I have idea. It would be cool and may be helpful for many learners if LingQ made more advanced Mini Stories for higher levels and more absolute beginner friendly mini-stories for absolute beginners.
I would be happier if these would be graded reader style fictions in 6-8 chapters. I think we would benefit more from real stories instead of reading 2 pages about Mike who is a cook then about sg. completely different in every new mini story.
My main suggestion for mini-stories would be to get them retranslated using only eg the commonest 1000/2000 words in the target language. I think the current translations strive for accurate translation, at least if Vietnamese is anything to go by, and sometimes use less common words. But the accuracy of the translation is relatively unimportant as long as the story still makes sense.
Another annoyance is the attempt to translate character names. For example, Mike is rendered as Nam in the first Vietnamese story. But nam/năm is a common word in Vietnamese, meaning five or year. Very confusing if this is your first acquaintance with the language and also not an isolated example.
I think the consensus here is clear: we’d all love more professionally developed, high-quality learning material directly from LingQ.
As seen in the responses:
While we have slightly different ideas on the exact details, we’re all united in wanting more advanced (yet still reasonably comprehensible) content beyond the current beginner Mini-Stories — material that’s tailored for intermediate to advanced learners in every language available on LingQ.
Of course, creating something like that at scale would require significant resources. @steve
Fixing the top meaning for the word Nam in the first Mini Story of Vietnamese is something we should do. I think adding a clarification in parentheses about it being a name would be helpful.
Regarding tougher LingQ-produced content - After reading ~20,000 words worth of Mini Stories, and presumably LingQing and learning many words along the way, we feel users are likely to be able to tackle Intermediate 1 content. At this level the language starts to open up and users can start choosing their topics of interest.
In many languages we have solid selection of content for users to learn with at this level. Adding many new LingQ-produced lessons would, as you mention, require significant resources. Many users already branch out to their own imports or other shared content in the Library before they finish all 60 Mini Stories, so we aren’t sure there would be significant demand for this.
May I ask why you don’t move on to other shared Intermediate content? Is it because you can’t trust the quality of such lessons as much as you can the Mini Stories?
I know LingQ has been working to let people know that LingQ is good even for absolute beginners. This is just an idea. A lot of people think LingQ is only for intermediate and up. Someone on the LingQ blog wrote a review about LingQ and said (on the LingQ blog site) that LingQ isn’t good for absolute beginners.
I can’t find the video now (it’s quite an old one as he has been studying Persian and Arabic for years now), but I remember @Steve himself talking about wanting more intermediate-level content built in a similar style to the Mini-Stories. He specifically mentioned content where people talk about their daily lives, work, and other normal topics, but at a more intermediate level—especially for languages like Persian and Arabic. He even said he’d be willing to subsidize that kind of content.
He also mentioned something similar for podcasts: more structured listening content followed by simple comprehension questions, kind of like the Mini-Stories where the answer is often embedded in the question.
So for me, it’s not really that I don’t trust shared intermediate content. It’s more that I really like that guided Mini-Story format—clear structure, repetition, and built-in comprehension checks—and I think even Steve has acknowledged there’s value in having more intermediate material designed that way.
Surely there is plenty of out-of-copyright graded-reading material already written in popular L2s for which AI translations would be sufficient.
Looked on Internet Archive just now, and found an interesting graded reader in French. Russian wasn’t as fruitful-- the interesting readers were copyrighted.
The French reader has some interesting explanatory notes at the end, Maybe this would work using Lingq on the desktop fof vocablulary, and following along on the notes with my e-reader,
Hi @nsprung !
It would be nice if Lingq would provide material only up till B1 level, but at least till A2 (including).
I’m one of them. I did it only in Swedish when I was already pro, just to complete a challenge and Mini stories was an easy pick to pump up my known words count. Besides, I dislike Mini Stories because they are not stories: there is no plot to follow, there is no protagonist to empathize with and there is no conflict to solve. The immersion of these stories is zero to me. And by your qoute I’m not the only one.
In popular languages graded readers are often available in the book section: in French, German. But they are not in Swedish, neither in Dutch or Greek.
I think 3-3 pieces each of an A1, A2 and B1 story per language would be a big help. But I completely agree: this needs resources. I would aim for books written long (10-25 years) ago to get a better price. These books are often widely available in pirate sources so you could have a better bargaining position.
Or, you can make AI to write them: I made AI write me a quite exciting Dutch crime novel in A2 level because the these kind of books in Dutch cost about 7-12 euros each and I couldn’t find any in Lingq library. I’m not familiar with the copyrights of those things written by AI but you sure will need a proofreader.