Darn…I posted a reply to this yesterday and I must not have clicked the button. I’ll try to go from memory.
When I mentioned don’t get stuck on words, I meant in regards to reading only. In other words, don’t read the same lesson 40 times trying to get all the words to “known”. If you’re not able to mark everything to known after a few repeats, move on. Of course, if you don’t repeat lessons then no worries =). I personally found in the beginning stages that some repetition of lessons felt like it helped, but if I was stuck on some words, I just moved on. My thought was that I had gotten all the use out of that particular lesson I could, had the lesson memorized, so it wouldn’t help anyway, and I would need to see the word in context elsewhere. The main point is that there are going to be words you just will simply struggle to remember. Don’t worry about it. Move on.
In regards to your specific problem with not being able to keep up with the Lingq’ing while listening to the audio. In my opinion, don’t. I think some do this, but I think mostly they are doing it with similar languages or are pretty advanced and only have minimal blue or yellow words popping up. What I do, personally, is to read the lesson first, without audio. I go in sentence mode. I read it and try to make sense of the sentence as a whole and if I can guess any of the blue or yellow words in context, I’ll mark them as known (fairly liberally). I don’t worry much about this…if I don’t recognize the word in another context, I’ll just as liberally set it back to 1 or 2. If it’s a word I’m not sure of the pronunciation, I’ll play the pronunciation of that individual word and try to say it (out loud or to myself). Because some words can have different meanings in different contexts, if the word meanings don’t make much sense within the sentence, I’ll click the “show translation” button which will give the meaning of the sentence as a whole and clue me in on certain word combinations or phrasings that might make a totally different meaning from what a given word’s usual meaning is. I then may re-read the sentence, trying to incorporate what I’ve learned about the meaning of the words and help internalize it better. Also, clicking the show translation button helps you to stay in tune with the lesson or story that you’re reading. So even if you really have a tough slog with tons of yellow and blue words, you are still engaged with the story and not just lost in a word salad.
I go through the entire lesson like that. I might also play the audio for each sentence (again, in sentence mode), but often I skip this. Once I’ve read the lesson through, then I play the audio. In the beginning stages, at this point I’d play the audio while reading when I could. Not to look up words or even to attempt to remember words or follow along with the story. This would be mostly to try and associate the words and letters I was seeing to the pronunciation of the speaker. I might listen then to the audio alone. Or listen to the audio alone at a later time, while driving or doing dishes. If the lesson was short and I had some yellow words to work through, I might repeat the lesson a handful of times after a short or long break.
As for your second paragraph, I think some of the links provided will give you these sort of “groupings” of topics. In the ministories too, the words are repeated within the same lesson, in the various forms (first person, third person, present, past, etc.) so you get this sort of a repetition. Various topics too. So maybe check those out. One nice thing about the Assimil books and Teach Yourself (although I haven’t used the latter much) is that you have tidbits of grammar thrown in to help you along. Many of the lessons on LingQ are not like that. If you’re curious about grammar point after reading a LingQ lesson you may need to go do a little research online or in a grammar book.
