Fixed - Request: Ability to import ‘known‘ and ‘learning’ vocabulary lists

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. 

I like this idea. I'll ask how feasible it is.

We're going to try this - ticket written.

Hi Marko,

Since Anki and other SRS exports normally give 2 columns of data for a typical deck, L1 and L2, we are proposing having the user indicate whether the data file contains "known" or "learning" vocabulary. Does that sound reasonable?

Yes. I think that would do it. So if I understand correctly the approach would involve two stages. You would import a spreadsheet containing known words on one hand and a spreadsheet containing words you are currently studying on a separate step. Is that right? If so, I think that‘d work great.

markoSSS wrote:

You would import a spreadsheet containing known words on one hand and a spreadsheet containing words you are currently studying on a separate step. Is that right?

Probably a tab-delimited text file rather than a spreadsheet, I'm guessing.

leosmith wrote:

Probably a tab-delimited text file rather than a spreadsheet, I'm guessing.

Yes, you are right. I was thinking in terms of spreadsheets because my Anki decks have many extra fields, which means I will have to edit those out in Excel. But that’s just me and I can always save it as a CSV file again so it should be alright.

Hi Marko,

We've created this now. I think it's working alright. Can you please verify? Caution - imports can't be reversed, so you might try it with just a few items first until you are comfortable.  

Hi. I’ve just tested this and it seems to be working pretty well. The only thing I’ve noticed is that existing translations will be replaced if they are different, but changes won’t be applied if they only involve differences in case. For example, if the default translation for ‘Häuser‘ was ‘Houses‘ it won’t be updated to ‘houses’ even though that’s what I imported. Other than that it seems to be working great.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that 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.

markoSSS wrote:

Hi. I’ve just tested this and it seems to be working pretty well. The only thing I’ve noticed is that existing translations will be replaced if they are different, but changes won’t be applied if they only involve differences in case. For example, if the default translation for ‘Häuser‘ was ‘Houses‘ it won’t be updated to ‘houses’ even though that’s what I imported. Other than that it seems to be working great.

I'll ask the question, but it may be similar to this issue that we couldn't solve.

wrote:

The other thing I’d like to point out is that 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.

There is a dropdown for native language which allows you to choose any language. I think I'll rename the columns "Vocabulary in this Language:" and "Definitions in this Language:".

(edit - if you were talking about vocab in general, not regarding importing, please start a new topic)

We've finished discussing this. The capitalization issue is too expensive to fix, and we'll discuss the other issue in the new topic, so this ticket is closed.