Hey LingQers,
I’ve been so immersed in my Chinese studies lately, I haven’t taken time to browse the forums much.
I’ve missed you guys!
How are you all doing? How is your studying going? What breakthroughs and/or struggles have you had lately?
Looking forward to hearing from you guys 
Cheers,
Edwin
For the most part I’m doing great, after many years of feeling like my life is going nowhere I feel that I can still achieve a lot of the things that I wanted. I haven’t had much time to deal with language learning as I have a huge project that is very important. However, language learning does play a huge part in it and is sort of the glue that holds everything together.
I chronicle this project on Lingq’s new challenge forum with at the end of the month updates and few sporadic posts in between. For the most part it’s been going great but I do have the occasional days when I feel down in the dumps, like today.
Wonderful. I am new here and love the site.
Have you used it long or are you part o fthe staff?
(I have a Personal Accountability thread if you want to know more about my progress what I am doing…)
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HerbM
I’m trying to reach 20K known words in German. I forgot how long it took me to get from 10k to 20K in French. I am really enjoying German lately, however I know that my listening statistic is SUPER behind oops Shhhh… Dont tell Steve. But I am trying to get in more listening. I just love to read, and most of the stuff I read doesn’t have audio to go with it. But what can you do you know.
That’s really cool you are learning Chinese! I did a little bit of Chinese awhile back, Thats a tough language for sure. But because there are so many Chinese speakers out there im sure it’s really motivating. Good Luck Edwin keep Chuggin.
Oh Hey Swedishfinnpolymath! I didn’t recognize you at first! You changed your picture I am so astonished by your statistics Great Job man! You have accomplished sooo much, Maybe one day I’ll achieve half of what you have. How difficult was german for you to learn?
Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, I felt that I needed a new profile picture to reflect my new identity (aspiring writer). German has been hard partly it’s because my mind has been all over the place for many years.
It’s a bit of a long story but another reason why I have struggled with German is that I haven’t learned the difference between indirect object and direct object properly. It such an integral part of German with nearly everything being conjugated in acc, dat, and gen. I started out learning languages at a community college. I started out with Spanish, continuing with the language and adding another one each year.
The third year I added German and that was a ill advised move in many respects. To cut a long story short, it was supposed to be a beginners class but turned into a sort of intermediate class by the virtue of me being the only real beginner and the textbook being the worst textbook I have ever seen in my life. I should have realized that I needed to take one step back to take two forward but I keep pushing.
Words are fairly easy to learn since my mother tongue is Swedish although in the past couple of years I have been overly obsessed with finding a right method to learn lots of words.
I guess I am somewhat in the same situation now, I need to think carefully about what I do as to not burning myself out. On a somewhat related point the project that I’m working on has to do with helping people learn stuff in an ever changing world.
I am also glad that you find my statistic impressive. It’s encouraging that others feel that they are astonishing since I do tend to dwell a lot on the fact that I should be further along in many of them.
Ah nice man! How long did it take you to go from 10k to 20k in French? How much time a day do you spend on German?
It’s funny, I’m the opposite way with Chinese: I LOVE listening. I like reading, but I definitely find myself resisting reading way more than listening. As a result, my reading speed is slower than it should be, which I’m trying to improve now by studying for HSK 5 (which the reading speed is much faster on than HSK 4, which I already passed).
Steve would still be proud of you I’m sure 
Hey Herb, nice to meet you mate
I’m not a part of the staff, even though I’d definitely consider a job at LingQ in the future, if it had something to do with Chinese.
I’ve known about LingQ since I first discovered Steve’s videos in 2017, however I’ve only been using it since September 2018 when I actually started studying Chinese. Currently I use it every day, as learning Chinese is my full-time job.
I still think it’s a shame that Duolingo is the most talked about language learning platform, but hey, that’s the nature of the beast I guess.
How about you? How did you find out about LingQ?
Hey mate, so great to hear from you dude!
I think it’s wicked what you’re doing. I can totally identify with emotions being deceiving. I have to remind myself that emotions are temporary, and that “this too shall pass” when I am down.
Your post made me think of this awesome interview I really enjoyed watching last year, I think you might like it too: Why You Need to Stop Saying What People Want to Hear | Kyle Cease on Impact Theory - YouTube
Cheers mate! Keep moving forward
100% Agree. DuoLingo does little or nothing for me and I haven’t (personally) seen anybody, including on the Internet, who seems to be getting an advantage from it.
I watch pretty much everything I can find on YouTube that relates to "accelerated language learning’ and much of "french’ which brings up Steve in two ways.
I found several Pod casters that I respect and who had interviewed him as well. Specifically (at least) Johan at Française Authentique and Hugo at InnerFrench (aka Le Cottongue) but there were others including Steve’s videos themselves.
The app didn’t do it for me at first – especially with the LingQ limits on a free account, but I saw the value even though I could use it enough to figure out:
My 5000 deck is about down to “diminishing returns” and I am in love with LingQ (and also BrainScape – mostly for the quality of their decks though their interfaces and such are good too. )
I haven’t bought on BrainScape because it’s has so much that is free and I haven’t satisfied myself (or my “cheapness”) yet. I will probably buy a lifetime subscription over there in the next week or so.
You can see the rest of the details for my methods and progress on my Personal Accountability thread near the top of the Open Forum – if you care.
Result: Today is my 12th day working here, andI will hit 17000 words and about 3400 LingQs today… I know at least 5000 words but probably a lot more due to cognates, roots, etymology, and context, especially when reading.
UPDATE: I went a little crazy and finished DAY #12 with over 20K words and 3700 LingQs by adding another 300 LingQ for the day.
I had a gold apple until the day changed so I might have to stay up and hit my goal for day #13
I do wish the Forums were more active here, so I am looking for a “Forum Home” to discuss with helpful folks like you.
My main focus has been on continuing weekly practice in reading and listening ~10+ hours weekly and meeting some of the other targets that I am keeping myself. So far, I have been hitting all of my goals and have been making very very solid progress. That said, I think I am starting to reach a plateau (which is a constant theme in language learning) but I am trudging along. The only way to get past those is to keep moving on and trust the process.
My plan is to significantly ramp up writing daily very soon and speaking A LOT soon after but some life challenges are delaying this currently.
I am very excited to see things develop through the year but February has definitely been a very very challenging month for me at least.
Edwin, I think this post is fantastic. It’s great to read what everyone is doing to learn!
I’ve been using Lingq for Korean since 2017, and I must say that I have been using Lingq less and less, but I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I enjoy the site, but now all of my materials don’t come in a format that I can put into Lingq. I just read, watch, and listen constantly, and I rarely look things up anymore. I’m always amazed at how well my conversations with native speakers go because my total speaking hours are so low.
I do still use Lingq for news articles, podcasts, and TV shows (if the subtitles/transcripts are good), but I have significantly less fun when I have look up all the words while I’m reading. I still think it’s quite good to do though.
A problem that I have is that I find news so boring, but I feel like it’s a vocabulary goldmine! It’s like all the low-frequency words get used ad nauseam in perfect contexts. I just find news so BORING!
I also find it hilarious that I have so much knowledge of outdated popular culture references related to relationships and dating because I currently binge watch a show called “Witch Hunt” (마녀사냥) all the time, and it concluded a few years ago.
I also feel like I’m slowly breaking into young adult level novels quite well! Short stories, comics, and tv shows have really helped me get there. I even have a novel I’m reading now, but it’s funny how easy it is to comprehend some parts, but not others. Overall, I just can’t stop coming back to the stories, and I think I’m in a great place.
How goes the Chinese? 
I find consistent speaking helps you notice that you’re still improving, especially when you start learning words from your conversation partners and applying them. You got it Moose
So today I have been hear one (short) month:
Feb 10 Start
Feb 16 10k 7 days 7 total
Feb 21 20k +5 days 12 total
Mar 09 30k +17 days 29 total
Current totals after a 29 streak with most days 4+ times goal. About an hour per day most days.
32,383 words, 9124 Lingqs
(most links were created manually as I disabled auto early on)
In French it’s actually difficult to find useful words due to the large number of cognates with English, especially after you pass the first 5000 words or so.
Short of dumping a “dictionary” into LingQ which wont find the most useful words the pickings become slip in most material.
My strategy is to read from a wide variate of sources where I have deep knowledge (in English) and otherwise focus on linking short phrases (locutions, colocations, & structural idioms).
Reading is pretty much straight forward but part of that is a strong technical vocabulary across a variety of fields which hits on latin roots and more of the “fancy” words that English shares with French.
To be clear, I do a lot of LingQ but it is only one of 6 components that are all about as intensive.
I love LingQ. It has made my reading extremely easy and thereby also helped greatly with my listening to audio books.