@The_Atomic … How are you measuring progress? What makes you think the other app is helping you more?
I think there could be numerous reasons for this.
Let me first offer an opinion. In terms of vocabulary acquisition and rate of acquisition, I think hands down, LingQ and/or other input based models (that also allow for quick and easy look up of words and phrases) will allow you to aquire passive vocabulary quicker than any other method.
Having said that, that vocabulary is entirely dependent on what you are reading or listening to. If I’m reading content related to politics or science or some other topic, I may not be able to understand if someone is speaking to me about the weather. So your other app might be teaching you greetings and how to order food, but if you’ve chosen a lesson in LingQ about the aformentioned topics on politics or science…perhaps you feel those topics aren’t very helpful in your day to day usual conversations or interests. So you might not rate LingQ very beneficial at this point, although perhaps you’ve learned more words than the other app.
You can adjust this by looking for content already present regarding these more common vocabularies or phrases and importing it (or finding it in the library of LingQ). Any easy thing to do would be to ask Chat GPT to give you a dialogue for a particular situation you might typically run into and ask it to also give you further vocabulary and sentences and phrases that use this vocabulary, and then import it into LingQ as a lesson.
Others have mentioned Dreaming Spanish. I think it’s a great resource, but I really do like to see the words myself…You can import their videos using the LingQ browser extension. Whisper will create the transcription for you in Lingq (keep in mind this takes a little bit of time before the lesson appears in your “imported lesson”). So watch their video and then go through the transcript in LingQ and look up any words or sentences you don’t understand. Try to choose videos for your level to do this.
The other thing you might be seeing as an issue to you is that LingQ does not do anything specific to output (other than writing exchange). Perhaps the other app you are using does do this and you feel this is more progress for you because you are outputting. Keep in mind there are three skills you need…reading, listening, speaking, (and writing if this is important to you). So you could be making progress on reading/listening, but it doesn’t feel like progress compared to be able to say something? Then you could still do LingQ…or maybe you do both apps. LingQ is definitely not a one stop shop for all facets of language learning. Nor is any app in my opinion. All have their own strengths.
Keep in mind though that your passive vocabulary is, by necessity and practicality, going to be larger than your active (output) vocabulary. If you can say something, but you don’t understand what someone replies back to you then you are going to be lost after one sentence, regardless of whether you could recite Hamlet in your target language. So I would suggest that it’s very important to get your passive vocabulary very high as well as listening which LingQ definitely exercises the best.
Perhaps it is also how you are using LingQ. Are you repeating lessons? Are you moving forward to the next lesson only if you “know” all the words? How are you determining when you “know” a word?
I do have some basic suggestions to ponder (although everyone should play around and do what works best).
Read each lesson in sentence mode. Read the sentence, try to understand the meaning of the words and sentence as a whole. If not understood in its entirety, click the “show translation” button to show the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Look at the individual words and LingQ them (mark known or some yellow level). My suggestion would to be to mark it Known if you know the word’s meaning in this context (you can always change it back to yellow if you encounter it again and don’t understand it).
After doing this, read the sentence again trying to again understand with any of this newfound knowledge. If you don’t remember everything, don’t worry, maybe read the translation again and then move on to the next sentence. Keep doing this. You can also play the sound, and definitely in the beginning stages this important to listen and read to start working on the sounds and word(visual) linkage. You should also try to pronounce the sentence as you hear it. You can add or leave in any of these depending on your circumstances at the time (i.e. maybe you don’t want to practice pronunciation while you are reading/listening on the bus). Or maybe you just feel like reading.
If you are a beginner and your lessons are fairly short, then you might want to repeat them a few times (not necessarily at the same sitting). You should start to “know” some of these words with enough repetition. If you do decide to repeat lesson, do not make the mistake of staying on the same lesson until you feel you know all the words. You will severely limit your progress. Some words will stick easy, other words may take a long time and hundreds of repetitions in different contexts. It’s best to move on, because you will gain many hundreds of more easily sticking words. Allow that to happen rather than limiting yourself from learning based on the non sticking words.
You do NOT have to repeat lessons. You can move on. You will see the most common words over and over in different contexts.
Another thing you can do if you don’t want to repeat lessons but maybe want to get some repeated viewings of certain words is to go back into a lesson that you have already read, and hop to each yellow word and read the word in that sentence (and perhaps surrounding sentences). If you understand the word, mark it known. If not, move on to the next word. Doing this will save some time over reading the entire lesson again.
Sorry about the long post, but hopefully it’s helpful.
If you have been studying a year, and you find the mini-stories a little boring, you could look for some content that interests you more. My reading pace picked up quite a bit when I read some translated versions of books I like in Spanish. Again, good luck!