I think it’s a good idea during the A1-early A2 stage. That said, I do tend to believe that outside of the beginner stage, any form of deliberately trying to learn words is just to make yourself feel like you’re progressing. In other words, you’ll learn those words anyway, eventually. Reading millions of words is what we’ll all end up doing if we aspire to reach a high level, so whatever deliberate targeting we do is mostly just to get a sense of ‘learning’, IMO. That may not even be a waste of time if it keeps us coming back.
Yea, I think so, hellion, You need to memorize a few simple words in the beginning. But eventually, you need to learn words in context which is far more powerful than memorization. You can’t do that until you memorize some core words and see how they begin to connect to other words.
I have the shortcut you’re looking for. Ain’t giving it tho.
I know what the shortcut is: get a Russian girlfriend and hang with (patient) Russians for a year.
Steve K took 5 years to get to where he is at with Russian. It could turn out quite simply that two years of lingQ and anki by themselves aren’t enough. It might be that you need the Russian girlfriend or tutor or whatever.
The question is: can you do it (get to “advanced” without that)?
Maybe not is a possibility.
But at the end of the day it’s not about the destination. It’s about the journey.
In other words, you’ll learn those words anyway, eventually. Reading millions of words is what we’ll all end up doing if we aspire to reach a high level…
So there’s a couple of points there packed together… Unpacking them is that word you used “eventually”.
My hypothesis is that you can do it faster than “eventually”.
The real question is: is words by itself enough? I think the answer to that is clearly no. Which is where lingQ comes into the picture.
But even lingQ by itself isn’t helping at all with speaking or writing. I can’t for example write at all and I can speak like a two year old.
In terms of reading millions of words. I’d like to think that we read the millions of words because we want to. I believe it’ll be easier to read those millions of words faster if we already know enough words.
It does seem (to me) after having spent nearly two years that vanilla lingQ plus vanilla anki words work but you don’t get there in two years (i.e. to advanced).
What I will say is that lingQ does provide some kind of progress (and so does anki).
I think what can be definitively said at this point is that the FSI are way closer to being right than Benny Lewis. Also it’s not just number of hours. There is definitely a minimum number of hours per day you need to do it if you want it as fast as possible. And it’s likely quite a lot more than an hour a day.
Anyhow. I have the balls to wash my dirty laundry in public talking about my successes and my failures.
I don’t know if I’m ADD or what but I am unable to get anything from reading while listening. The only version of that I can kind of do is watch netflix with subtitles. But netflix is, as yet, too advanced. But if it works for you go for it. It definitely seems to work for Peter as he keeps on banging his drum about it.
My “method” does work for me about as slowly as expected. I was just hoping Benny Lewis was right and the FSI were wrong.
I just had a conversation with Stephen Krashen last week, who told me he would never recommend flashcards or SRS systems or any activities that isolate words and require memorization. This was prompted by a member of my FB group who posted a ChatGPT response that incorrectly quoted from a Krashen book The Power of Reading.
@xxdb And the fact that the FSI figures quoted by most people are class hours only and not including the huge amount of homework they do. Really, the class hours need to be doubled to take this into account.
Youtube videos is the core of the listening part of what I do at the beginning. What I found though (in both French and Russian) is that you can get to classroom speak fairly quickly from doing TPRS then slowly spoken then classroom speak, but the gap from classroom speak to naturally spoken vloggers is big and the gap from naturally spoken vloggers to TV shows is even bigger. Importing them into lingQ is as you both say very good for acquiring spoken vocab and e.g. I can understand the common classroom speak vloggers in lingQ 100% and spoken better than 90%. Where it’s hit and miss is naturally spoken vloggers. There is more to them somehow. And TV shows there is also slurring or something else that makes it even more difficult.
But the key learning for me I have picked up with a distant language like Russian that is very clear compared with Spanish is there is are two conflicting memory paths happening at the same time: learning and forgetting. Every day you learn some and every day you forget some.
With Spanish the vocabulary is way closer to English so it’s easier to remember and not forget. With Russian almost none of it is close to English so it’s harder to pin onto something already learned. All of it is learned from scratch.
End result in terms of learning vs forgetting:
An hour a day (for me at least) seems to be slightly in favor of learning but only barely. I think that for a distant language a minimum of two hours a day is required or you’re going to barely progress at all.
The first six months when I was doing at least 2-3 hours a day I made pretty good progress. Now that I have slowed down to an hour a day roughly, progress has been much smaller. It’s there, but nowhere near as rapid.
Bear in mind: that is with vanilla methods. AI material targeted to what you are short on a daily basis is IMO a massive breakthrough.
But the proof will be in the pudding as they say. I suspect/hope there will be stories sometime later this year of folks who have signficantly reduced the time going from intermediate to advanced (in understanding) by means of using AI.
xxdb,
You write: “But even lingQ by itself isn’t helping at all with speaking or writing. I can’t for example write at all and I can speak like a two year old.”
LingQ is helping you with reading and listening because you are engaging in reading and listening on LingQ.
LingQ is not helping you with speaking or writing because you are not engaging in speaking or writing on LingQ.
LingQ’s writing exchange function is used by language learners of various languages, particularly in English and French, and there are a couple of very active native speakers who give excellent corrections for free.
Likewise, there are tutors on LingQ offering conversations in languages such as Russian, Czech, Japanese, German, Spanish and English among others.
I read this before in a podcast for AJ Hoge also
I find the gaps you are talking about only exist if you don’t have relevant material to fill them. I only really followed one language learning vlogger/podcaster (Podcast Italiano, as in the recent video with Steve). He had content at varying levels. This content allowed me to move to natural speaking vloggers (monologues), which allowed me to move to TV series, (then the next step is movies, then books). There are still hard vloggers for me and some TV series, which I find quite hard, but if you try multiple channels, you find some are easier than others, which allows you to gradually increase in difficulty. There are obvoiusly topics, which I still have issues with (eg. food, because I have watched any food vloggers or cooking shows), but if you find the right material, the gap isn’t too large.
Interesting about your Russian experience with the learning and forgetting.
Maria nailed it:
You’ll become good at what you train for.
And if you don’t train for it…
LingQ is helping you with reading and listening because you are engaging in reading and listening on LingQ.
Correct and agreed.
LingQ is not helping you with speaking or writing because you are not engaging in speaking or writing on LingQ.
Correct and agreed.
There seem to be some folks (not me) who think that you can magically get speaking or writing just by doing lingQ and listening.
It doesn’t work. Speaking and Writing are different (but overlapping) skills from listening and reading (which are also overlapping).
You mentioned earlier that that entails a lot of reading maybe millions of words. Yeah…it actually does, but, again, I don’t think there are any shortcuts.
There are two ways I agree with you. One is there is no way around just putting in the work. There is no shortcut to putting in the work. Also that reading the millions of words up till now was necessary. The reason why you need millions of words isn’t that you need millions of words per se. It’s because of something called Zipf’s law. Zipf’s law essentially means that you get diminishing returns in terms of how often words appear in a text, so the gap of the number of words you need to read to encounter a particular word increases with how infrequent it is. But unfortunately you need to learn a certain minimum for adequate comprehension (see Paul Nation’s studies for the exact numbers).
I’ll quibble with you about no shortucts, but let’s say that what we really mean is “assistance”. We’re definitely able to get assisted by technology. Consider: in the old days you would have had to painfully look up each words you didn’t know in a dictionary. Obviously with lingQ you can just click on it.
There are a variety of smaller “shortcuts” (or crutches if you will). Anki is also one to aid with memorization because it carefully optimizes just the minimum amount of time you need to see a word according to “the forgetting curve”. Reading in and of itself doesn’t do that.
Anki and vanilla LingQ should do that. And I think it does do it very well.
In the case of similar languages that is.
Where you get gaps is in languages that are distant: with a lot of non-cognate words.
Those non-cognate words seem to be much harder to remember even with the aid of anki. And trying to combine it with lingQ only works in the early stages because of zipf’s law. It appears to be that as you go higher up the frequency ladder for words, anki and reading vanilla texts becomed decoupled so you lose the benefit. Whereas in the earlier stages the low-mid frequency words are coming up often enough that you’re getting a double whammy: individual words and context.
BUT… and where I’m really excited about this… AI generated content based on the words you’re currently learning ON THE DAY is REcoupling anki back to lingQ.
What this means is that in theory you should get the same amount of progress as in the earlier stages by using AI generated content.
Anyhow, TLDR… you have to put the effort in or no method will work.
This is obvious. It’s other folks (not me) who seem to be suggesting that you will get speaking and writing for free just by doing lingQ reading.
I expect only to get reading from lingQ and listening comprehension from listening/watching videos with audio.
“will get speaking and writing for free” (@xxdb)
I’d say the consensus in this forum (starting with Steve) is that listening facilitates speaking and reading facilitates writing, but
- good speakers speak - a lot.
- good writers write - a lot.
The rest is the illusion of effortlessness…
@xxdb:
That’s for tomorrow because it’s getting late in Germany…
You mentioned that “reading while listening” doesn’t work for you,
It should work for “any” language that has a writing system, but it might not work for all learners (for example, when the bi-modal switching is experienced as “overwhelming”).
On the other hand, you can start with silent reading first (including the marking of LingQs) and then choose the audio speed you like. So you have total control reg. the pace…
Therefore my question is: What exactly did you do?
I don’t think the only purpose of reading lots of words is to learn new words. I think a lot of reading is training our subconscious mind to take on the task instead of our conscious mind. Getting into that flow where you no longer are really aware of individual words at all. I alluded to that in my story about learning Morse Code.
We all do that in our native language. We read without being aware of the words until there is an unfamiliar world or a confusing construction. We get there through years of reading all kinds of materials, some of us more than others if we go onto university or other advanced training.
I suspect that’s what’s going on when we keep reading the same paragraph over and over again. Maybe the subconscious is reading, maybe even filing away what it’s reading, but the conscious mind has lost the thread and is not in the loop, so to speak. So it keeps forcing a rereading. I’ve gone on for an entire page at times when suddenly I realize I have not understood what I’m reading. Probably the same thing we experience when we are driving and suddenly don’t remember any of the last 10 miles of driving.
I’ll take your meaning of short-cuts. Certainly, new technologies have made it easier to gain materials that make reading and language learning more interesting and efficient. One reason I’m learning Norwegian (my roots) is that trying to learn Spanish in high school and college was such an unmitigated disaster. I took responsibility for my failure. Learning Norwegian on my own has been my salvation. It wasn’t me alone. I was set up for failure by the existing school system. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Honestly I would love Lingq as a background app. to be used on the Switch directly, that would be great for me and quite slick. Playing “Triangle Strategy” in Japanese with Lingq would be awesome. Same with many visual novels on there.
I’ve heard that argument against google Translate from my partner, a high school Spanish teacher. I tell her google speaks Norwegian a lot better than I do so I can still learn from it. Native speakers make mistakes, tell lies, repeat crap, make up other crap…it goes to show how well ChatGPT actually does mimic us!!
Mistakes are inherent in everything human. We survive them (mostly). So I have no problem learning from imperfect sources. They give me a good start that I can work on as I gain experience from other sources.