How Do You Use Lingq?

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Hello all, hola todos, 大家好, привет

Just looking to get some feedback from everyone on how they actually use this website. Not asking how you use this or that function, but how do you use Lingq to study?
I got to thinking about this because I’ve seen some other threads in the forum where people were saying they don’t actually use the Lingqed words for vocabulary reviews, rather they just keep reading more and more lessons/stories. Just the other day Steve K posted a YouTube video about pretty much the same topic (ie, more lessons for more varied exposure, rather than more focus to fully break down less lessons).
I figured one of the main functions of the website was to identify specific words/phrases and how well you know them, for the purpose of seeing them frequently or infrequently in SRS studies between lessons. But if you’re not doing the SRS recaps, what is the point of making the Lingq? You might not see that word for a long time, and if it’s been a while how will you remember what it means?

So, if you would be so kind as to describe your Lingq study methods I would appreciate it.
How many new lessons would you go through in one sitting? How many times do you go over a specific lesson before moving on to the next new one? Do you start off every day’s study with the SRS review or do you never bother with it? Anything else you’d recommend throwing in?

Thanks in advance for your input.

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Hallo Darkslide.

LingQ is ideal for reading!

I read texts and mark words that are unknown to me (and I add translation of course).

Doing this over and over again is like vocabulary reviews but much more entertaining.

You just read whatever you want to read and whatever fits your level in the language, and you will encounter the most important words over and over again in yellow.

It’s okay for me to forget what a words means from time to time, seeing it marked as yellow forces me to remember even a bit of it’s origin because after all… I have encountered it at least once before.

Anyway that is how I use LingQ :wink:

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I agree. I will say, when I’m a beginner I go through lessons multiple times. Even in the same sitting I’ll take it from the top multiple times, listening, reading, listening while reading. (I started up a few new languages recently and was a little surprised to find myself doing this.)

I don’t do enough listening. As an activity it’s less straightforward than reading, and it also doesn’t contribute to my streak…

It is an interesting question what the value of LingQs really are, aside from functional things like being able to put your own notes and tags on them. Choosing a LingQ is a small amount of work, and the site can easily count how much of it you’ve done, so that it is measurable. As niek1337 said, when you see that a word is yellow, you might notice the word rather than assume you’ve never seen it.

I put various tags on LingQs (at time of creation) that I think I might want to review and be sure I know, but I actually hardly ever do such reviews.

The site would function much the same, for me, if it didn’t have flashcard functionality at all… The idea that the shades of yellow correspond to frequencies with which the word should be reviewed, seems almost like an afterthought, something that plausibly works with the concept of LingQs, but that would have been left out if it hadn’t worked.

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Early on I read lessons multiple times and did flashcard reviews. That can be effective, but only if you actually do it. It’s not a terribly alluring set of activities, which leads to the discussion of maintaining motivation. Once my vocabulary reached a certain level I transitioned to the read once approach without separate vocabulary review. I’m on my 3rd or 4th full-length book read with Lingq’s help, and I’m both enjoying it and continuing to learn.

Let me qualify myself, though, by stating again that I had studied my target language in school many, many years ago, and I retained a good measure of the grammar and some basic vocabulary. So I’m not really qualified from personal experience to comment on best approaches for rank beginners’ use of Lingq. If the key to language acquisition is comprehensible input, then it seems to me that some structured review of vocabulary and grammar could help greatly with the “comprehensible” part.

Anyway, nowadays when I’m away from Lingq I may read e-books on an e-reader with an integrated dictionary, but I still prefer Lingq and find lingqs beneficial. On the e-reader I will recognize a word in context and only pause to look up words when necessary to understand a passage. On Lingq, contrariwise, I will briefly consider each yellow word to judge whether my ability to recognize it out of context or in a different context warrants its promotion. That constitutes a brief vocabulary review and better aids learning the word compared to the e-reader approach. For those that I lingqed previously but haven’t learned, my chosen “hint” is immediately available, which is less tedious than using the e-reader’s integrated dictionary.

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Honestly, I just mostly read. I listen in the car to stuff I have read before, but there isn’t a ton of content I want to listen to more than 3-4 times.

For reading, I upload my books and just go through them. I used to get audio books with them, but I quickly moved away from that since it took forever to upload. Since LingQ won’t let me do more than 2k words a lesson, I was having to splice up the audio into 2k word chunks and it was taking forever. So, now I just read without the audio.

I do not use the flash cards or the SRS built into LingQ. What I generally do is by about chapter 4-5 of a new book, I will take all my yellow words I encounter from then on and make Anki flash cards out of them. I have been using my Anki deck for years, and it is what I like, so I stick with it. It also helps me study at my random down time during the day. After I add a word to Anki, I generally click it as “known,” then move on. I try and at least add a couple of hundred words per book, but I certainly ignore a large number of my yellow words when making Anki cards if I don’t think they are that important.

The reason I started waiting until the middle of the book to add the cards was so that I could add the words that I know have popped up multiple times in the book. Some words only occur once in an entire novel, so I see no point in trying to memorize that word. Authors tend to have a few favorite adjectives and verbs, so those are the ones I focus on, especially if I am having trouble remembering them after spotting them 2-3 times.

At a minimum, I read/listen to RFI’s News in francais facile. It is 10 minutes of audio worth, so just long enough to feel like a study session, but no so long that I can’t finish it. After that I just read whatever book I am working on, or browse the library for something that sounds interesting if I am not in the mood for my book.

By the intermediate level, I just read things once and move on. LingQ does the heavy lifting for me by highlighting the words, so if I keep seeing words I know I have seen before, I throw them in Anki and keep reading.

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I’m like most people. And there are prevous threads about this.

the purpose of linqing is 1) to help you notice; 2) to look up the definition; 3) to store the work for later review on its own (flash card, etc); and 4) to keep track of how many words and phrases you are looking up so you can see your progress.

I personally don’t do #3 a lot, unless it’s in the beginning of a language, or whether I have some downtime (waiting on line, etc) then I’ll do a quick review.

I read a lot. If i see a lingq word that hasn’t encountered in a long time, I might remember it. If I do, I change it to white. If I don’t, I look again at the definition and maybe I will next time remember it.

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I am new here and I am unable to upload my profile pic it always gives me an error or shows me a blur screen don’t know what’s wrong with it.

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Is the picture maybe too large? Try reducing its size.

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This is happening to me too, no matter the size of the image, when I try to upload, everything blurs.