Hi,
in the phrase: "it differs so rightly from one frequency level to the other. "
shouldn’t it be “highly” instead of rightly?
It must be “so slightly”, I would assume, short of reading the whole thing again. Hi Ana. I am working on Portuguese right now by the way. A brief rest from Russian.
Hi, Steve,
I had a complete break last week, but I’m back now.
I’m glad you’re studying Portuguese again, maybe we can talk to each other in Portuguese more comfortably soon. 
By the way, I think “so slightly” doesn’t fit well in the context, because the difference he was talking about is big.
If you copy and paste the whole paragraph I might have a better chance of figuring it out. Obrigado.
Hi ana-paula,
we have a family member from Brazil and she have to learn German. She is speaking German as beginner but she whant to learn better for eventually getting a job.
I want to bring her to LingQ but at the moment she decided to go to a school. For some people it’s difficult to understand that they could learn for herself. They need a contact person. We will see.
Hi, Irene,
I can understand this kind of resistance, mainly from a beginner. Actually, I’m not sure how lingq would work for beginners. I’ve been promissing to study French from scratch to get a feeling for this, but right now I’m somewhat obssessed about English. 
Why don’t you suggest her to use lingq together with her school studies, as a reading and listening practicing tool? Maybe this is a way of ‘breaking the ice’.
Ana
Thanks for feedback Ana,
I agree - sometimes its really difficult to handle LingQ if you cannot understand the language.
Daniela is not really a beginner, she is higher. I suggested LingQ at first for listening, importing own text and learning vocabulary.
I showed her the forum and the Portuguese part so I thought here she can ask questions in her native language.
Irene
A lot of people have trouble believing that they can learn without a teacher and a classroom. They have been conditioned for so long to believe that they must have these things. It’s too bad because we can pretty much guarantee that she will achieve less at school than she would on LingQ. After all, even those people who do learn “in the classroom” really do most of their actual learning on their own. At least if you can get her to try it as a supplement as Ana suggests, she might get hooked.
I do my best for persuade and tell each people about my improvement with LingQ
I agree with you, Mark, when you say she would do better at LingQ than at school, given the same effort employed.
But the main problem here is the discipline needed to learn by using LingQ. There are no assigned tasks, no dead-lines, no exams, so no urgent need for studying. Most people simply can’t keep studying like this…
exactly that is the point. The people I spoke with often said “I have not enough energie or discipline”.
But when I ask how long they learn at home after school (or adult education) I hear often “not enough, not long…”
I think people learn really when they have fun with the language.
I never thought I will have fun with English but I found it with LingQ
You’re right, Irene, the point is that most people simply don’t study enough, no matter how.
Good schools, teachers, books, methods and computerized systems can all be valuable, but only if the learner is really engaged in his or her learning. I believe if your Brazilian friend really needs to speak German, and is driven to do so, she will benefit both from her school AND from LingQ.
I read somewhere from Steve that he is the person who spends more time in studying languages he ever knew, so “guess what”, he is the person who speaks more languages he knows. It’s obvious! Of course Steve is quite a smart man, and this helps a lot, but any not handicaped person who had studied languages for 30 years 2 hours a day would end up knowing a fair amount of languages.
Of course, granted the person has the willingness to make the needed effort, I still believe LingQ is one of the most valuable tools to speed up the whole process.
Ana,
I agree that most people simply don’t study enough. Yet I can not agree that “how” does not matter. The “How” does really matter. Most of us do not have so strong spirit that we are willing to continue studying language for many months without noticeable results. We have to feel that our efforts bring genuine fruits but that does not happen so often at formal way of teaching languages.
Hi, Loby,
maybe I haven’t expressed myself very well. What I meant is that people simply do not study enough, either if they go to school or if they chose some kind of self-study method.
Of course, there are methods that seems to work better or faster than others. But I still believe that even with some kind of more traditional method it is possible to improve a lot if the student is motivated enough.
Two years ago I needed an intermediate Spanish certificate quickly, so I went to a teacher and took classes twice a week. He used a quite traditional and somewhat boring book, but I achieved what they considered a higher intermediate level of Spanish in about 8 months! So, despite of his awful method, I ended up being able to read newspapers and listen to podcasts, simply because I was very driven to get that certificate.
Because of this experience, I still believe that in scale of importance, student motivation is far away the most important factor in learning another language. Then, if some particular method is able to improve your motivation, it will probably more effective for you.
Ana,
Exactly. Yet I have to add that in my opinion most of the methods are rather able to destroy our motivation :). Out of hand I have to agree that if a method is able to destroy our motivation it means that the motivation was not highly strong. That is right.
By the way. Congratulations on achieving your language goals.
Loby,
yes, I have to admitt laughting that I cursed my poor Spanish teacher and his terrible books a few times during those 8 months…
In that case, I indeed had an urgent and quite objective goal, otherwise I certainly would had dropped out that classes. Actually that was what I did as soon as I got my certificate…
A true pitty, because I could be pretty fluent in Spanish by now, instead of having forgotten a great amount of what I learned…
Thanks for your feedback. I like very much to practice my English in such lively discussions!
As a Portuguese speaker, if you had access to good Spanish audio books and the texts you would have learned faster and more enjoyably. Do you need Spanish to pass a test or to use it. If the goal is to use, either for reading or listening or speaking, you do not need a teacher.
I really recommend Rubem Alves, not only for his wonderfully narrated Portuguese, which I am enjoying now, but also for the message. Anyone who is learning Portuguese should get them.
By the way the way I have found some Spanish audiobooks here. One is Da Vinci code in Spanish, another is a novel by Isabel Allende called Inez something…I cannot remember now.
But Alves is great!
I know, I know, Steve, but I didn’t know LingQ at that time…
Also, I needed the certificate, but I really liked it and probabily would had kept studying it if I knew LingQ then.
But now I’m not likely to re-start it soon… I have French first in my priority list… after having my English obssession cured, of course!