Sounds like we’re using different methodologies and criteria, which is totally fine. I think you mean that you have the “paging moves to known” feature enabled, which I myself never liked as I always felt that encouraged too liberal of a word marking and has the potential to flood one’s word counts with proper nouns etc, which end up inflating the count over the long run.
Instead I use the keyboard shortcuts to go through the text and mark words as “known” as opposed to “unknown” – with some practice of the arrow keys this can be done at the speed of reading. I feel this is more intuitive to learning on the long run since we don’t start out from the position of the “known until proven otherwise” but instead of a standard of “unknown until proven otherwise.”
The only reason why I brought that up is because you mentioned that “hearing and understanding fast spoken French remains a problem,” and that “news is almost understandable when you concentrate.” Those assessments pointed to an imbalance to me because with 48K known individual words, the way LingQ counts them, those activities are usually not a problem. I think News usually becomes the first understandable native content and it usually happens to me at about 10K known words on LingQ. And listening to fast spoken speech starts to become comfortable about 30-35K known words. With actual speaking fluency soon to follow.
Again, this is just a different way of tackling it and none of it matters on the long run. I have no doubt that you’ll make progress and achieve your goals.
Another thing that helped me in the beginning is first learning (at least to recognition) the 5000 most common headwords (or nearly so) in French, so my reading vocabulary was in the high 90% range even before I started using LingQ.
I absolutely agree about disabling the automatic marking, for only for LingQs.
It’s not worth my time to mark a bunch of blue words I can immediately see are known – which has been almost always – even though I manually check the few that are suspect.
Also, I would like to see you keyboard technique for doing that manually as the LingQ movement and marking rules (as badly as they are defined) have always seemed abysmal to me – one of the worst features of LingQ.
Many people might not understand the reason for knowing your technique but I am a “keyboard” sort of person and use such techniques in almost every program in favor of the mouse most of the time.
It’s a skillset and if you’ve found a way to keep from interfering with reading speed then that would be valuable.
The keyboard shortcuts are fairly easy, but they do take some practice to get fast at. For best results the “auto LingQ creation” option should be turned ON for these. The shortcuts are:
left/right arrow - goes to next shaded word
up/down arrow - moves to next/previous option on blue pane – this is where you can mark a word “Known” by clicking up to that option
enter - create a LingQ with the selected hint or open the selected dictionary
shift + left/right arrow - next/previous page
1 - Status 1
2 - Status 2
3 - Status 3
4 - Status 4
k - known (green check) – this the way to mark a previously LingQed word “known”
x - Ignore, remove
Additional options.
(plus) and - (minus) - increase or decrease font size
s - plays tts audio
a - plays sentence audio
t - add tag
shift + t - show sentence translation
d - check dictionary
h - create LingQ and focus cursor in hint field
e - choose selected hint and open dictionary
b - go to next blue word
shift + f - flag selected hint
spacebar - Play/Pause audio
ctrl + x - Rewind audio x seconds
The one thing that’s not mentioned in this list is the Command-W function which closes any pop up screens which happen a lot when you try to link a word that’s not in the dictionary.
100th insane streak day and continuing with Anki every day (300+ reviews each day) but I’ve been lazy.
For over a week I’ve let Glossika and Rosetta Stone alone. I’ve been reading but not listening to audio books, just the news and a few YouTube videos in French.
Congrats on 100th day. I’m 24 days in on a streak of at least 50 a day, have had a few 100 day streaks, and have peaked at over 300 a few days ago when I had a bunch of extra time. It’s been a very productive month since I found this thread and got inspired. I was trying to include Pimsleur and Glossika as well but I was only doing those during exercise and now I’ve stopped exercising for a week so I’ve let those fall by the way side for a bit. I thought about getting back into them while I’m not exercising but they are just so boring compared to Youtube videos/podcasts/articles/etc I realized I get way more out of just focusing on material I like so if I were you I wouldn’t get bummed about not going on with Glossika/Rosetta Stone at your level of 48,000+ words. I haven’t seen the advanced levels of both of those courses but I wouldn’t be surprised if you were way beyond them in vocabulary but I now remember you use them as a pronunciation training so I guess that’s your main purpose for it. But if I were to really drill pronunciation I think I would start reading a book outloud or record it and send it to a teacher and just insist I get corrected on every little thing. That’s basically how I remember learning English pronunciation as a kid with reading every night with my parents. Anyway I’ve seen a really impressive improvement in my ability to read and understand many people talking lately, watch through some videos without looking at the subtitles, and absorbing words much more rapidly and saying them in times I really need to communicate something my wife doesn’t know the English word for. I’ve gone through one stint of reviewing flashcards that I’m constantly creating from sentences i’m mining from material I read but for the most part my vocab from simply reading transcripts and listening to it spoken in video/audio content has been enough to get new vocab in my head. I wish I had realized this long ago but again, my main hurdle before was finding youtube content i liked with subtitles and after I discovered the subtitle search trick all my struggles for having enough Youtube Videos to watch have disappeared. Although I’m still really struggling with some types of content such as news articles which are filled with a lot of unfamiliar vocab not used in normal conversations, I’m still figuring out slang in sketch videos or Brazilian music, but thankfully my wife can translate those for me, but oddly enough my biggest challenge is understanding my mother in law haha. I’ve been around her so much I would think I’d understand her by now but I still really struggle with her Portuguese. I guess it’s a matter of finding material that uses the language like she does. Before the pandemic I considered staying at her house for a week just to really get used to it and crack the code but that’s out the window for now haha.
That’s all from my side. Best wishes for your studies through the end of the month.
Still slacking, but I did finish my first full length book, Deuil Interdit. And I am getting close to finishing Sapiens.
Since I like to read at least 2 books in parallel, I’m going back to “La Carte et le Territoire” by Michel Houellebecq. Much more of a literary book and it’s going to need to get a lot better if I’m going to finish it this time.
Ok, my 6 month plan to fluency ending about a week ago FAILED.
I am certainly not a fluent listener nor a fluent speaker, though I can carry on a conversation which is fairly ugly in quality.
My reading is certainly fluent.
At about 4 1/2 months I stopped almost everything except LingQ/Reading daily and watching TV or YouTube in French almost every day.
I probably wouldn’t have made any more significant fluency even with continued intensive practice the last 50 days – and I had already posted that.
However, my LingQ streak is now150 days at the “Insane” level and my French is still improving slowly.
This was not a failure – I am miles ahead of where I would have been with any lesser effort, and my contination of LingQ and daily listening doesn’t really even qualify as a burn out since for most people this level of practice would be high if not extreme.
My intention is to get my act together and start another 6 months as some higher (maybe not as high) level and try to see where a year gets me.
49k Known words, almost 27k manual LingQs, and about 1 million words of reading.
I noticed i can understand my mother-in-law, my husband, and my husband’s stepmom when they speak Russian, but when it comes to my father-in-law and a few hockey players I’ve talked to its like I’ve never taken Russian before. I can’t understand a word. I think it just comes down to accent. There is a news podcast I listen to called world news japan. there are two announcers. I listen to it so I can get better with listening to fast Russian (the woman speaks fairly fast but she’s very clear) the man however, his accent is so thick I can never understand him to me it sounds almost Arabic when he does his soft or hard sounds. maybe find some tv shows or radio shows local to her and listen to them? they’ll probably have the same accent as her since they’re in her same city. just a thought.
This doesn’t sound like a failure to me. You learned a lot along the way and I think that that is more important than reaching your end goal. I’m sure you will get there sooner or later, depending on how often you use the language. Just try to find ways to enjoy the language so that daily practise will not become a chore.
Thanks, and you are correct. The result was not a failure, just the plan goal failed.
I can make a bunch of excuses for slacking off, but ultimately that was my behavior and also I never did quit or even pause completely but continue to make (at least) my double LingQ goal every day without exception.
Now at 202 days of my “insane” streak and reached 50,000 words yesterday.
Almost 33,000 LingQs.
Finished Sapiens, and started Harari’s next book:: Homo Deus: A brève histoire de l’avenir
My reading is virtually fully fluent though I still run into odd constructs that don’t seem to quite make sense, and I don’t know all of the slang words most people would recognize.
I’m really impressed with your ambition and all the work you’ve done so far!
But, I have a simple question: Why don’t you drop the AudioReader crutch (at least for a while) and focus more on oral interactions with native French speakers? You don’t need to know 50000 (different) word(s) (families) or more to have a decent conversation in French.
In my experience in language learning and coaching, it`s better to “do more with less” when it comes to improving fluency!
I believe there was another comment about this, but reaching 40K known words with only 500K read seems strange. I was well over a million when I did in the same language and am almost at 1.5 million now at around the 50K mark, having been able to read Le Petit Nicholas before even starting LingQ.
I guess that could be due to you having a great memory, prior knowledge of the language, studying a lot outside of LingQ and maybe being a bit more quick to mark words as known it still seems a little weird considering how, when I read Norwegian here and knew almost every word at first sight due to knowledge in related languages, I still had to read 570K words of varied content, including dictionary entries in several fields, to reach 50K known ones.
Perhaps you read extremely diverse material in French here as opposed to me reading a lot of long 19t century literature books and that explains more of the difference.
So glad someone else found Kjellin’s work. I’ve done Kjellin’s method with a couple of languages now, and, combined with (literally) 15 minutes on youtube learning to roll my R’s, pronunciation has never been an issue for me. Now, no one will ever mistake me as a native, but becuase of Kjellin’s work (and was really only a little less than a month of focused work on my part), I have the awareness of how i’m pronouncing, where i’m wrong and right, and how to self-correct. I think building the ability to notice and self correction is very important in language learning, but it takes a while sometimes.
Dropping LingQ and the dictionary support is a good idea, though I do make a signficant effort to “just read” and use the dictionaries mostly to confirm my intuitions and to define truly unknown words.
Mostly I don’t drop this crutch due to the “game mechanics”; it keeps me doing a minimum amount of French every day…
As to interacting with French speakers, I have not had great success finding serious learners or others who were interested in talking with me.
My biggest failing at this point is not listening or watching enough French recordings & TV or movies.
If you (still) studying French or wish to use the methods with other languages then David Tolman’s work – just the free stuff on his site and his YouTube videos are well worth the effort, though he has subscriptions if you do all the free stuff (a lot) and want more.
