I’m new to LingQ, though have used LWT and Lute a little, and through them got a feel for the main concept behind it. I’ve been waiting for LingQ to support Hindi, so was very happy to here Mr. Kaufmann announce its impending release recently.
I took two intro to Hindi courses in university in 2008, and did a little to try to keep up my practice thereafter, but never went too far. My professor had authored his own Hindi learning textbooks, and his method, along with his instruction, had me reading the script quite well in about two weeks! It was pretty mind blowing. (I recall it having to do with learning the characters in a certain order, organized by their shapes, not to do with the traditional Devanagari chart order.) Also got a pretty good grasp of the grammar at that time.
Since then I began studying and playing Hindustani (North Indian) classical music, as well as playing bhajans (devotional songs) and kirtan (call-and-response sacred songs) in a band, mostly sung in Hindi, so I have kept up a fair bit of contact with the language, though I’ve shied away from trying to speak with my Hindi-speaking friends.
A couple years ago I used Duolingo as a refresher for the grammar, and got a bit of vocab from it too, but I cruised right through it and found it short-lived and limited in what it had to offer.
Having heard about LingQ during this renaissance of my Hindi learning, I jumped the moment it when live here! Signed up for a lifetime membership, to save money over time, (I don’t foresee myself dedicating time to any other language in my lifetime, haha!) and I’ve been enjoying it immensely! All the integrated features are what pushed me over the edge, away from the free, similar platforms. Not to mention the inevitable addition of new features down the line, I’m sure.
So far I’ve worked through one full mini story, a bit of the second, and a little bit of the first chapter of Harry Potter (something I’d been doing on Lute recently.) I’ve also tried out the browser extension and imported a Netflix episode (‘Selection Day’ a drama about young cricket players,) and imported a podcast from the ‘Puliyabaazi - Hindi podcast’. Pretty excited about all this! Going to have to try to generate some stories with ChatGPT sometime too.
