I dunno who it is, Friedemann, but someone or other (possibly Herr Lewis aus dem ‘Emerald Isle’?) keeps spamming the forum with infos about a rival system to LingQ!
Right now his ass is gone from this thread - either Steve or Mark must have deleted the posts! 
You know… It is a two-way street though… As spammy mcgee moves further along with LWT and it becomes more user friendly, it seems like a very easy jumping off point to possibly an offline version of LingQ that could sync with the website or something along those lines when there’s internet access and LingQ could use the Open-Source code as a startpoint, no?
What is with the *** in place of LWT? (see above comments for ***)
HUH? L W T does not seem to render normally when put in without spaces between the letters in this forum
WAIT A SECOND HERE!!!
If you imagine the acronym that Learning with Texts makes and then try to write it in this forum, it comes out as 3 asterix. Very strange
@Steve: “massive reading and listening and related vocab review, are the most important language learning activities”.
Well, who wants to hear that message about language learning? People want to hear that they can become fluent in 3 months (using an occult process that probably costs a lot of money). Telling people that they can achieve whatever they want, as long as they are prepared to work really hard for a really long time, is never going to win you first place in a popularity contest.
But since I agree with your approach to language learning, I use LingQ, as I still haven’t found any other system that supports this learning methodology nearly as effectively.
lwt
Yep, you’re right dooo!
I used to use LWT and I think *** is about the rating I would give it. LingQ gets *****.
Maybe lwt is a Canadian swear word, and that is why they censor it?
They don’t have swear words in Canada.
Yes, it does seem a bit silly to block those letters but there was a time where the guy from lwt and others were consistently spamming the forum trying to get the word out about it so we did this to discourage that. We are not interested in providing a forum for others to promote their products whatever they may be.
As I said, I used the triple asterisk software for a while before starting with LingQ. It is good, but it is nowhere near as good as the reading interface here. The biggest difference for me was the lack of user hints, which meant I had to type in every single word that I wanted to save. This is tedious and slow. I have created more than 18,000 LingQs here. If it had taken me 10 seconds to look up and type in the correct hint for each LingQ, that would be 50 full hours spend doing nothing but creating the hints. Other problems are the lack of Google TTS, not such easy access to Google Translate, the fact that it doesn’t work so well on the iPad, the complex install process, and the terrible choices of colours for the highlighting.
HTLAL is ok, but one big issue is that they are big at censuring threads. You can barely speak your mind and your post gets deleted or the thread closed. And a lot of those people seem to have drunk the kool-aid that says that you can be a C2, native level that lets you do “anything in target language that you can do in native language” in 3 months.
@Colin: “I had to type in every single word that I wanted to save. This is tedious and slow.”
Yeah, ditto. When I started on LingQ I had no real understanding of the amount of time it would take me to make a significant difference to my language levels. I had no concept of the number of LingQs I would have to create and learn, and what information I would need to store about each new word. I really needed the running partners that LingQ provided me. I need to see the kind of hints other people are creating, and to steal…er, be inspired by, the best ones. If the triple asterisk software gives you a product you can use offline, then that could be nice (if you have an unreliable internet connection, say), but if it means I have to work alone, then it’s not going to be useful.
@cazasigiloso: “a lot of those people seem to have drunk the kool-aid that says that you can be a C2, native level that lets you do “anything in target language that you can do in native language” in 3 months.”
It’s implicit in the name, really. [We will show you] “how to learn any language” [as a short-term project, so then you can go off and do something else].
After all, if you buy a book called “How to…” you expect to be able to master its contents in weeks rather than years, don’t you?
Whereas LingQ is very clear in its marketing that it’s a language learning (a process not a magic solution) community. It does what it says on the tin.
"If the triple asterisk software gives you a product you can use offline, then that could be nice (if you have an unreliable internet connection, say), but if it means I have to work alone, then it’s not going to be useful. "
It can be used offline, but since it relies on online dictionaries, you would lose the ability to automatically look up words. When I started learning German about 9 months ago, I also had no idea what it would take. I overestimated the difficulties of some things, such as grammar und speaking, and I underestimated the difficulties of other things, such as learning vocabulary and comprehension. I remember reading the suggestion that one can use LingQ for free by making the 100 LingQs, learning them, and then deleting them. What an idea!
Going back to HTLAL, I tried to register to make a comment on their forum. One of the mandatory questions is: why do you want to learn languages? I thought about that question for a while (I don’t WANT TO, I DO learn them), then decided I didn’t really want to join them.
@skyblue None of the books that I buy say that you can “master” something in a few weeks. They aren’t language books but related to my schoolwork. They just expand my always insufficient knowledge of the subject (s).
How should i kill myself?
There are better websites to ask that than here, Victom.