How to learn words fast without relying on rote memorization?

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I’m a longtime user of link, learning Spanish, but I haven’t had much progress in yet. :pensive:

For one and a half years, I only learned about three hundred words. Reading is the main way of my learning. I have created about 4.8 thousand lingqs. I have read 117K words but learned little. Is it because that I haven’t read as much? Or it’s because I’m doing the thing the wrong way? Is it normal for a person to learn so slowly? How can I learn faster?
My goal is to learn two thousand words of Spanish in a year. So how much time should I put in Lingq to achieve this goal? And do any of you have some good learning suggestions? :face_with_monocle:

I’ll be really grateful for everyone of the suggestions you gave me, It will be great help for me and I will put it into action to see if it works out.
Please help me!
Thank you guys! :kissing_heart:

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I’m sorry to be so blunt, but with that little time put into learning a language you are never going to learn one no matter what style you are using. Repetition just isn’t high enough to make anything stick. I think Steve has talked about reading 1 million words per year in your target language. Personally I think that is still quite low if you really want to supercharge your learning. However, 1 million is still a good target if you have less time to put into learning a language. It ensures that you are making progress, but should be achievable in many live situations. A little less might be more realistic when you are starting a completely unrelated language to the ones you know, but with any language start is the slowest. Personally I have liked to start fast with as many hours as possible to get past the most frustrating period as fast as I can.

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When one looks at your profile there is no information. Just based on your 117K word read I do the very same recommendation than Jessei. Volume of reading itself must be at least 10 times higher.

It would be usefull to describe your daily routine.

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I believed in the LingQ/Kaufmann method, like you I read, in my case in German. Like you I was slow and I was starting from scratch. I got nowhere, or rather I was struggling to learn words. More than a year passed by and I felt frustrated. Then I dumped the LingQ method, and started studying. I slowed down, I looked up words, I studied grammar as and when it appeared. I found little stories outside of LingQ, which were using simple language. I honestly don’t like the German content on LingQ. I am using Herr Antrim at the moment. I also started doing simple exercises, whereby I would think up sentences to translate then compare my answer to the correct one using online translation tools. I started making much better progress. Now I have a much better foundation in German and I am starting to listen to German for learners without studying. I believe that listening is key, and the only way to fluency is through listening. But study is needed at the start.

Now I am not you, and we all learn differently so I can only say what helped me. That said for me the issues with LingQ are the lack of output practice, the German content which I do not like and the overemphasis on listening at beginner and lower intermediate levels. Were I to start a third L2, I would find a source of simple stories on video, then simply work through them, looking up words and grammar, doing exercises, memorising words and not worrying too much about understanding everything in the stories. Understanding many words in a sentence, and looking at the translation, is okay.

About 35 years ago I learnt some Welsh. I used traditional methods, and didn’t struggle at all. It is only when I adopted the LingQ approach for German that I struggled.

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I looked at my stats for where I was at at around 100,000 words read. I was around 3600 words (Lingq words…i.e. not word family’s). edit: Was just thinking about this again…I did have this many known words, but I also had done the Memrise A1 “course” (no longer available). So that probably did give me a very good advantage and probably accounts for at least half of the above 3600 known words.

Assuming you are referring to the way Lingq counts words I’d say you’re a fair bit behind. HOWEVER, this also depends on how you, yourself, define the word as learned. My definition, as it relates to LingQ specifically, is to count it as known, if I understand the word in the present context I’m reading. If your definition is whether you feel you can recognize the word and give the meaning outside of in context, or even harder to judge…can you use the word in output. i.e. you can translate from english (or whatever your native language is) and output it in the target language. If that is the case, I think your possibly not as bad off as you think.

The nature of Lingq, if you’re using it solely as an assisted reader, in my opinion, makes it better to simply judge the word as known, if you can recognize/understand it in context. This is very easy to judge. It doesn’t require any extra thought contemplating whether you can actually output the word, or whether you think you may know it just from looking at it. If I understand it in that sentence, I mark it known and move on to reading. If I don’t then I will bump it up a level (up to 3). Once it’s at 3 I just leave it until I know it based on context. If I previously marked it known and I don’t understand it in some other context, I’ll usually drop it back down to 3.

Now, if you are doing all that and you are still at 300, I would ask, what things are you reading? Are you using some of the beginner material in the Spanish Lingq library? Are you using the mini stories? These would be good places to start. Obviously don’t try to do content that is above your level.

You might also benefit from getting a book like Teach Yourself Complete Spanish. That’ll also give you basic grammar and useful sentences. You could add these sentences to a lesson in Lingq and study them there too. Or Assimil Spanish. Hard for me to explain, but you can essentially import the contents of this book from the subtitles of the mp3’s. Or heck, just type the sentences out from the lessosn into Lingq as a Lingq lessons.

I personally used Assimil German initially with Lingq by importing it. Then also review the lessons in the book which give enough grammar points to not feel so lost.

Finally, you really haven’t read a lot yet so even if you are at 3000 words by my definition above, you don’t really know much yet. Gotta keep plugging away.

How are you using LingQ so far?

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I try to read 3000 words a day.
I put words as known early and generously and I need to see a word many many times - dozens - to be able to recognise it on average.
More reading may make repetition generate recognition sooner.
Or maybe you are being very strict with when you recognise a word as known.
I read what’s interesting but it also has to have enough words i can recognise so that’s it is accessible. In Greek I have limited material but in Spanish I’d hope you have good and easy material to read.

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Hi. I find I learn best when I use a variety of sources. I think Lingq is great but so far for me it works best to improve vocabulary and reading in a language I am at around B1+ level. I just started trying to learn Czech. I’m using Lingq and duo. I’ve learned more from duo so far but it’s so helpful to see the very few words I’ve learned in other contexts in Lingq. I’ve also used Lingq for French and Spanish. My French is around B2 so it feels easier and like I’m learning more but I think it’s just language learning stage differences (in French I’m refining but in Czech, I’m starting from scratch). Keep going, you’ll learn more as you use the language more and read more. I’d suggest adding other media to supplement Lingq like music, movies/tv, other apps, and websites, and see if you can find opportunities to try speaking in conversations.

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There is something to be said for rote memorization, especially rote memorization with context and done in a way that makes you produce the word.

I have been using a combination of LingQ and Lingvist. Lingvist is a cloze deletion flashcard system - you see the Spanish sentence with a blank in it, and the full sentence in English, and you fill in the missing Spanish word. It does spaced repetition, and once I learn a word with Lingvist my chances of remembering it are very good.

Both Lingvist and Clozemaster (another similar system) support custom vocabulary lists for paid accounts - I use LingQ to find vocabulary I want to learn and practice reading and listening with tools to help me, and then I take that vocabulary over to Lingvist to make a custom vocabulary list to learn. The vocabulary “sticks” a lot faster if I give it that extra boost.

If you don’t want to deal with transferring vocabulary to a whole different system, you can also try LingQ’s own flashcards. They’re right there in your account ready to be used.

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I don’t have the stats for 100k words read, but in Italian my stats for 200k words read were:

Italian
words read 200k
Known words 879
LingQs 7,567
LingQs learnt 908
hours listening 109 (this is slightly inflated)

Based on this, I don’t imagine my stats for Italian were very different from yours. (I was going through the beginner content on LingQ.)

The difference is that this was over a few months for me, instead of 1.5 years.

As others have mentioned, you’d see more progress if you put in more time. Language learning takes a very long time. It’s probably one of the slowest hobbies you can do in terms of actually being able to do something with your skill (unless you are learning a sister language).

30 minutes per day on average as a beginner is a good goal to aim for. One hour day per would be ideal, if you have the time and motivation.

I wrote about my experience of reaching certain levels in Italian here, if you are looking for goals to set. I also put in my estimate number of hours to reach each comprehension level.

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In my opinion, you need to combine different methods when it comes to deal the language study. Of course, I believe that learning a language is 80% comprehensible input and 20% to other things like writing and speaking. But i like to deal this way because it works for me. It’s a good idea try to combine for example speaking lessons with tutors and keep studying input with LINGq. Break the “plateau” requires different approaches. And most important: don’t be shame to make mistakes. Try different things.

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I assume that you guys are right that I read too little, but the case is that I don’t have much time everyday to learn Spanish. I have calculated that one need to read about 2.8k words to complete a goal of 1 million words a year and I’m around 1k per day now.

I classify a word as known if I can understand it out of content.

I believe in the reading and listening method, because that’s how I learned English (though I don’t understand any bit of English grammar I do know how to assemble a correct sentence, so I’m uninterested in learning grammar ) I have read little prince in Spanish and I have read two thirds of Spanish mini stories but found it boring.

I’m wondering how to make oneself want to listen, I found myself not wiling to listen to the content I’m reading cause not able to understand most of it. :pensive:

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I have used duo but I don’t think it helped much

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but thanks for your suggestion :kissing_heart:

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thanks! I’m sure it 'll help a lot!

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Yes, that is a little bit difficult in the beginning. If you are a true beginner, you’re going to have to listen to some likely fairly boring stuff. Around the late beginner stages there should start to be more interesting stuff, but you may have to do a bit of seeking out.

By the way, in regards to amount of time one has a day. You can progress. I’ve probably averaged around 15-20 min a day on my journey. Of course this has taken me 7+ years to reach a late intermediate stage…maybe early advanced in terms of reading. If you are wanting to go at a faster pace, you simply have to put in more time a day. You either need to find pockets of time where you can do things. Or you have to give up certain things to make time. Unfortunately, this is just the way it is. (which is probably why a lot of people give up learning languages)

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Listen in the car. Do flashcards on the toilet. Read before bed instead of doomscrolling.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

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It’s hard at the start, and beginner material is often tedious and boring. I suggest using beginner material, read the text, look up words, look at translations, line by line. Try to understand the meaning of each line even if grammar escapes you. Then listen to it while reading. Don’t expect to understand it all at normal speed. Do another text. Then quickly review an old text. Followed by a new text. Rinse and repeat. Don’t expect to understand texts before you study them. This works for me, perhaps it will work for you.

I found some very good short videos in German by a German teacher which have helped me enormously. They are short, often funny, stories. Perhaps something like that exists in your target language.

Learning a language is a very hard, and slow process. Maybe Steven Kaufmann and others find it easy, but I don’t, and I’m not alone. Most people who start a language give up. Some of us carry on despite the frustration and slow progress.

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some people said that the most important thing in learning a language is listening. Is it true?
By the way, will concentrating on one piece of content and make it stick help? Will it help much?
I found myself learning words quicker if I reread.

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In general I think we all agree that itnis. The better I get at a language, the more I listen. In the early stages I don’t listen to much content. Others may do it differently.

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I think reading is more valuable than listening, but that may be because of the characters in my TL (Chinese).