How Do Users Use LingQ?

Open Forum
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Hello everyone,

I’m having a really hard time using LingQ, so I end up using it very little… which is a shame because I’m fully aware of the potential of this app.

My biggest problem is: how can I use this app effectively?

More specifically, I struggle with the review system. On the page I’m studying, the reviews appear at the bottom left. But in fact, I feel like I spend hours and hours (and sometimes days) trying to complete all the review exercises. It’s exhausting… and I don’t enjoy it.

I’d also like to know how you study a text.

Do you take notes in a notebook?

Do you create flashcards on Anki or MosaLingua? (That must take a really long time…)

In short, how do you absorb new vocabulary with LingQ?

Do you use another app alongside LingQ, like Babbel or MosaLingua?

Thank you in advance for your feedback

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I don’t use the review or flashcard system at all because of that. I just open what looks interesting. Read through it while clicking on all blue and yellow words to briefly note the meaning. Sometimes a yellow word is becoming more familiar to me and I advance the number I assign it. Occasionally a blue word is a cognate or is related to a word I already know. When that is the case and I think I will remember the word I mark it as known. I don’t stress myself about knowing all the words before moving on. At first I wasn’t sure that would work. But after 1 year my known Words are almost at 20k. It just takes time.

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I use the review system but not the way it’s intended. Let’s you have 5,000 lingqs created, it would take a long, long time to get these words to known. Because they’re spaced daily, every 3 days, every week, etc. What I personally do is when I read a lesson. I will select words I am familiar with or words I want to study at that moment in time. Mark them as 3s. Then every day or every other day I will go to the review. Maybe review up to 50 words a day, but with the answers covered. So one by one, I’ll say what I think the answer is. If I have it correct, I will move it to learned or known. Sometimes it takes 1 time. Sometimes it takes 5 or more. It I tried 5 times and don’t get the meaning, I’ll move it back to a 1 rating. Sometimes when I’m reading later in days or weeks I’ll see the word again and the meaning will just pop up in my head. But don’t focus on the flashcards themselves, just seeing the word multiple times will help you remember the meaning. Doing the review exercises will take too long if you do it their way. The way I do, I can go over maybe 50 words in about 20 minutes. Just a quick guess and on to the next one.

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start with the mini stories or look for beginner level youtube videos in your target language if you are a beginner. Going through a series of similar types of content such as audio books or youtube videos about a certain topic means you will get a lot of repetition. The review on lingq is not very good so if you do want to do flash cards with anki on the side that could work but i don’t do it and i still learn vocab but it takes a lot of reading. I always read and follow along something that has audio, the more you do it, the faster you will start to learn words. Just keep looking up words you don’t know and try to only watch new content that just above your level. Every lesson on lingq shows you how many new words there are. I try to aim for 10% new words or less

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Very important: In Parameters/Lesson settings, I’ve disabled [Paging moves to known].

I mostly read and occasionally [review the lesson].

When I started learning, I read the mini stories. Now, I import at least 3 Spanish articles a day. I find them mostly in https://www.meneame.net/ or Noticias - BBC News Mundo . They are typically around 600-1000 words long.

I often read them first in their original location, before rereading them in LingQ. After that second reading, I open the statistics for the lesson and adjust the “Words Read” multiplier from 1.0 to 2.0 . I sometimes do a third reading back in the original source: the images and rich formatting make it more memorable. When I do, I also adjust the multiplier to 3.0

After that, I generate the audio for the lesson and add it to the top of my playlist. I listen to this playlist in the morning, when I walk my dog, or when I drive.

Just after importing an article in LingQ, I browse through the pages and rapidly check the new blue words. Proper nouns are easy to spot - they start with an uppercase - and I “delete” them. If I notice an underlined word - see below - that I now completely understand, I change it from 4 to 5. I then go back to page 1 and start reading.

When there are many blue words and/or a section of the text is hard to understand, I switch to the sentence mode.

  • I mark as “1” new blue words I don’t understand. I may promote yellow words that I now recognise.
  • Once I recognise a yellow word in context, I mark it as “known” (5).
  • If this word has a double meaning that I don’t master yet, I mark it as learned (4) to make it appear underlined. Ex: in Spanish, “papel” means “paper”, but also “role”. After having encountered both cases multiple times in lessons, I now know it can mean those two things, so I’ve moved it from 4 to 5.
  • If I understand a blue word, I keep reading and don’t bother marking it as “known”, as it will be done automatically at the end of the lesson (see below).

At the end of the LingQ reading pass, I press [Terminate the lesson]. It displays a list of the remaining blue words that will be marked as “known”. I review this list carefully, and click/move words I don’t recognise completely to the next list.

Note: this is an evolving process.

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Not sure what is the most effective but just my experience below.

I only used to take notes when I did some lessons with tutor and when I was going through some grammar. If you like writing notes, I see no harm in it.

I completed the Refold Anki Deck. I do make card through sentence mining from games sometimes. But I am not consistent in using ANKI anymore. Just lack of time. I spend more time just reading/listening and completing books/podcasts.

Common words will naturally appear a lot and would have similar effect as SRS (ANKI). “Absorption” will happens naturally through regular exposure to those words over days/weeks/months. If you read material by same author, you will absorb their commonly used vocab.

Don’t worry about rare words, they are probably not important. I don’t see any point in reviewing rare words that I know I won’t use actively.

I find “absorption” gets easier as you learn more word and get better in the language.

Also just like your native language you don’t need to know every word.

Also note that vocab in reading books is a lot more ( and a lot more flowery ) than what you would use for daily speaking conversations.

I tried many but never completed any as they were either too slow or got too difficult too fast. Or the topics were boring, too niche (example, a fashion trend in an African country or weird examples on duolingo).

I like the MosaSeries by MosaLingua for listening practice.

to add, I am also experimenting a lot, example one of my goal is to play Skyrim in my Target Language with as little look up as possible. So I extracted all the in-game books from the game and imported them into LingQ. Hopefully this would get me familiar with the vocab used in the game.

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No.

No.

I absorb it through the books, articles I read. Because I read only what interests me. What does not interests me I can’t really absorb. (That’s why I didn’t go through mini stories: I find them utterly boring.)

In one of my target language I use a private teacher’s own website for everything else but vocabulary (grammar, pronunciation, etc.).

Plus sometimes I use Lingq’s review system because I’m not in the mood to read at all but I still want to achieve my daily goal. So on those rare days I review words of finished books. Some quizz fun till my daily linq target is hit.

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Thank you all for your answers!

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I do not use the review function typically. Occasionally I’ll mess around with it but have never really found it useful (or just doesn’t fit my flow). Keep in mind that you may find certain things helpful that others may not. So some of this process you may have to figure what works for you.

In general, I find something interesting and import it into LingQ. For me…news, books, wikipedia articles, or documentary type things. I usually work in sentence mode. For blue words…If I know it in context, I set it to 5. If I don’t know it, I look at the sentence translation and then choose a meaning that fits…if no meaning fits I create my own. If the word is yellow, if I know it this iteration in context then I set it to 5. If not, I bump it to the next level, up to 3. i.e. 1 becomes 2. 2 becomes 3. 3 remains 3 until I know it in context. If it’s a common word in these piece of text I won’t bump it each time I see it. Only if a day has passed might I bump it within the same bit of text.

Through this process you will begin to start remember what the words mean. Some words will stick easily. Some will not. Some words you may mark as known but you encounter them later and can’t remember (I’ll usually set these back to 3).

Do I take notes? No. If I find some article or something that explains a grammar point or something about the language that I find useful I may clip it to Evernote.

Do I create flashcards? Yes and no. I hate using Anki. I find I get behind on reviews because I usually have limited time during the day for such things. I usually find myself only doing reviews. When I first started learning German I did use an SRS type app (Memrise) which gave me a good foundation in the beginning. But ultimately I gather vocab with LingQ much faster through the process I described above. I AM currently going through the most common vocab (from a word frequency list) and setting these up in google sheets. For words I don’t know from this list I’m creating entries in google sheets with word, english translation, german example sentence, english translation. I set the english translation to white so I can’t see it unless I click in it. Each day I add a few words and review old entries for a little bit. I do use an SRS type of system with this (Leitner). I’ve found this very useful and it doesn’t take me a lot of time. I’m also not stuck with reviews accumulating like I would with Anki as I’ll just start where I left off if I miss a few days. If I did that with Anki, I’d be behind a few hundred or thousand quite quickly!

Note, I’m doing this mostly because a lot of these words are fairly “common”…in other words, they are essential vocabulary, but they don’t appear very often in text. So this is to give me the necessary reps for these words. I have also occasionally grabbed the words from LingQ for a chapter that I still don’t know and create a similar google sheet to learn these. I’ve mostly stopped this as I just don’t have the time.

No other apps really – I have used Memrise and Duolingo but I rarely pop my head into them. I’ve used Language Reactor and like it a lot for watching Netflix movies, but again…I’ve kind of run out of time to use it. Plus, some of the shows I’m currently watching aren’t on Netflix. I do also use “naturalreaders” app to do the listening part of the sentences I mentioned above from the google sheets process I have. Oh, I do also use quizlet a bit. Mostly I’ve been using it for Language Islands. I can do this in google sheets too, but google sheets on the phone doesn’t act so nicely. Quizlet is nice for this. Much simpler than Anki, but no SRS mechanism.

Eric

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10

I have hardware, mouse or macro apps that let me run shortcuts the way I want.
I use the web version.
50 point/ minimum of SPanish, Irish and French a day.
Lots of Greek, ideally 2000 or 3000 words of reading.

I get books I’m happy to read. Harry Potter, Hunger games, others.

I use sentence mode;
next sentence + translation
then audio

or all at the same time.

Recently, I sometimes
go to the next sentence + translation
read it
then read along with the audio.
I find this very intense, a bit slow but potentially very good.

And repeat for a target of a million words a year.
Almost nothing else.

It leans into comprehensible input with translation helping with comprehension. The level of interesting texts are above the ideal level for comp input.

Words come up again; then you’ll want to learn them. Or they are important. Or your brain starts to make connections.
Basically, everything is interesting and relevant.
I notice a big improvement every month or 100,000 words or so.

I mark words as known early and generously. I might mark something as 2 or 3 to revise it, which I probably won’t. It’s distracting to mess withthe numbers if you read a lot so I stopped.

I find Greek hard and very slow, but this progresses me. Other methods haven’t been great.

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For the first 500 words in a language, I use a flashcard app, a language learning app, or YouTube videos where you repeat useful phrases.

I only do reviews on Lingq once in a while, when I feel like it. Otherwise I just read and make Lingqs.

I prefer Lingq texts with about 10% new words, maybe 15%. At first, it was tough to find material with only 10% new words. Once I got to about 1,000-3,000 words, Lingq became much more useful.

When I pick a new text, I open it on my iPhone and open the vocabulary.

If the vocabulary words in the Lingq tab look useful, that’s a good sign that this lesson is worth reading.

Then I look at the New Words tab. I tap the check mark for the known words, and the delete for the proper names.

Sometimes, it helps to do the review for the Lingqs before starting the lesson, especially if it has useful words. I only review 20 words at a time, sometimes 10, and then I take a break or do something else. I set up the reviews so I don’t have the cloze “fill in the blank” cards, or the review that has you put the words in order.

It can be helpful to listen to the lesson first, and try to follow along in the text.

When I read through the text, I make Lingqs as I go. Sometimes I read one page at a time, and push the sound button.

If I find a text I really like, I might re-read it, and do the reviews after every page.

If a lesson has a bunch of difficult words in the reviews that I don’t really need yet, then I keep moving, and keep looking for a text at my level.

It helps to go back and read the same text later. Taking a day off between reading a lesson helps sometimes. Other times, you feel like repeating the same lesson and same reviews every day.. Reading lessons again that you read a week or a month ago is also very useful. I only do daily reviews for a short text that I really like.

You might try reading something with a lot of cognates at first, like very short news stories. Short cartoons for children full of facts you already know are also good, especially if you can watch the cartoon in multiple languages.

Simple, everyday vocabulary is very different between French and English. You might want to try reading and listening to texts that have a lot of words you recognize, just to get used to the sounds, and then go back to the beginner lessons later.

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Not saying my way is good, but here’s how I do it. Each day I go through the following steps, in order. I progress through the Mini Stories first, then the courses at the progressive levels (Beginner 1, Beginner 2, etc). I study for reading knowledge, not speaking.

  1. Create thirteen links, not studying them. No more, no less, progressing through the material, one chapter/episode at a time.
  2. Read through the first lesson for which I don’t know all the words. Read, not listen. If I need to use the Sentence view for translations, I switch to that. I click on any words I don’t know, with a focus on comprehension of each sentence. Just reading, no memorization.
  3. Listen through the lesson I just read, reading it as I listen. At this point, having just read it with comprehension, so when I listen it’s fresh in my mind and I usually understand everything I hear, following along with the text.
  4. Next, I go to “Review Lesson”, with the goal of moving thirteen lingQs to “Known words” for the day. No more, no less. I’m not memorizing, just going through the “Review Lesson” exercise and progressing through 1, 2, 3, 4, Known until thirteen lingQs have become known words. Known at the moment, not memorized for later.
  5. After getting my thirteen known words for the day, I read the next lesson in sequence, without listening. I click on any lingQs and use Sentence View when necessary to make sure I understand everything. Then I listen to the lesson I just read. I move on to the next lesson, read it, then listen to it. I progress through lessons in sequence, reading and then listening, until I have my 0.25 “hours” for the day, as measured by LingQ. In this step, I’m not doing the Lesson Review exercise or creating new lingQs. All of the lingQs for the lessons in this step have already been created days earlier in Step 1. This Step 5 involves only reading with comprehension.

The next day, I repeat the above steps, except my starting point is a little further ahead in the lesson sequence by virtue of having moved thirteen lingQs into the Known Words category the previous day. When all lingQs in a given lesson have become known words, the next day’s starting point is naturally the next lesson in the sequence.

It’s slow but sure. I only want to be able read, not speak, so this routine works for me. I’m in no rush, either; this is a hobby I intend to keep up indefinitely, at least until I complete all or most of the lessons for a given language. I am studying three languages a day like this, and want to pick up more if and when I complete the ones I’m studying now.

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I don’t use the review system. I just keep reading stuff on LingQ and the same words will pop up again eventually in the new texts I’m reading.

I learn in 2 different ways depending on the language. Right now I’m learning Italian and Ukrainian.

For Italian, right now I mainly import TV subtitles. I read through the subtitles, check the definitions for the words I don’t know, and hit “ignore” for any words which are in another language or the same as in English so it won’t mess up my word count. I do that for one episode, then I watch the episode as a video with Italian dubbing and Italian subtitles. When I’m done watching, I add the minutes watched to my “Listen” count on LingQ.

This is possible because Italian has so many words in common with English and some other languages I know, it takes very little study to get to this point. At least once a day I also try to pick a very short text in Italian which has as many words I don’t know as possible in it, in order to raise my LingQ count faster than when doing subtitles.

For Ukrainian, both the vocabulary and grammar are new to me, AND the LingQ dictionary is terrible for Ukrainian. So I have found picture books meant for Ukrainian preschoolers who are learning to read. I take the text from those and put them into LingQ and read them as I follow along with the book on another screen.

Italian is my main focus and is more motivating because it’s much easier, so I do at least 1 hour a day of Italian. I am pretty lazy with Ukrainian because it’s demotivating to understand literally nothing in the text. I am considering a different method where I make flashcards of the most necessary Ukrainian words and grammar, pausing my usage on LingQ until that flashcard deck is memorized, and then will return to LingQ after that.

I have also used the LingQ AI to try and chat in Italian. It made me feel more tired than reading however.

I don’t write notes in a notebook. I don’t use another app. I do read Italian books with a Kobo E-reader (which also has a dictionary built-in).

Years ago I used to make tons of flashcards, and now I feel that making and reviewing the flashcards typically takes so much time that it is better to just not do it, unless you are REALLY struggling (like me with Ukrainian) or you have to prepare for a language exam.

The alternative for me to overcome my struggles with Ukrainian is to study a semi-related language first, which is much easier, such as Bulgarian. Get used to vocabulary and reading in Bulgarian, then switch to Ukrainian and you will understand maybe 30% or more of the Ukrainian vocabulary, making the learning much easier. If I did that, I could do it all entirely through LingQ.

I don’t “level up” my vocabulary. I always just either mark it as Known, Unknown, or Ignore.

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I have found little value in LingQ beyond the basics. Especially the review exercises.

I upload a book in French I want to read, then I read it in Sentence View, using the dictionaries and audio playback as necessary. Then I read another.

I write down definitions, links I don’t know plus occasional notes into a Moleskine notebook. I review when I feel like it.

That’s it.

I recommend finding what works for you.

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In my experience, Lingq’s greatest strength (and a great strength it is) is serving as training wheels when breaking out of learn space into the wilds of the real world. I don’t find it very useful until I somehow gain some traction with the language. Currently, I’m using this app for Spanish, French and Latin, mostly watching news and history YouTube videos, I tried to use it for Greek (even did some hardcore challenges) but found I was not progressing, and dropped back to just Duolingo and Mondly, at least until the script stops looking like space alien hieroglyphics.

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I’ve read over 2 million words on LingQ. Over 60k known words in my language. Here’s the secret. It’s simple. Just read–a lot. Read as much as you can, every day. Mark words know when you recognize them and unmark them as known when you forget them. Forget flashcards or reviews – reading itself is your flashcards. Every time you read a word, it’s a flashcard. Just read. I’m now B2, btw, and LingQ is my main source for learning, along with weekly native conversations.

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  • Listen to Steve Kauffman / lingosteve on youtube for tips
  • Ministories, don’t master them, just keep going and loop back
  • Lesson reviews, here and there
  • Import songs, learn to sing along and know the meaning
  • Let it become intuitive when you read and listen. Don’t translate.
  • Read and listen A LOT. Words magically connect in your brain. Some take longer.
  • Words in context are easier to get into your brain than vocabulary drills (I still do those though occasionally)
  • I ask ChatGPT a lot
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I don’t use the review or flashcard system at all because of that. I just open what looks interesting. Read through it while clicking on all blue and yellow words to briefly note the meaning. Sometimes a yellow word is becoming more familiar to me and I advance the number I assign it. Occasionally a blue word is a cognate or is related to a word I already know. When that is the case and I think I will remember the word I mark it as known. I don’t stress myself about knowing all the words before moving on. At first I wasn’t sure that would work. But after 1 year my known Words are almost at 20k. It just takes time.

This is pretty much how I study too. I don’t use the review system because it’s just not motivating to me at all. I read whatever I find interesting, alternating between easier and more difficult materials so that I don’t get too tired. I mostly use Sentence Mode while reading, so it’s easy to check unknown words and reinforce vocabulary I haven’t fully learned yet. I also aim to listen for a minimum of 15 minutes per day, because I find that it makes it easier for me to remember words and sentence patterns.

I like to LingQ words according to how well I can remember them:

1 (New) - I have no idea what this word means

2 (Recognized) - I can deduce or remember the meaning of the word (at least roughly) when I see it in context

3 (Familiar) - I can understand the word without context, but I might not be able to produce it myself

(Known) - I can remember the word well enough to be able to produce it myself (edit: although I might not remember e.g. what case it is in, so I wouldn’t necessarily be able to use it correctly)

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19

For how to use Lingq personally:

  1. Using the keyboard to jump between yellow and blue words to learn words on the computer
  2. Sentence mode for early stage of listening
  3. Create 100 lingqs or more a day for hard languages or 100 known words a day for easier languages
  4. Hyper focus on creating lingqs

Never used the review feature and any other feature other than going to lesson and start lingqing. More of a straight forward approach to using this application. Been doing it for years

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Recently I’ve gone back to what I did before I got Anki (and Falshcards Deluxe, another flashcard app) - just read as much as possible. I’m currently convinced flash cards or other app games are just a poor way to create real long term memories that lead to acquiring vocabulary or grammar. I think you should just read, listen, speak and dabble in grammar. I don’t use any of the vocabulary tools on LingQ and never have. I used to copy and paste words into Flashcards Deluxe or Anki and study them there but I’ve stopped. I use an app Language Reactor to “read” movies or videos. You can set it to pause every subtitle and then read it with a pop up dictionary like on LingQ. I think there are some extensions for LingQ that may let you use LingQ to do this but Language Reactor is very easy to use.

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