How do I get started

Open Forum
34

@LeifGoodwin

Well:

  1. If I’m not mistaken, the Mini Stories seem to be (more or less) identical in all (?) languages on LingQ.

  2. From the perspective of native speakers of Germanic/Romance languages, these Mini Stories are only “difficult” for more distant L2s such as Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. because the pronunciation/intonation, writing systems, grammars, word order and vocabulary of the latter are very different from the Germanic/Romance languages.

  3. Yes, French is easier than German for native speakers of English, but mainly because of the many lexical similarities between English and French (ca. 1/3 of all English words - and maybe even more - are of French origin: Influence of French on English - Wikipedia).

  4. Dutch is closer to English than German, so it’s a bit easier to learn.

  5. If you need grammar for those L2s to be acquired, check LingQ’s grammar guide and light grammar approaches such as Michel Thomas / Language Transfer. That’s usually more than enough to get a feel for the beginner levels in close languages.

  6. Notabene: You can simplify the German grammar a lot by focusing on three tenses:

  • Present Simple
  • Present Perfect Simple (ich habe + past participle)
  • Future Simple (ich werde + infinitive)

You can skip the “imperfect” (ich tat, ging, aß, etc.) because it’s used less and less in the oral dimension and will probably die out in the future.

In short, the three tenses above alone will get you a long way in everyday German. And that’s also much simpler than the tenses in English and even French (with its distinction of passé composé - imparfait - passé simple, for instance).

  1. However, the “separable verbs” (trennbare Verben) in German are a real challenge. On the other hand, the “Konjunktiv” in German is quite primitive compared to the sophisticated Subjunctive Mood in French.

  2. Moreover, you can always

  • Ask ChatGPT for particular grammar points.
  • Use deepl.com for translations and
  • the outstanding Deepl Write (for German).

And if all that isn’t enough, you can also create simplified text versions using Ling’s AI.

So, I don’t know why native speakers of Romance / Germanc languages would need more “absolute” beginner stories (for an extended period of time?) to learn other Germanic or Romance languages…

That said, if you really need such absolute beginner stories occassionally (say for understanding specific grammar constructs), you can also create them using ChatGPT.

“I needed simpler sentences and lots of them to build a base of vocabulary.”

Then just use Memrise for learning the most frequent words - in combo with the methods mentioned above.

There is one disadvantage with the Mini Stories on LingQ, though: they are simply boring. But. I’d say, that’s a problem with all stories in all languages at the beginning, esp. for adult learners.

PS -
I just checked the first ca. 10 Mini Stories in German.
As far as I can see, the only grammar point that is a bit more complicated at the beginning is the “two part (separable) verb”.

For more background info, see this thread:

2 Likes