No language is a breeze, and Steve Kaufmann himself has said that language learning takes a whole lot of work. Also, most of language acquisition is subconscious, so you don’t consciously see the improvement that’s going on in your brain. But as time goes by, if you keep reading, you will understand more of what you’re reading. If there is a trick to LingQ, it’s to read a lot - I mean a LOT - in your target language. The more you immerse yourself in it, the faster you will learn.
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I’ve been at LingQ for over a year. Almost all of that time was spent in Sentence View, reading and listening, plus a fair amount of repeating aloud or shadowing.
When I listen, it’s mostly on a sentence basis, not by hitting the Play button in the lower left.
This work adds up over time, though there are periods when it’s hard to feel one is making much progress.
I do recommend importing text for content you want to read. The Text-to-Speech is adequate (at least in French) for listening comprehension.
LingQ has lots of other features, but I haven’t found much use for them. Also be aware there are many bugs and poor design choices in LingQ that one must live with.
In recent months I have also found ChatGPT useful for questions about expressions, unusual word usage and breaking down phrases or sentences that look like word soup at first encounter.
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@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.
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p.s. if speaking early is important to you, then you will have to practice that. LingQ does not help with this and you will have to use other methods to test. Either via tutors, language partners, speaking to yourself, speaking on camera, or other apps for example. You can work on some output via LingQ. One thing I’ve been doing is going through the mini stories, or other lessons within my native language (English). Sentence by sentence, trying to essentially translate from my native to the target…either speaking or thinking or writing. That will help with output. Perhaps then at the very end of one of these lessons, try to speak about the lesson as a whole. Doesn’t need to be verbatim for any of this…you just want to say whatever or however you can say it. If you don’t know, then look it up…DeepL, chatgpt, etc. You can LingQ into your target language in this manner…sentence translation won’t work unless you do some finagling, but for short phrases and words you can set the dictionary in to your target language.
Other output ideas you can do, non lingq related is to keep a daily or weekly journal. Pretend you are telling someone about your day…either try to speak it out or write it out, or both. Look up how to say things you don’t know in deepl or chatgpt. Once you are done you can use chatgpt to correct you or give you help on saying things in a better way. Or submit to writing exchange on LingQ and someone will hopefully review. Then you can try to recite and memorize some of these sentences. These will be words and phrases that you might use every day…or you can write and focus on those other words and phrases you currently use daily. Ask chatgpt how you would say them… Then import that into LingQ
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That’s what happened to me in Turkish. Last March I started with the mini-stories, and found I could learn the words prettly easily (“Susan smiled at him. John sat down.”), but what were all those endings? I didn’t know. I got through 20 or 30 stories, but I wasn’t learning, so I stopped.
Last August, I found Language Transfer, and did their 44-lesson audio-only course in Turkish, then found another series of 100 lessons on Turkish grammar (mostly endings) and did that. Just 1-2 lessons a day, never more. After that I started the mini-stories again, and now I enjoy them. I know (or can figure out) all the endings. Each story has enough repitition that when I get to the questions at the end, I can just listen and answer them.
I’m a firm believer in the “comprehensible input” method, but for me it doesn’t work well at the very beginning. It might also depend on the language you’re learning. If it is fairly similar to one you know, maybe you’ll need less of the “grammar” stuff.
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Absolutely right. The reason why it doesn’t work at the very beginning is that you’re not dealing with “comprehensible input” but with “incomprehensible input”. That’s why, in my opinion, it’s better to learn about the basics first and only then switch to LingQ (regardless of what Mr. Kaufmann thinks about it).
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Yes. More listening and reading. If you don’t want to do it on LingQ, try just watching Dreaming Spanish on YouTube. So, in general, yes! that is correct thank you for your input .The key is a regular consistency of 30 minutes to an hour each day for three months. If you give it that, then you’ll surely see a difference.
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I am sure Steve uses LingQ. Some of its features are there because they help him. He shows statistics to show that he has used it a lot.
The more important question is: what else does Steve use? He says he buys lots of beginner books when he starts a new language. He does lots of one on one tutor sessions with iTalki (or something like that). He reads books in the language (books, not text in LingQ). So he uses some of the LingQ features, and also uses other things.
But don’t copy Steve’s method. It’s part of his method for learning his 19th language, not his first or second. And he still takes a couple years to learn each new language.
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Hello fellow Lingqer,
I feel I am in a similar situation to you and felt I wasn’t making enough progress. I am sure there are others with far more expertise to advise on the process but it maybe worth sharing what I have tried and what I find currently works for me.
First of all I am one of those people who probably spends far too much time reading about the theory of doing something rather than focus on the doing. I guess this is linked with a fear of wasting thousands of hours of my life on an inefficient way of doing something. Because of this I have wasted a lot of my hard earned money or various apps and programmes linked to learning Spanish. Most of them I have abandoned as they didn’t seem to work for me. I have stuck with Lingq because the concept feels right to me but I have also struggled to make the progress I was hoping for.
Therefore, I took a break from Lingq and explored some additional apps and resources to help speed up my learning. I eventually found a web based Spanish course called Fluencia that is by the same company that does the excellent Spanish Dictionary website.
Fluencia has helped me understand Spanish grammar and how sentences are constructed. It drills you again and again until you grasp each concept and slowly adds more vocabulary. It also gives you a sense of progress as you work through the 600 units. I am currently around 159 units in and feel I have learned so much that will help me with my reading on Lingq and help me to get the best out of Lingq.
For example, I now know that when ‘tener + que’ appears these words in combination have a particular meaning and when they also have ‘+ ver’ on the end they have another meaning again. Without this training I might save them as individual lingqs without grasping how they work in combination in various conjugations. Similarly, where as previously I was seeing a number of examples of what I thought were different words I can now recognise the verb stems much more easily.
Now I have a basic understanding of some of the grammatical structure of Spanish I am now planning on increasing my read again via Lingq and doing both Fluencia and Lingq together until I’ve completed fluencia.
As another person mentioned Chat GPT is also good if you paste in sentences and ask it to break them down it will give you a really good understanding of the grammatical structure.
I am sure we are all making progress slowly but it doesn’t always feel that way as it’s such a slow process. Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience as it’s good to know there are others in the same boat.
Best wishes
Adam
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I’ve achieved above average results in a few different task/learning domains in an audodidactic fashion. A couple of comments:
(1) If you are not just learning, but also figuring out how to learn, you have to resolve to “waste time”. The only other option is to find someone else who has also done the autodidactic part, and to have enough of a philosophical grasp of the learning domain to assess the degree to which their stated methods are responsible for their success, and then obey them for the long haul. The philosophical acumen is rare, and in modern culture the inclination to obey is almost zero, so most likely you are going to go the autodidact route, which again, means “wasting time”.
(2) The key is to waste time intelligently. So you have to have a rough idea of the appropriate time frame over which to test a method of work and a rough idea of a realistic goal at the end of that time period to use to assess your methodology. In my experience you need to be willing to burn at least six months being extremely disciplined with your method, before you can honestly evaluate it. Again, there’s a lot of art here, but any six months spent working systematically and consistently and then actively trying to evaluate for yourself how things went at the end of those six months is time well spent.
(3) You also need to figure out how to tweak your methods in intelligent increments. What I mean by that is that whatever method you use for the first six months of work should form the basis for your next six months. If you change methodology radically rather than systematically, not only are you disrupting whatever skill base you built with your first method, but you are robbing your mind of the structure that you need to actually figure out what works over time.
The worst case scenario is that you pay money for something, try it for two weeks, decide it doesn’t work, fall in love with some new ideology that completely contradicts your first method, pay money for that, try it for two weeks, and then rinse and repeat, with lots of idle periods and wishful thinking in between. That is wasting time.
The inevitable inefficiencies of your first year or two of work are not time wasted if you use them to develop a learning process that not only works for your current domain, but builds skills and character traits that you apply to the next task you set yourself.
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I think I understand what you are saying and agree to a degree. We do live in a culture of instant fixes and gratification. Youtube is full of seductive hooks like ‘How I learned Spanish in two months’ I am not a fan of the cult of outcomes. I read somewhere that happiness is finding an interest or hobby that you will never master. It’s really important to enjoy the process I think.
I don’t agree that you have to spend 6 months on something to truly evaluate it. I did a few months of Dreaming Spanish and tried to follow the method they set out. It may or may not work but I am sceptical that it was efficient. But more than that it was tedious after a while. Almost like force feeding over and over again just to focus on some holy grail thousands of hours down the line. No thanks. Life is too short. I also think that if you enjoy something it’s much easier to do it. For me it is a combination of discipline but also instinct. if you are very left brained it might be easy to simply focus on detail and repetitious drills in robotic fashion and then do some kind of objective analysis of the product at the end of it. That’s just not me, This is more of a journey of trial, error and discovery. Small things have kept me inspired and provided hints along the way.
I overheard someone say i’t’s like breaking a code.’ For some reason this inspired me. It made me feel that what I was doing had some fun element and gratification rather than just trying to get to a place where I said I could speak a language (outcome). Each little de-coding now has an element of excitement. I read Steve say you forget and you forget but slowly the cloud lifts. This again resonated with me and made sense. All those frustrations over forgotten words are now seen as part of the process and I can ‘see the cloud slowly lifting’.
So I would say I am able to listen to those other autodidacts but a little choosy over which ones. It has to make sense to me and feel right. With so many competing theories and voices out there and no consensus on what is the most efficient, proven method what other real choice is there? If you can find a method that is enjoyable and you like doing even if it’s not the most efficient you will, in my estimation, have more chance of making progress.
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I often wonder if he, and those like him, have developed the ability to learn more efficiently due to changes in the brain especially the hypocampus, and discovering what works for them.
I have developed a way that allows my German to progress but others here have described the approach I use as boring and demotivating. I think it is closer to the way a child learns. Maybe it’s a case of use whatever floats your boat.
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This. I would say that one of the most useful tools for any sort of skill acquisition, not only languages, is that you really have to have an understanding of yourself and how your brain functions. What motivates you? When are you most efficient? What works for you and what not?
Another important part is that you need the confidence that you will reach your goal, even though you may not be able to tell how long it will take.
Both things combined can only be achieved by investing a lot of time in learning (anything, not necessarely languages as stated before), and that you have wasted a whole lot of time in doing it wrong to learn how to do it right.
I wouldn’t compare myself too much with anyone else. Try to learn from the others, but don’t expect that what works for them works for you or that you will be as good or fast as they are. First of all, you never know whether it is true and what exact circumstances they learn under compared to you, and secondly and even more important, it doesn’t matter. You learn for yourself, not anyone else, so stop comparing.
More on topic: What I found useful is to revisit content I’ve dealt with a few months ago. Usually it is much easier to understand then back in the time, giving me a feeling of progress.
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It’s not the precise 180 days, it’s the fact that your evaluations need to be on a scale that is longer than most people think. You said you did “a few months” following a method. “A few months” might be enough. If you are thinking in terms of months, at least you are working at the right order of magnitude.
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LingQ makes the incomprehensible comprehensible. You have a wall of blue words, but all you have to do is go into sentence mode, click the translate sentence, and it’s comprehensible. So actually one can start right off with native level input…in fact there are many who do just that using LingQ for a new language. (usually people who are very familiar with LingQ or similar tools). I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for beginner LingQ’ers, but it’s totally possible. This is also probably not the best approach if you want to speak earlier–without extra work on common phrases, more beginner input, etc. However, you could do both.
On other languages I’ve started, I’ve done exactly this. No way am I going to spend my entire study time on mini-stories or “who is she”. They are certainly helpful, but very boring.
Obviously there are easier material in many languagues and where that is available these can be interesting and closer to your level. However, there can still be bigger jumps than you might want and that’s where LingQ definitely helps.
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That’s reassuring to know, as I wasted a lot of time with German figuring out what works. Oddly enough the method I now use is similar to how I learnt French in evening classes, and less like the freeform approach CI adherents advocate. I am an advanced beginner.
With French I already had a base from school and evening classes three decades ago, so progress has been much faster and I can now consume native level content.
A lot of the YouTube content is toxic. And often the good non toxic content is designed to sell a product.
I recently rewatched a film from several months ago and I understand most of it, whereas before I had to read the transcript. It gives a good feeling.
One additional comment is worth making. A good pair of headphone or hifi speakers can make a huge difference. I listened to a French YouTube video today using the iPad speakers and understood nothing. I switched to the very good £1,000 hifi speakers, and I understood > 90%.
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YouTube is full of good content for beginners in many languages. It is easily imported and hey presto, LingQ is suitable for beginners. Does LingQ add value? I think so.
I disliked the LingQ content for German beginners, it was far too advanced for me, but that is a subjective evaluation on my part.
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Well, I am no big fan of this either … or … thinking, to be honest, acting as if comprehensible input would be the golden lamb and/or a completely new approach to language learning. It is one aspect of learning a language, especially if you already have some fundament to build on. I think though that on one side such a fundament can be really helpful if not crucial and on the other side everyone is going to switch to comprehensible input sooner or later. I mean, you learn a language for using it and once you do so, it is probably comprehensible. For me even chatting in this forum is sort of, or watching a documentary in English, even though I do none of this for learning purposes.
German is a very grammar heavy language, I guess, especially compared with English. From a perspective as a german, English is a bit like simplified German. (Except the pronounciation. Be honest, you are using dices, aren’t you 
) So I would guess investing some time in getting a basic overview over the grammar is definetely worth it, even though I wouldn’t advocate for trying to memorize it.
I’ve got side-attracted a bit with Japanese and noticed that due to my Korean studies I actually didn’t had a lot of “starting difficulties”, so to speak. It helps a lot having already learned a different alphabet, spending some time with Hanja beforehand so I know the basic logic and the grammar is similar, too. Especially word order seem to cause a lot of people headaches.
So yeah, having some sort of fundament, whereever it comes from, definetely helps a lot.
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I haven’t done it myself, but for Russian, I found moving to native content reasonably early on had a decent benefit. It was probably after ~150 hours of beginner and intermediate material. In Italian, it was more than double that before I fully migrated to native content and away from teacher content. One of the benefits is that they speak faster (like 50% to 100% faster), which means you cover more material and encounter the words in more contexts, but you also start to getting used to real accents at real speeds. On top of being significantly more interesting than teacher content. If I decide to learn a new language after Russian, I think I might consider moving onto native content even faster. If I were learning a sister language to a language I already know, like Spanish or Croatian, I think I’d just skip straight to native content.
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This is a good example of smart iteration, and also the way learning compounds. I also would go to native content earlier (I stayed with pedagogical content for a similar period of time in Italian, ~250 hours) in the next language, and would be much bolder going to native in a language related to a language I know well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I wasted time with Italian.
As I progress, the base of linguistic ability that I’m working from is not the same, the hard skills and processes (how to break down and assimilate new listening material) as well as the soft skills (general confidence in learning a language, social confidence in speaking a foreign language) are at a higher level than before.
There’s also the individual arc that each of us are on. I tend to be more on the systematic side, am good at following through and following processes, etc. so as I become an efficient learner I learn how to trim off any excess adherence to process that does not help my progress. Someone who tends to be on the less systematic side might learn how to mitigate their inclination to ignore both linguistic and pedagogical structure that could make their learning more efficient.
This is also related to the interminable pro-or-anti-grammar threads. I’ve built a base of meta-linguistic knowledge that helps to increase comprehensibility quickly at early stages if I pay attention to grammar. I also have a suite of hard/soft skills that helps me translate what other people consider useless memorization into comprehensibility at earlier stages. My opinions are not based in ideology, but experience.
Learning is path dependent in this way. Theory gives you a map of the ability you are acquiring, but you have to get walking.
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