One year ago, I started learning English with the Linguist system. Today, my goal is reached : reading books in English easily. I am happy. That 's why I would like to say “Big thanks to all team of the Linguist”.
However, even if it was my second objective, I am not able to speak English fluently because of lack of practice. It was my fault. I did not follow my learning program with the Linguist system. I did not enough participate to speaking events. But all of this does not matter. I will set another goal and I will put the efforts necessary to achieve that goal.
Thanks again !
Hi,
Can you tell us more about your achievement? How many words do you know? How many did you read? Are you able to understand spoken English easily and watching films without subtitles?
I have been learning with the linguist half a year. According to statistics I know 5100 words and have read ten times more.
My goal to be able to understand what I hear is still out of reach for me 
But I am not going to give up! 
That’s great Regis! You’re welcome! It’s always nice to hear that we’re making a difference here at LingQ. I know you will achieve your goal of speaking if you meet your targets. Good luck!
marcin82, the same goes for you. Meet your targets and you will achieve your goals. I expect to hear your happy testimonial soon, as well! 
Hi Regis,
congratulations. It’s good to know it is really possible!!
I guess I’m about 7-8 months around here, and one of my goals is to read books too. But although I improved a lot, I can’t read books very comfortably yet.
My statistics show around 14000 known words, what about yours?
Marcin, I can’t understand movies very well yet, but it depends on the movie. I could watch “The pursuit of happiness” without captions and without much previous information about the movie, but not “American Beauty”, even though I had already watched it with captions some years ago.
But I can understand technical presentations without major problems. Also, I can write pretty well in professional settings. This was indeed my greatest achievement until now, and it is really great for me, but sometimes I get a little frustrated when I can’t understand something I would like to.
I’m happy to know you are meeting your goals. But what do you mean by reading books? It always depends on the content. I can read some books and there are other I can’t read that easily and I have been learning English for at least 8 years, but maybe I could add some more when I was a child. I can read, for example, “The Chronicles of Narnia” without ever consulting the dictionary and only finding an unkown word every 5 pages or more. But when I read “The Lord of the Rings” I didn’t consult the dictionary because, for every paragraph there could be 5 unknown words…
Hi everyone !
Thanks for your comments !
I have only 6 500 known words. But I notice that English had a lot words with latin roots. And this knowlegde of Latin help me to presume the meaning of many words. Sometimes they have the same spelling but the pronunciation is different. I suppose that’s why I can read easily many books in English.
On the other end this depends on field of the article you read. If you read a book on Medecine even if in your native language you would look up many words in a dictionnary because you do not get in this field.
Thanks all !
Ana,
14000 is a huge amount of words. You must have read a great number of content and all this in 8 months? How quickly do you move on to next item? I spend on one item two or sometimes three days. Perhaps a bit too long.
It does not sound encouraging that you know so many words and still have trouble understanding. Do you still feel you lack some or is it because you miss them when natives are speaking fast?
Hi, Marcin,
please, don’t be discouraged because of my comments. I really improved a lot during these 8 months!
Yes, I read a lot. I read Steve’s book, another one on a technical subject I was interested in, and I’m reading ‘Digital Fortress’ right now. Also, I studied a fair amount of EnglishLingq’s episodes and a lot of smaller articles, coming from varied sites.
I feel I lack some vocabulary yet, although I can perceive that it is much better now. About movies and naturally spoken podcasts, I believe there are two main problems:
- the so called (and so hated!) idioms and phrasal verbs, they are too many, and they use to be confusing too.
- yes, the speed is an important issue. With the audiobook I’m studying, I can understand the story pretty well even though I still need to make 20-30 lingqs per chapter. (I usually listen to it a few times before I read). But when I go to a tech podcast, for instance, I loose entire minutes of meaning. In movies, I loose entire dialogs.
About moving to the next item, I’m not that disciplined! I generally have about 10 items in my workdesk. So when I decide to study, I do varied things: study some item’s vocabulary, read and make lingq’s from a new item, re-read and re-listen an already studied item. This way, I believe each item can stay at my workdesk for one or two weeks, depending on the time I could spend studying English during those weeks.
Well, I hope it answers your questions!
Hi, Pedro,
by reading a book I meant reading a novel, which a general use vocabulary. As I said in the last post, I’m reading Digital Fortress, and since I’m a tech professional, the technical words there are not a problem for me. But the general vocabulary is indeed a problem. I make 20-30 lingqs per chapter, and most of them are new words, not idioms or phrases!
Just to give another example, I’m studying a newsweek magazine article about the Kindle e-book reader, and I could get most of the meaning while listening to it, but I made 106 lingqs from it!
This really amazes me. I couldn’t figure out how many different words a language can have and I need to agree with Steve: THIS is what make the learning of a new language so difficult. You can explain the grammar rules in a 100-page manual, but according to my statistics I read 350.000 words since I started with Lingq, and I still get 100 new words from a single magazine article…
And there is no shortcut for this: just reading, reading, reading, listening, listening, listening, studying, studying, studying…
The good news is that ‘digital fortress’ is a funny story and the kindle is an interesting gadget to learn about… at least for me!
Yes, maybe I should simply go on and read German, even when there are lots of words I can’t understand… Thanks for telling us your experience Ana.
You’re welcome, Pedro.
Just a small correction in my last post: with a general use vocabulary…
Yes, I think you’d better go on and read your German. Just focus more on the subject and less on the unknown vocabulary.
I just started French from scratch a few weeks ago, and in the 5th item I got stucked with a phrase I couldn’t understand, even though I created lingqs to all its words… then I gave up on the phrase…
Yesterday, I found part of the same phrase in another item, and then I realized it was an expression (idiom?) and then I could understand the previous phrase. It’s pure Steve’s method at work!
I must admitt it’s a somewhat frightening approach in this very beginning and it is easy to get caugth thinking about going to a more traditional method. But I took this as a challenge and decided to stick with the method the more strictly that I can for at least for 6 months, to see what happens.
I’ll tell you then…
Hi ana-paula,
Sou novo por aqui e gostaria de alguém para me esclarecer algumas dúvidas e dicas suas. Estou aprendendo inglês, consigo ler mas sou péssimo para escrever. Teria como a gente conversar por e-mail? O meu é ledsr@oi.com.br.
Obrigado,
Leandro