I have found this wonderful resource – HappyLifeStyle.com – and it suits LingQ just like a glove! Short manageable entries on a wide range of topics, absolutely free, intermediate difficulty, useful vocab, each and every entry – with an audio. The audio may be a bit monotonous - probably it’s machine reading – but it’s good nonetheless.
So far I’ve uploaded the following:
Travelling advice for the Japanese - Login - LingQ
Changing your life as a NEET - Login - LingQ
Tired of human relationship - Login - LingQ
This resource is like a golden mine, but uploading takes time –
so I thought – maybe you can help me “mining”?
Add more courses and tag them with a “Happylifestyle” tag. (If you have questions about how I did it – I’d be happy to answer!)
I suggest we can keep a list for easier collaboration (to keep track and to see uploads in progress, to avoid overlaps). HappyLifeStyle - LingQ uploads - Google Sheets
Together, we can create more stepping stones towards the Japanese mastery. This language is a tough one, but we will be there, eventually, one LingQ after another.
Alisa
Alisa, thanks so much! I’ve been meaning to go through these.
I am not sure if you have noticed but in the Japanese library, LingQ has been automatically pulling HappyLifeStyle. A new one usually appears everyday. This is because they have an RSS feed which LingQ is able to pull from.
Mind you, there’s no audio when LingQ uses the RSS feed (and yes, it looks like HappyLifeStyle’s audio is robot generated).
Alisa, If you find content you would like to add to LingQ, rather than create the courses manually, you can share with us the site’s RSS feed. Please add the RSS feed to the google sheet below… That way, I will add the RSS feed to LingQ’s media database and the lessons will start popping up. LingQ also works with YouTube RSS feeds too.
Wow, thank you!!! No, I didn’t notice that HappyLife is integrated - that makes my life so much easier!!!
I’ve tried it out - the audio is not “scraped”, so if I want to make a course public I still would need to do it manually, right? In any case, still it’s waay easier now! Because these are convenient and fast read, I consume them faster than I produce them.
By the way, how do I know what LingQ supports? I’ve seen a list on the side panel of the “import” page and thought that this is it (I would have attache a prints screen… if I could… )
Yes, the audio isn’t scrapped from this site. But that’s fine,. For me personally, I’d much rather here native talkers than a robot generated voice In my opinion, you don’t have to add the audio manually but if you would like to, feel free. I don’t know how others feel about the audio from that site…
"By the way, how do I know what LingQ supports? I’ve seen a list on the side panel of the “import” page and thought that this is it (I would have attache a prints screen… if I could… ) "
If it’s a blog, web page 90% of the time it should be OK. All YouTube videos are fine for the most part as long as they have close captions.
The special cases are sites like Animelon and such. Sites that host video and audio. They need to be added by our development team before being able to be imported.
The easiest way to do all this is to get the RSS feed (if available) that way, new people who try out LingQ won’t have to search the web to find things to import… it will already be there in the library feed. This is one of the goals we have in mind for LingQ.
Ahh, that makes me see the feed in a different light now! I thought it was solely news feed, so I avoided it, hehe.
In any case, the articles that are in the feed are rather for private import, as they don’t have audio, right? When imported they will all go to “Quick Imports” folder, right? I do like to have courses… It, kind of, gives me the feeling of some order and progress And predictability (I know what to expect, in terms of level of difficulty and length)
The robotic voice on HappyLife is awful, I agree, but for me - better than nothing, for two reasons - it still, somehow, walks me through the text nonetheless, and also - I can share the course.
About the GoogleSheet you shared - I have a question - I went over some of the sources that are listed there and I saw good YouTube blogs\vlogs, but without subtitles - how good is that for LingQ?
When importing from sources in your library feed, they shouldn’t go into quick imports. They should go into a new course that is named after the content you’ve imported.
YouTube/vlogs without subs won’t work in LingQ and shouldn’t be added. The closed captions need to be enabled
This language is a tough one, but we will be there, eventually, one LingQ after another. 
