phrasal verbs and are mostly formed by a verb plus a preposition. The difference is that, unlike their English counterparts, German separable verbs are not always separated. Their infinitive and participial forms are always a single word. For example, the verb aufhören (stop/quit) is formed by the verb hören (hear/listen) plus the preposition auf (on), and its participle is aufgehört. Here is a comparison between the conjugated forms of the base verb and the separable verb:

Hör mich! = listen to me!

Hör damit auf! = stop it!

As you can see, the preposition goes at the end. And it can get even worse:

Hör mit dem Lügen auf! = Stop with the lies!

Hör mit diesem verdammten Getrommel gegen die Wand auf! = Stop that damn banging on the wall!

I understand it would be almost impossible to automatically detect if the preposition is working together with the verb or not. But it would be awesome if you could allow users to link those two words manually on a case-by-case basis. That would avoid having incorrect examples being linked to the base verb and it would help people reading public texts which have already been annotated by someone.

This way several words could be grouped under one base form. It would help with statistics, SRS card creation, and organization. Taking German as an example it could be implemented in the following cases:

Declension of nouns, plurals, adjectives and determiners:

• Buch, Buchs -> Buch (book)
• Bücher, Büchern -> Bücher (books)
• gut, gute, guter, guten, gutem, gutes -> gut (good)
• mein, meine, meinen, meinem, meiner, meines -> mein (my)

Verb conjugations

• spiele, spielst, spielt, spielen, gespielt, spielte, spieltest, spielten, etc -> spielen (play) 

Additionally a comment field could be added so that we could input information about each variation (case, tense, grammatical person, etc.). For example: spielt (play, präsens 3. pers. sing.).

If the user was allowed to add all variations in one go, or if declension and verb tables were already loaded beforehand the new text statistics would be much more accurate.

It would be great if these were regarded as different words. You see, in German all nouns are capitalized and sometimes there are other parts of speech which have the same spelling but in lower case and mean something completely different. For example:

Leben (life) and leben (to live)

Macht (power) and macht (makes/make)

Floh (flea) and floh (escaped)

Fliegen (flies, i.e. the plural of ‘fly’) and fliegen (to fly)

As far as I know there is no exception to this rule. The only problem would be how to handle words at the beginning of a sentence which could give a false positive. Maybe in this case the tool could show both possibilities.

I realize that most punctuation marks and numbers are already ignored by the platform, which is a great idea. However I noticed that there are still some cases in which they are regarded as words. So far I’ve spotted the following:

German:

• Angle quotes: » «
• Numbers with symbols like: 100%, $500, €350, etc.

Spanish:

• Angle quotes: « »
• Curly quotes: “ ”
• Numbers with symbols like: 100%, $500, €350, etc.

Hi there!

Here are some observations I had regarding the language settings and displayed languages.

First, I noticed that languages are divided in different ways in the settings screen (native vs known+learning) and the chat screen (spoken vs learning). So there’s a bit of an overlap between what I consider to be three distinct categories: native languages, languages you speak (non-natively) and languages you are learning. If we were to group them I would rather group the first two (languages you already know).

Furthermore, the native language is automatically set as default for translations in reading mode (it can be switched in the term edit window, but not for hover-over translations). This is a nuisance for me because my native language is Spanish but I prefer to study from English given that there are more resources available and it’s closer to my target language (German). That’s why I had to list English as a native language, which is not the case and could confuse people when looking for chat partners.

Last but not least, I noticed that the chat window displays native languages in both categories (speaks AND is learning). I actually think this division is the right approach, I would just take the spoken languages out of the second column and highlight the native language somehow in the first column (in a different color).

Hope you find this useful!