Hi everybody, recently I’ve been struggling to find content that interests me, at my level, and has about 10-15% new words. I wanted to ask if anybody has there own way of doing that or that can give me any advice. (context - I am acquiring Spanish and still at the beginner level with around 3k words).
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You can take any section in lingq. You do see all. And then you sort by pourcentage of known words. Or you can find sources on a youtube channel import available video and see which one has the lowest number of known words.
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As suggested by nicolasbrunel you can look in the LingQ library. You can look under the various topics…Also set your filter to your appropriate level. This isn’t always accurate but you can play around with it.
Have you looked into Dreaming Spanish youtube channel? They have videos and all different levels. You can also import these into LingQ - they’ll get transcribed and then you can LingQ away. Then also watch and listen to the videos.
Olly Richards has books at various levels and there are some graded readers on Amazon by various authors. You’ll have to use epubor to remove drm and import into LingQ if you choose to.
Otherwise look on youtube for various other content of interest. There is stuff out there for all kinds of levels. Also there is Easy Spanish…they should have a “super beginner” playlist or something that has more simplified videos.
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I understand your bracketing for 10-15%. It is more comfortable and many believe more efficient. I wouldn’t argue otherwise.
However, if the content is sufficiently compelling, I would suggest considering a higher range. Not that you should do so.
Using LingQ as one’s tool makes it so fast to look up definitions and conjugations that I found it not much of a hardship to jump to 40%. Since motivating content is so important to me, it was a trade-off I was happy to have made.
A year later I have no regrets.
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2 things to try:
Translated books: If you have books that you love that have translations in Spanish, re-read those in Spanish. It makes it easier to follow the story through context, even with a higher percentage of unknown words. Also, your unknown % will drop for later chapters. If re-reading isn’t your thing, you can use bilingual books, or books that have both and read both in parallel.
Replace your English Content: Read and listen what you would normally find compelling in English. For me, I listened to a fair amount of world news, sports news, and general informational podcasts in English. I have replaced at least half of these with Spanish content.
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This is my approach for French.
I’m now reading Roger Zelazny’s Amber series and it’s great.
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To be honest, it’s probably quite hard to find interesting content at that level. Other than interesting in the sense that you can understand, which in that stage is important to keep up the motivation. For me with Spanish, I started watching dreaming Spanish and storylearning Spanish when I had 4000 known words, but even then those were exhausting besides super-beginner content which is not that inspiring. I did use those as extensive input so they might have been more digestable when imported to lingq. Somewhere around 6000-10000 is when I could start to widen the content I consumed and around 15000 could watch a lot of native content that was clearly spoken. Take it step by step. Whatever content you use now will become obsolete in no time.
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Thanks for the detailed response. Out of curiosity, what content did you use when you got to around 6k-10k words and the content you used when you got to around 15,000 words?
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Still DS and storylearning Spanish at 6000-10000, but could understand more confidently. There are many channels for beginners at that level. Not sure if I could call the content interesting in the sense that you would watch them in your native or strong languages, but at that point just understanding brings its own excitement. It’s also just a short way away from content that is meant for native speakers. 15000 I started watching some news and youtube channel about linguistics called linguriosa on top of some other channels. I did try a bit earlier, but at 15000 it started to become less straining. Still at 35000 I can’t say I understand all of those which is natural. When you choose content, don’t be too hard on yourself if don’t understand all or miss even longer parts. It’s all part of the process and I reckon challenging myself enough is the reason I could also move up faster. Also I did watch a lot out of lingq so in essence I got more listening practice compared to word count than I would have just with lingq.
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I just hit 15,000 words in Spanish and have started importing my own news and blog articles, which has been really fun! But, I’m not sure I would have felt ready to do that before now.
Prior to this point, I only read content already available in the library. Here are the ones I read most frequently:
Dreaming Spanish
Unlimited Spanish
Un Dia en Español (Babbel)
Spanish Podcast.net
CuriosaMente (This has been one of my favorites! It contains a lot of science words that are easily recognizable and I’ve learned fun new things!)
Steve’s book - The Linguist
I tend to read through once first (possibly in sentence view if there are a lot of unknown words). Then I read + listen for a few times. Then, I add them to a playlist and listen only while driving.
As you work through any of them your % of unknown words will continue to decrease as authors often use the same words over and over.
Hope this helps!
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I had the same experience. I did dabble before that, but it was hard to keep concentration even for the necessary 5-10mins. I do think it’s still good to occasionally do content that is a little too hard. 15000 in Spanish seemed to be the magic number for a lot of native content that is clear enough. I suspect that at that point you have the base words of the language and what you miss have known words next to it to bring context. Also the amount you need to listen, if you do both listening and reading quite equally, gives enough practice to understand clear and not overly fast pronunciation.
That said, 15000 is quite a far target when you start and having midway targets to keep motivation up. Even if one doesn’t understand all, it’s still good to see it as a glass half full. Even if listening to something for me was a bit painful, it still gave me the sense that it’s not that far away.
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