Having a horrible time with Arabic. The new words are never ending. I think the Mini Stories give you up to 700 completely unique words though (‘work’ and ‘working’ being the same word); I pasted all of them into a duplicate remover and manually went through them to remove any that would count as the same word, and they should be around 700 at least. But I don’t think that with those 700 words, one can understand much news at all. How much of the news can one understand with the LingQ Mini Stories? Such as Aljazeera anything, or BBC Arabic anything.
How can you work your way up to understanding the f***king news? I wish there was something like L2 Press’s Interlinear book for Arabic. They have one for Persian and it is a GODSEND!!
Honestly I didn’t understand the what and why of the remover thing.
However, the Ministories do only give you a foothold in the language. For understanding the news in a distant language you need an advanced comprehension level - 60 repetetive beginner short stories won’t get you there.
If you already understand the Ministories that’s a great starting point. I would recommend you to go for something slightly more difficult now.
I don’t know anything about Arabic, but for the languages I’ve studied, there is a long way between the Mini Stories and the news. After the Mini Stories, you will have to look up almost every single word in a news article. To be able to read the news, you need a decent sized vocabulary. From zero to being able to read the news without a dictionary may takes a few years of study, depending on your L1 and L2.
It takes time @anglien, no shortcuts.
For the number of words is very difficult to say, I don’t know what level you need to be to read the news unassisted, but I would say at least Advanced 1 (LingQ’s numbers?). For Arabic, that would be 40k words, and 60k words for Advanced 2.
We are talking about LingQ-words, not unique words, which are a bit more difficult to calculate in this context. In any case, that would be a few thousands anyway.
If you want to speed up the process a little bit, you can choose the type of news you want to read (for example economics), the media you want to use (for example BBC Arabic), and you keep importing a lot of stuff from them trying to build as much as vocabulary you can. It will be a struggle at the beginning, you will need patience, but eventually you will go through it.
Same topics will repeat the same words over and over, same for journalists and type of media.
You appear to be putting yourself under a lot of pressure with your language learning. You need to take a deep breath and clear your mind.
First, you need to determine precisely what your objectives are with the language you are learning. What are you trying to achieve? Is it understanding the news, watching TV or movies, or speaking to people?
Then you need to devise your activities accordingly. If you are trying tobecome proficient in all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening), it is perfectly okay to focus on just one skill for three months, and then move on to the other.
Language learning is a marathon, not a sprint. It will take time (a lot of it) before you can consider yourself fluent in a language that has nothing in common with your mother tongue.
Just relax and enjoy your journey. It’s meant to be enjoyable, not something that will lead you to a burn out.
I can just about understand the 14 videos that I have watched in French, but I won’t have a chance of understanding the news or TV shows. Just keep reading and listening, progressively getting harder or more advanced and then you will eventually be able to understand more and more