I made a minimum not really viable product in good sheets that takes a news feed and tracks words I know; plus translations and there is audio I can play separately. That’s the essence of what comprehensible input (and Lingq) for me.
I wanted it for Irish. Even low code technology isn’t friendly enough for me to do the gymnastics you need to do to text to make something for this language approach. But the tech will improve and make unusual processes easier.
Mainstream tech is shockingly bad at comprehensible input. They’ll be improving Duolingo. Actually, if they improved live subtitles that might be a rival.
Language Reactor could choose to eat at least some of the market.
I’d advise lingq to use modern code and make an engine to do the minimum (deliver text by sentence/block + text to speech audio + translation). That will be enough for some people in some languages and will have secured the future market. Then they can expand.
I’m aware we use Lingq in different ways and some people will want features than I don’t use.
I’ll defend LingQ on price. Buy the lifetime subscription for $/£300.
I have that amount of books on my shelf that have been almost no use to me.
Teachers and classes will soon cost more.
Duolingo for Irish was clicky and annoying after 4 days.
A DIFFERENT POINT, I CAN’T DO A SEPARATE COMMENT.
Lingq, would you consider assigning someone to think about the next generation.
Clarify a conceptual offering. Comprehensible Input drives much of what you do, but not all of it.
Have a core minimal offering (text, audio, translation, shortcut keys, known words but no cards, no SRS, no AI, no mini-stories)
have everything else runs as add-ins that people can have or reject. Excel has add-ins. Ecosystems have apps.
Ask for help. I’d contribute time or money to get Irish.
You can’t move sentence by sentence + audio + translation with one key. That’s fundamental for comprehensible input. That’s all I want Lingq to do beyond delivering text and tracking known words. They should fix the core things first.
I don’t defend Duolingo, I think it’s not much better than traditional classroom learning. £300 is a lot of money, and I can’t convince myself it provides value. After all it’s useless for podcasts, and most of my French listening comes from podcasts while driving or walking.
The value of LingQ is instant access to word definitions while reading. However, with YouTube imports it is so clunky that it’s actually quicker to use YouTube directly and a dictionary! In fact another bug with LingQ is that video audio and text often get out of sink, so I can’t even read the text while listening because it has disappeared off screen.
I just wonder if anyone in LingQ HQ actually uses it with YouTube imports. Maybe this is just on iOS that it is such a complete mess?
What app do you use for french podcast? Podcast addict? Do you passively listen to podcasts or do you process the audio somehow?
I tried using Podcast Addict in tandem with LingQ, ie downloading audio and transcribing through AI feature, but any podcast longer than 30 minutes makes a lesson too long, and therefore quite slow (im talking aboy lessons that have around 10k words in them).
btw, lifetime subscription is 200$, not 300£.
I hadn’t heard of Podcast addict. It doesn’t seem to matter which app I use, I find Google Podcasts works well on my iPhone.
I don’t use transcripts with podcasts, mainly because I can’t get any, and importing does not work on LingQ. I listen to the podcast, for 60 minutes, that’s it. Many months ago I only got the gist of a podcast, now I usually get all or most if it. Some presenters are harder to understand than others, some French speakers do slur a lot, and Parisien French is very clipped. Huge amounts of listening gradually habituates me to an accent. Contrary to Krashen’s (excellent) advice, I do get value when I understand less than 90%.
My belief is that it works best if I mix my learning. Thus 15-30 minutes Anki, one hour free listening, and lastly one hour listening on LingQ with a transcript, looking up words and phrases, sometimes storing them in Anki.
Regarding pricing, I found it incredibly hard to find out the pricing, I had to Google outside LingQ. A lifetime subscription is $200 per language. I’m not convinced given that LingQ is useless for podcasts and Netflix, and seriously flawed for YouTube.
Some great ideas. Simplifying the messaging on what they do and how to install them would mean I’d put more effort into trying them. Perhaps more, simpler ones.
For Greek, I have relatively few options and LingQ lets me read novels. It’s most of my language learning.
£300 is plenty, but people spend far more on TV channels, gym, cars, holidays, phones. 6 playstation games.
Learning a language for less than the price of the phone in your hand.
People expect to pay for most things but not language learning.
The platform is definetly bugged.
Unfortunately I can’t really see the alternative.
Other similar apps I’ve seen are worse in features. There’re some good alternatives for specific languages (I prefer Readibu+Pleco for Mandarin, and LangaugeCrush for Thai, for example), but none of them are equally good for a set of languages.
Yes some people do indeed spend a fortune on lifestyle goods. My iPhone cost £300, and I pay £10 a month line contract. But I’m a cheapskate. Literally, as my new ice skates were reduced from £650 to £340, and I get in to the rink with a concession ticket.
I guess to be fair the £100 I am paying at present is quite reasonable. The bugs are annoying, but I have just spent 30 minutes on a German YouTube video in LingQ and enjoyed it. It just takes time to work out how to use LingQ effectively. I am though surprised that bugs which impact usability in such a serious way exist,
Lingq in its current shape can only offer one lesson per day to read peacefully before it goes haywire for most of the day. What is the point of having those extra bells and whistles if you can not read a lesson peacefully.
Lingq 5.0 was an experiment that went wrong completely. Better hire good developers and invest some money. I mean it is a commercial product you can not say that we are a small team we are trying our best.
At the current state of affairs, we all are going to be blood pressure patients rather than good language learners
After reading one lesson my wild guess is i am done for the day
I stick strictly with the Sentence View, which is plenty buggy on its own. Although it ought to be straightforward code.
I have tried some of LingQ’s fancier features, but those became classic examples of what Jamie Zawinski, a whiz programmer from the dotcom days, called “Now you’ve got two problems.” Getting what I want done and getting LingQ to do it in its mysterious, buggy ways.
LingQ works its wonders clumsily. I never know if the keyboard shortcuts are going to work or my bookmarks will be remembered. I usually have to mark my lingqs twice. Etc.
If LingQ loses all my work tomorrow, I won’t be surprised.
I don’t bother with its fancier features, because then I’ll have two problems.
Today has been a nightmare, the iPad app crashed and now it crashes seconds after reopening. It’s unuseable. I tried the Web interface in Safari, that is soooo hard to use. I find it unpleasant, unintuitive, clunky. I was a software engineer for 30 years and created several personal websites, so I like to think I’m not stupid.
There are plenty of things that I seek for cheaper.
I’m learning a new language to speak with my wife’s family, as are many. Compare the price of weddings to the price of LingQ (lifetime). Some people probably pay more to go to someone else’s wedding.
But, yes, I’d like Lingq to be simpler to use (shortcuts), better and reliable (not too bad for me most days as I only use sentence view. or maybe I have accepted delayed audio etc.).
