Advise to new users

[Claes7]

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.

[MartinGuehmann]

@Claes7

There will not be a test at the end.

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.

[Obsttorte]

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

[fabbol]

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.

[Obsttorte]

@fabbol

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.

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.