Hello everybody. This is Keith. I’m using LingQ to study Japanese.
I just spent 2.5 (two and a half) hours to go through one Japanese news article. I looked up every word, added tags, and saved them. 108 words saved from 1 item.
It was a news article that I had imported myself.
How about others? How long does it take you to look up the words and save them?
Hi Keith,
At first I listen to and read, without looking ti speacial words.
In the second passage I stop when I see an unknown word and look for and save it.
I think the time depend of the words (number and state of difficulty). Perhaps I choose more items they have not a too high number of new words. Too much aren’t going in my brain so quickly. Smaller and lighter parts are better (for me!!!) I think.
But for the time - two or more hours run away fast!
I’ve done that for items above my level (OK, perhaps not 2,5 hours).
During the beginning stage it’s easy to find suitable articles to read, but as the skill level improves there can sometimes be quite a gap between “too easy” and “too advanced”, and since we want to add vocabulary that will take time.
Jeff,
Which languages are you studying and what kind of content would you like for your intermediate stage?
Keith, late addition to my previous reply (there seems to have been some technical problem recently):
I think that Steve has said something about the recommended level of “unknown words” in one of the LingQ-threads on how-to-learn-any-language.com. Assuming an article is 200 words long, and 50% of them are unknown, then we’d better choose something else to read, otherwise we will spend one hour saving words. However, I don’t judge everything by the percentages. I’ve saved words from articles where a lot more than 50% were unknown, but where the exact number was fairly low. And you might as well find an article with 10% unkown words and end up saving 500.
Steve,
I’m into Russian and German. For Russian there are lots of texts which a beginner can benefit a lot from. Приятно познакомиться, История Нины, Поход в ресторан and Сила Лингвиста are all good beginning material (in my opinion), not way over your head but still challenging enough for you to be able to save the recommended number of words each day. Then, suddenly, all you have is Толстой, Чехов, Гоголь and so on (judging from the search engine with the %-option checked). Nothing wrong with that, though. Real material is good. But one is likely to face the same “problem” as the one Keith is having. Still nothing wrong, but time-consuming.
Jeff, thank you for your numerous replies. You probably have heard that the system is not working perfectly for Asian languages yet. Basically, it only parses the words on spaces and punctuation. Japanese like Chinese has no spaces, so that means the current system does not count the number of known or unknown or total words correctly. So for the time-being, I cannot use the percent of unknown words to identify articles that are at my level.
Jeff,
W will get some more intermediate material going. One source will be our own podcasts.
We are starting a series of Podcasts like EnglishLingQ. Mairo is starting in Portuguese. I did two yesterday, one in Swedish and one in French. I hope to talk to our learners via Skype and record the conversation for these podcasts. We also want others to do recorded conversations in their own language. maybe I could talk to you in Swedish one day, or maybe you could help us with Swedish content for the store.
I am hoping to do this in many languages. We are also looking for transcribers. We seem to have found someone for Japanese and we are still looking for the other languages.