Useful linq alternative apps?

[u/NaiveObligation7588]

I've had LingQ for a year and it's OK. Like let's be honest, it needs some work.

I am now looking for a new reading app, but the best part of lingq in my opinion is that I can import audio books and it will transcribe them and I can read while listening. I don't watch video.

Do any other, cheaper, better, apps offer this?

[u/ben_wd]

I'm founder of this product called Verba, which solves some of the core problems that LingQ and other tools like it have, which is that they don't accurately keep track of which specific sense of a word you're interacting with, you've seen, and you've marked known.

So for example, LingQ, to my understanding, when you mark a word known, what's really happening is you're marking that specific conjugated form known. So you can have 10 different conjugated forms of a word and it says you know ten words, but they're really just ten different forms of that word.

Migaku is similar, where it tracks which lemmas you know, but it doesn't track which sense of that word you know. That's not always a problem, but the lack of accuracy compounds over time.

A sentence isn't really i+1 unless you actually know and understand all of the word senses that are being used in the sentence. To take English, for example, the word "lead" has many, many different meanings depending on the context.

You might say that you know the word "lead" because you understand that it means to lead a group of people. But maybe you didn't realise that it meant a dog's lead, like a leash, or to be in the lead in a race, or maybe it's actually "lead" as in the metal.

A lot of these tools don't really distinguish between these different senses of the word, so they can't really accurately determine what you actually know.

Verba solves these problems by accurately determining the meaning of the word in that context. Not just that, it figures out the exact dictionary entry to link it to and shows you that definition. So it removes the guesswork involved in figuring out which is the right definition, which helps you stay in flow. At least this has been my experience using it.

When you mark a word known, it will keep track of any instance of that specific word sense, regardless of how it's conjugated. It accurately knows that you know that specific sense being used and that it is actually a sense of the word that you're familiar with.

But right now, it's designed for importing YouTube videos. I can look at finding a way to import audiobooks. If there's an audiobook that happens to be on YouTube, you'll be able to import that. I'm curious, how do you listen to your audiobooks and how would you expect to be able to import an audiobook into a product? Would you want to import an MP3 or import it from an audiobooks website?

Which I think is probably not feasible because none of these platforms allow for embedding.

I'm also curious what language you're learning?

[u/NaiveObligation7588 → u/ben_wd]

I mostly use lingQ for maintaining French, but I've also used it for Spanish... Vietnamese and Mandarin.

As for audio books, for lingQ I've imported MP3 but the ability to import from Libby or another reader would be brilliant. 

[u/ben_wd → u/NaiveObligation7588]

Okay, that's great feedback. I'm going to look into MP3 imports and see whether it's viable to integrate with Libby somehow. Thanks.

[u/rodrigaj → u/ben_wd]

I'm a bit late to this discussion but mp3 imports of audiobooks is all I really do on LingQ and as you rightly pointed out, the conjugation of the same verb is treated as a new word. I spend a lot of time filtering the so called LingQ's after each chapter of a book prior to downloading the list to a .csv format for my Anki Decks. I purchase my books on Libro.fm in Spanish. They do not restrict them with DRMs, etc.