As a new user I am feeling overwhelmed on how to use LingQ. Are there are online tutorials? I am confronted with my first lesson and it simply only speaks the first word, “hallo” (I am learning Dutch). I literally don’t know the next step. Are you able to help.
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I would suggest watching a couple “how to” videos on You Tube. I searched “starting with LingQ” and watched several videos so I could better understand how the system works before I got started. Having said that, I think there is a lack of total beginner material in the LingQ library for many of the languages. Maybe someone else here can comment on what’s available for Dutch, but you may want to do some sort of online absolute beginner course before jumping in to reading material if you have no background in the language. I’d be curious what others think!
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Hi kiwiheretic,
Here are
-
a few ideas on how to use LingQ as a beginner, esp. with a(n)“(ultra-)reading while listening” approach: —www.lingq.com/de/learn/pt/web/community/post/4380195 (simply remove the hyphen before the “www”)
-
my Dutch resources you could use on LingQ (I’ve been learning Dutch for ca. 11 months now):
—www.lingq.com/en/learn/en/web/community/post/4899118 (simply remove the hyphen before the “www”)
Hope that helps,
Peter
PS -
If you’re a native speaker of English, you don’t need material for absolute beginners because
Dutch and English are close Germanic languages. In other words, the second language acquisition process is quite straightforward for you: simply start with the “Mini Stories” on LingQ 
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Not sure if you’re referring to a technical issue here. However, if there is an audio problem,
you can change the AI voices, see this thread: — Creating lesson audio only makes audio for 2 seconds
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When I try to visit that link it says the link either does not exist or is marked private.
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I think it’s pointed to the old forum. Peter’s posts should be in this forum somewhere, but would have to search for the title names (which I don’t know).
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Hi @kiwiheretic / Eric,
No, those are posts on my home page, not in the forum
Hm, interesting. There’s nothing “private” here.
Anyway, the easiest way is to go to my LingQ home page and scroll down a little bit:
-
Go to your LingQ home page (profile), add my user name after “profile/” in the URL, and
press Enter.
(Tip: You can access any home page of LingQ users by adding their
user name after “profile/” - provided their page is public) -
Scroll down to DUTCH CHALLENGE (SINCE MARCH 2023) for the
Dutch ressources. -
And scroll down a little bit further for several other posts:
Title: BASIC RESOURCES FOR USING LINGQ
Title: For LingQers who want to know what the “ULTRAREADING-WHILE-LISTENING” APPROACH is [as of March 30, 2022]
The conversation with the user “Wajlander” about learning an L2 (just replace Swedish with Dutch) from scratch (see the comment section there).
Sorry for the inconvenience, but navigating in LingQ is sometimes a bit of an adventure
Hope that helps / good luck,
Peter
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As others have suggested, take a quick look on Youtube for LingQ tutorials. The system may seem intimidating, but you really can’t go wrong here by just starting to read one or two of the Mini Stories.
LingQ is self-correcting to a great extent. If you accidentally ignore a word you don’t know, it will come up again: same if you mark a word as “known” when you really don’t know it - it will reappear somewhere else and you’ll not know what it means, so you’ll mark it as unknown. It all sorts itself out in the end.
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@PeterBormann
The links, in your first post above, if you examine them (compared to posts in this new forum), are quite a bit different. i.e. I think they are pointing to the old forum links, which doesn’t exist anymore. I know they transferred most, if not all, to the new forum, but they have different urls. i.e. any of the old forum links that have “community” in the url name don’t work. If you know the titles we can find them in the new forum. I have found a couple of your old posts (not sure if either are ones you were thinking of).
Here’s the link to your profile. Lots of good info of course, and most of the links work (they point to new forum):
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I suggest learning Sentence View first and ignore the rest of the features until you get the hang of Sentence View. It’s not hard.
- Start with a mini-story lesson or any other beginner lesson which looks interesting.
- Click Sentence View at the bottom of the page.
- Try to make some sense of the sentence.
- Click “Show Translation” (or press Shift-T on the keyboard").
- One by one, click on the blue words and read the definitions.
- If you know the word, click the Known button in the Defnition Panel (or press K key).
- If you don’t know the word, increment the number in the Defintion Panel (or press the number key).
- If you want to check the pronuncation, click the Speaker button (or Press S key).
- After you’ve dealt with all the blue words, click in the Translation to get out of Definition mode.
- To hear the whole phrase or sentence, click the Speaker button (or Press S key).
- To get to the next sentence, click the “>” button on the right. (The right-arrow works, but not always.)
Once you’ve gotten comfortable with this, later learn how LingQs work (just like words except you select a range of words first).
That’s all you really need to know to make good use of LingQ. That’s all I use. The rest of LIngQ – all the testing, flashcards, streaks, fancy importing – you may explore as you are moved to.
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PS. I personally suggest turning off two annoying features:
- Profile/Settings/App Settings/Reader/General/Paging moves to known
- Profile/Settings/App Settings/Reader/General/Streak and milestones popups
By the way Sentence View is buggy. Keyboard shortcuts may not work and audio may be delayed for several seconds or longer.
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I 2nd this op. Sentence mode is the way to go
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I’m in the same boat, I come from another site with a green owl, did one year on it it was quite good, but maybe too scholar.
But even if this green owl became utter sh*t over the years, it was much more intuitive and if I had never done it I wouldn’t even be able to read cyrillic and start the first lesson ! (I’m learning Russian).
I can see how Lingq is the complete opposite of the previous site and I’m a bit lost.
How should I be able to learn a language when I can’t even read it or understand the differences between present/past/future ?
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LingQ helps you to read what you don’t understand. You can look up the meanings of individual words you don’t understand…initially set to blue, which you should then click and mark as 1, 2, 3, 4, known, or ignored as you click on them to look up the meaning. Setting to 1, 2, 3, 4 will mark them as some shade of yellow. You are still learning these. In addition, in the aformentioned sentence mode you can click on the “show translation” button and it will show the translation for the entire sentence. As you continue to click on your lingq to look up the word translations, or in sentence mode to see the entire translation, you will begin to slowly start to understand those words in context. As you do, you can mark them to “known”. In the beginning you won’t know the words, but with enough repetitions (either in the same lesson, or in other lessons) you will start to learn the words.
You will start to see how a verb might look depending on a tense, but you can then also start to look up grammar points as you start to get familiar with things. One of the dictionaries you can choose in the LingQ section is “Reverso Conjugation”. This will show you all the forms of a given word if you click on it. You can also click on one of the tags that shows the root form on the LingQ that will bring you right to this “dictionary”. On the main screen under your avatar in the menu there is also a Grammar Guide that should give the basics of the language you are using. But you can do a google search or copy a sentence into ChatGPT and ask it to explain the grammar. It’s not perfect but doing this occasionally can help you get familiar with grammatical concepts.
If you haven’t looked over the basics you might check here first to see how to use the app:
Latest Knowledge Base/Knowledge Base topics - LingQ Language Forums
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get a second device and a bluetooth macro maker so you can use sentence mode to 1 go to the next sentences 2 say the audio and 3 show the translation. Look up how with “lingq shortcuts”. Read thousands of words a day and you’ll recognise words and hopefully enjoy what you read.
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Re: @ericb100
Thumbs up on Reverso for verbs, especially at the beginning. It provides the primary definitions plus the conjugations.
I like to glance through the conjugations, not to memorize them, but to be reminded. Also to check to see how irregular the verb is.
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Thanks, Eric!
Funny:
My “DUTCH CHALLENGE” post was created in March 2023,
so it shouldn’t be on the old SW.
Anyway, I don’t have time to investigate bc. I’ve got too many (AI-/ data sc.-related)
certifications to do
Have a nice weekend,
Peter
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I’d add - “only for distant L2s”.
Dutch is a kind of “low hanging fruit L2” for native speakers of
Germanic languages (esp. German or English), so “no
sentence mode” is usually needed.
The challenge with Dutch is “speaking / writing”,
but we tend to get listening / reading comprehension in Dutch
almost for free.
Same with (Br / European) Portuguese ↔ Spanish, btw.
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- Learn Cyrillic letters first.
- Use a grammar light approach à la Michel Thomas to get the
basics of Russian grammar / sentence structure. - Maybe even the beginner course on Memrise.
Only after that can you use LingQ both effectively and efficiently.
The rest should be straightforward: lots of reading (or / while)
listening (plus a grammar book / SRS for learning grammar constructs).
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Are you using the web interface i.e. in a browser. or the app? I use an iPad, and I strongly recommend the app. I struggle to understand the web interface.
The biggest problem, and the greatest strength, of LingQ is the lack of structure.
I spent months working out how best to use it for German and French. If I were to start again as a beginner, I would search YouTube for A1 German video, with simple phrases such as “I went to work by train”, and I would import them into LingQ. I would then study each video in LingQ, using sentence mode. Look up the words so you understand them, listen to the audio, speak the sentence. Work through each video, revise previous videos.
LingQ is far superior to the evil green owl and other similar courses. However, I’m not keen on the content in LingQ. Some is outdated (old novels), some has poor quality audio, some is spoken poorly, some has horrible robot audio and all too often in German the level rating is misleading e.g. A2 (beginner) material with long complex sentences. But that’s easy tomfix, just import from YouTube.