Is LingQ beginner friendly? Absolutely. Immersing yourself in a new language from the start may seem intimidating, but it’s the most effective method. Here’s a guide to using LingQ as a complete beginner. #learnlanguages
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It’s interesting to read that the ministories actively use high frequency words. But I often wonder whether that is high frequency in English (presumably the original ministory language) or high frequency in the target language. The two aren’t necessarily the same.
I’d like to see some ministories that take eg the top 250-500 words in the target language and then create some text around those specific words.
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I would bet there is a huge amount of overlap in the meanings of the top 500 words in nearly all common languages.
For example, is, go/come, with, have, question words, pronouns, person/people, to, from, at, car, food, eat, drink, restaurant, shop/store, want/need, left/right, inside/outside, here/there, many/few, more/less, numbers, child, house/home, etc. are going to be heavily used in most places.
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Certainly there will be substantial overlap, but I’m less sure that it’s huge.
Most languages do presumably have multiple words for a given concept. And it’s down to the translators of a ministory whether they might choose the translation option which is commonest in the target language or a reasonable synonym that they might feel is a more accurate translation but is a less common word.
And (on a separate point I know) the translated ministories would also benefit from sub-editing to be as straightforward as possible to read for beginners in the target language. Just as one small example in the first ministory, 7 o’clock in Vietnamese is bảy giờ while ‘now’ is bây giờ. Took me ages to figure out that sentence. Just changing the time to eg 6 o’clock rather than doing a literal translation of the original would make that a non-problem.
And then of course the high-frequency use of dozens of different pronouns according to cultural norms is another issue in Vietnamese.
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Yes, I understand. Chinese has similar convoluted pronouns describing in great detail the familial relationships, where in English we would just say something like “cousin”.
My strategy is to simply ignore those and other things I dont care about in the ministories. They’ll become clear later on, when they matter more.
At least to me, the goal isn’t to scrutinize and memorize every word that appears in a “beginner” material as though it is a bible. It’s to keep reading new things and moving forward, absorbing what you can, and trusting that the magic will happen. The more new material you read from more various sources, the more you can rely on natural word frequency working for you.
There are LingQs I’ve created months ago and have never seen or thought about again. Who cares? Memorizing them would have been a waste of time, but there was no way to know this back then. 
I’m far from fluent (or even conversational), but as an American sitting in a cafe in Beijing right now after just a few months with LingQ I can promise you that the magic does indeed happen. If not, I’d have starved!