Advise to new users

Open Forum
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I thought it might be useful to have a tread were more experienced users could give general advise to newcomers. I have used the platform for four years now (I think), so perhaps I qualify as a veteran. However that might be, I will be so presumptuous and offer unsolicited advice.

There are almost always a couple of topics ongoing in the forum from new users who seems to be disappointed or confused. Almost all of them have in common that they bemoan how some metric on Lingq is calculated. Other experienced users have touched upon the idea below in some of these threads before, so I’m not claiming myself to be original, but here it goes anyways:

I would advise to let go of what could be called a schoolboy attitude. You’re not a pupil in a classroom, who have to impress some teacher, nor will anybody accuse you of cheating. There will not be a test at the end. You are a grown up independent learner who wants to acquire a skill, not get a diploma. It doesn’t matter how known words are calculated, if you exempt proper names from the statistics or if the calculated time spent on something is off.

I have 46k known words in French (48k I Italian I think). Among these there are a certain number of proper names. I have no idea if they amount to 2k or 10k. Heck, I even have words in Cyrillic that counts as known French words. It doesn’t matter. My current competence in French is what it is, regardless if my true number of known words are 15k or 44k.

This platform is a crutch, or training wheels, that lets you tackle pieces of language that are a bit (or very, if you have a high tolerance for struggle) too difficult for you at the moment. The statistics are useful to get a general sense of progression, or as an indicator of how difficult a new piece of text is; but that’s all.

Right now I am, with the help of Lingq, reading Salammbô by Flaubert (a marvellous read by the way, highly recommended). In this text I have the word ”onagre” marked as known. The meaning of the word is: a south East Asian donkey, or, a type of siege engine (suitable to give the Phoenicians hell!). In six months time I will certainly have forgotten the meaning and once more have no idea what an ”onagre” is. But my French skills will anyhow be at a higher level. That is all that matters.

This became a very verbose tread start, for that I apologise.

Fellow veterans are very welcome to add their own advise to new users.

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Of course, there is a test. It’s whether you can understand and whether you can be understood. And even this depends on your goal. If you just want to read literature in a new language and you want to enjoy it then it’s only whether you can understand. And even that does not need to be perfect.

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I think the point is the extreme focus on the metrics provided by LingQ. Of course, in the end it comes down to how well you can do the things in the language you want to do, but that is something different then counting how many strings you were able to recognize or how much time you’ve spend listening etc…

A good grade in a math test doesn’t imply you have a good understanding of the matter, if the test doesn’t require said understanding. In return, having a bad grade might not mean you haven’t understood it.

I personally tend to ignore all the stats and if I could (as in if the LingQ devs would allow me to), I would disable all that nonsense.

In regards to the topic of the thread:

  • spend a sufficient time investigating the how to, so read up on how language is taught or what methods are available, what people do when they try to teach themselves a language (you can find videos on YouTube about that for example), presentations on that matter (TedTalks etc…)
  • try out different approaches and see what works for you, don’t stick to a learning method just because others say the method is good
  • consider what you are learning a language for and adopt you strategies and where you put your focus on
  • varying the focus (so how much time you spend on what) and the methods used can help keep you motivated as can having a break

mindset:

  • accept that learning a complex skill takes time (as in years) and will require hard work, but that it’s like that for everyone and over time you will improve, even if you might not notice that (going back to older content you struggled earlier on can be a good motivator, as it will make you notice you’ve improved)
  • the more you think I’m not a language person, I’m not so smart, I lack talent the longer it will take, a healthy portion of arrogance is very helpful :wink:
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Excellent advice. I think a lot of confusion for new users steams from what you might call a “duty premise”. Users think that by, e.g. turning a blue word yellow, they are committing to learning it, that they now are obliged to learn this word. Similarly, they feel like marking a word “known” means they commit to never forgetting it again, and they worry about not knowing it the next time they see it as a white word. As if they are turning in a test to their teacher who is going to grade their performance and judge them for getting something wrong.

My number-one advice is to think of LingQ as a mark-up tool. It helps you mark up text to enable you to learn the language. Rather than committing to learning a word by turning it yellow, you are actually relieving yourself of the necessity of memorizing the word: you are tagging it with its translation for future reference. It means that you do not need to worry about it again until you notice yourself remembering it naturally.

And as for turning a word “known”, you are just telling the tool not to draw attention to this word in the future. If you forget it, you can always turn it back to yellow and tag it again.

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It can be seen as a measure for the difficulty of a text. In addition to the new words count you can see how many words you haven’t memorized yet (more or less). This way you can sort out content that is either too easy or too difficult and may be able to differentiate between simpler and harder lessons, to choose from based on you current frustration tolerance level. :wink:

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Yes, of course, that is the other use of “known”.

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Maybe a little more general advice, not just when using lingq. Don’t believe in the promises that you can learn a language in 3 months or with 10 mins a day, or anything in these lines. It’s not going to happen and it just disappoints when it doesn’t happen as easily. Ofcourse depends on your targets, but even for basic level of spontanious communication I would say you need a lot more. I would say an hour a day with expectation that it will take years is more realistic. Consistency is good, but you don’t have to be consistent on daily basis. When you have time (and motivation), binge rather than doing 10 mins also those days and don’t do anything on those days you are too busy otherwise.

As to using lingq, don’t get stuck in details too early. Understanding of the language is build step by step, piece by piece. You don’t have to know or even see all the details once you encounter them. Slowly everything starts to make sense. Personally with spanish I marked pretty much all conjucations of verbs to known if I knew it’s basic form and roughly the conjugation. Didn’t bother with trying to learn subjunctive and probably many times didn’t even recognize it. Now it’s starting to make sense, and even if I don’t know the difference it makes in all cases yet, I mostly can see it. As other pieces around are starting to be more clear, it’s easier to pinpoint the differences it makes.

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Congratulations. I’m studying English with LINGq and I agree with you. Like Steve kauffman and Luca Lampariello approached in their books, the language learning journey is not about the metrics, tests, datas or anything. You just need to put a lot effort to trying acquire a skill and visualize where you can reach on your target language. Like me for example, I know that I’m making a lot of mistakes writing this text but when I compare with two months ago, I could not be able even read your text!! Language must be deal like a process, like a mean to achieve something that you want. Thanks again.

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Not so. Some of us complain about how buggy LingQ is. And poorly designed.

For instance several months ago Sentence Translation was broken for a week. How did that version get released? Why couldn’t LingQ roll it back immediately using standard source code control?

I’m a retired senior software engineer. No company I ever worked for would have allowed that.

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Re: Metrics

Sure, there are ongoing discussions of the meaning of the metrics, such as “LingQ: The Illusion of Metrics.”

But the most consistent criticism from newcomers is that LingQ will mark words known at the end of the page or the end of the section, much to the unpleasant surprise of the users.

At least four times I imported text into LingQ, loaded a section, clicked to the end to check the text was good, then clicked the arrow on the last sentence.

Boom! The whole section was immediately marked known and the known language statistic was broken.

This is not what new users expect nor want. It violates standard interface guidelines that software does not change the user’s world behind his/her back.

LingQ users have been screaming at LingQ for the past two years and more. After much denial that it was a problem and insistence that it was the way LingQ was supposed to work, LingQ finally, begrudgingly made changes.

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OK, let’s change “almost all of them” to “many of them”. My post doesn’t adress legitime complaints about the softwares bugginess (which also I find annoying, but manageable (with a lot of restarts)). I have always found fanboyism a strange phenomena, and I’m not about to start defending the site from legitime criticism.

My post were aimed at people who seems to treat language learning too much like a video game. Jessei above, in the section about don’t getting too bogged down in details early, makes a great point about how the competence sort of sneaks up on you. It’s not binary: ignorance - knowledge. Its more along the lines of: total Ignorance - abstract comprehension - sort of getting it - really getting it - full comprehension (where you ask yourself how anybody could find that word or phrase difficult to understand, its obvious). In this process statistics doesn’t matter.

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Absolutely! A very important observation, which I also have discovered. And the statistics on this site doesn’t show this, even if it count “known words” etc.

I think most of the statistics is not important, and without them, the learning process would not suffer much or even not affect it at all.