For long-time users, what were your early fears?

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I think this is a pretty relevant topic. LingQ comes with a hefty price tag and it’d be nice for the “wet ears” among us to know what it felt like at first.

Of course, OP must contribute. So, personally found the site after using Beelinguapp and then seeing how much less scary language was by reading. Tried reading a few articles autnomously before coming to LingQ and finding the user definitions the “final boost” needed to accelerate learning. Went from struggling to read a 30-word news session to listening passively to podcasts over 2 hours long with full understanding; the only issue being ADHD (and that’s an issue anyway).

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I’m a hopeless auto-didact. So, teachers, get out of my way.

If you wish to subjugate me with your grammar lessons and canned dialogs, I will slip through your fingers.

Avast! I hold my pirate colors high.

So LingQ was perfect for me.

Later I discovered that LingQ was the least competent software I ever paid money for.

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I have been on LingQ for almost 1 year.

I was learning Norwegian with Duolingo, and after making good progress, I got tired of translating only short sentences.

When I came across real Norwegian newspaper articles, I was always unable to translate much.

Then Duolingo changed and you have to pay for it , I had to think about whether or not I wanted to spend money with them…I wasn’t sure. I had learned some good basic Norwegian, but I felt like I was stagnating.

It was in these conditions that I discovered LingQ, I told myself that confronting myself with more text was undoubtedly the solution that would allow me to progress further.

When I validated my subscription on Lingq, I wasn’t so sure of myself! I had to learn how to use the site, understand how everything worked, understand everything I could get out of it.

So, I started working on Lingq every day, and in a short time, I was totally won over! This is exactly what I needed, help to be able to translate real Norwegian texts. I come to the site religiously every day to translate texts, and I have progressed incredibly in 1 year.

I really like this possibility of being able to choose your own texts. Sometimes, when I feel motivated, I look for a text on Wikipedia on a subject that is close to my heart. Other times, when I don’t have time or I’m out of ideas, I take the lessons that are already available.

What is certain is that I will stay with LingQ for the long term. I still have progress to make to fully learn Norwegian. I also dared to start learning Icelandic.

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I was under this impression that reading through creating Lingqs and marking them as known words would actually work or not. I must say that it really worked even without using Anki.

I read newspapers, magazines like Spiegel and Harvard Business Review in public library. Thanks to LingQ I have become a fluent reader of these magazines and have recognized so many words while reading these magazines that I first learned on LingQ. Reading consistently on Lingq is key.

My early fears have disappeared, However, Lingq is a reading tool that allows me to read fluently by looking up words quickly. However, it does not hand hold me when it comes to understanding grammar. Somehow I need to learn it outside LingQ. Lingq Is a great tool for B1 and beyond.

Considering the fact that you can transcribe mp3 audio within a few minutes and can study them as a lesson is simply icing on the cake.

If you are using a tool like lingQ you already have a head start against traditional language schools. They use physical dictionaries in a class room, can you imagine this in 2024?

Teachers are so out of touch when it comes to implementing latest language learning strategies/tools. Grammar dissection and doing drills are only the ways to learn a language for them. To be honest tools like Readlang/LingQ are a fresh beath of air. The progress you may achieve in 8 years you can achieve it in 4 years if you are usling tools like Lingq.

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I agree. LingQ is a great learning tool and I think it may be vastly undervalued by the vast majority of the language-learning community and certainly by academia, which seems desperate to cling on to outdated teaching methods. Hopefully LingQ will eventually find its place as one of the premier tools for acquiring language.

In answer to the OP’s question, my only fear about LingQ was that it might simply not work. After all, all we’re doing is using it to read, and while it has some memorization tools, they are not the main focus. But it has kept me reading some German and Spanish every day, and I definitely have improved since I started using LingQ last December.

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When I started using Lingq, I was hopelessly lost in the myriad of ways to use it to my advantage. After a query about how to use Lingq with its numbers and phases and lessons, I started to understand that one does not have to understand a lesson fully before continuing. That was a habit I had inherited from schools and university. Every set of lectures was followed by an exam. And if you did not succeed, you failed and had to redo the lecture. That attitude does not work with Lingq. You need to learn a lesson until you are comfortable listening to it and understanding the gist. And, while you continue, it is no issue returning to old lessons so you can pick up the remainder. The trick is that you don’t learn by “learning”. You learn by encountering stuff, time and again. At some point, it just sticks.

The main thing that I needed to learn was to enjoy the process and trust the process). No need to stress about whether I was “progressing enough”. It just happens. Don’t forget to go outside Lingq and have fun with series, movies, youtubes etc.

Just use the system and trust that your subconscious brain is working like hell, even if you are just enjoying yourself with Lingq and all the other video tools out there. And don’t forget podcasts.

Currently, I learn mostly outside of Lingq, but Lingq is still my vocabulary acquirer. At the moment Lingq reading feels like intensive reading. That is the only con I know of, I forgot how to do extensive reading and I really have to push myself at the moment to do some extensive reading.

Hope this helps.

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I’ve used LingQ for almost three years.

In the beginning, I felt I had to use the platform in some correct way. I used to try to use the 1-5 levels of a word being known with precision. I used vocabulary review. I used to think more about LingQ itself.

Now, LingQ is much more ambient and I’m focused on the content itself. I don’t use vocabulary review. I mostly just mark words that I kind of know at level 1 and flip them straight to 5 at some point. I don’t worry about feeling success or progress too much. Much of the content I consume, I directly import off the internet. Most lessons I never repeat.

LingQ has high potential to be an even greater tool, but I have augmented it and continue to augment it with other tools and techniques–podcasts, Youtubers, iTalki, Lingoda, Language Reactor, Babbel, Audible, paper books, etc.

Finally, I have to say that I find it much better at handling French and German than Japanese. The word splitting errors it makes in Japanese are bad enough that I wouldn’t recommend for A1 or A2 level Japanese.

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Besides working behind the scenes at LingQ, I taught myself Japanese using LingQ to a decent level. I did not care much for “tactics” or best approaches when I started, I dove in head first and read and listened to content (with a heavy focus on the guided courses and basic material). Afterwards, I began to read and listen to more advanced content.

I don’t like to complicate things. When someone asks me how to use LingQ, my simple answer is, “read, listen, and turn all your blue words into yellow, then into white (known)”.

I think many learners set unreleastic expectations or come from a fixed mindset. IE: If I can’t do within 3 months, I’m a failure. The leaners with a growth mindset (I’ll get better and learn from my mistakes), are the ones who become fluent.

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