@LeifGoodwin Seeing the translated sentence is very useful, when you don’t understand the grammar. I’ve used Sentence View when I was a complete beginner. The main issue I have with it and phase away from this layout (even though I would appreciate a translated sentence to glance down at at times) is because of the sheer amount of clicks it requires. My guess as to why Steve uses Sentence View is because he’s studying Persian and Arabic, which are vastly different from other languages he knows, so he’s more likely to have grammar issues. Or maybe he just doesn’t care that he needs to do 1,000+ clicks for an hour-long podcast.
The main trick is trying to reduce the number of clicks and time waste which take you away from actually reading, listening, absorbing, and rote learning the language. This includes the huge amount of faff required selecting and creating definitions on LingQ. Unfortunately, the fact that it requires a minimum of two clicks to get a definition really adds up. Just think that I have 48k lingQs in Italian. And I wrote most of those definitions myself, means I’ve clicked probably 200k times just for making those lingQs! If you use an eReader, it requires one click to get a definition, or if you are at an upper intermediate/advanced level it could require perhaps zero on Language Reactor simply by glancing down at the sentence translation. Due to LingQ’s implementation of a dictionary/look-ups, it means that low-frequency words and words in less common languages have only one Google Translated/DeepL definition. This is an issue, because many words actually has multiple definitions and you aren’t guaranteed that the Google Translate/DeepL definition is the definition being used in the sentence. This means you have to go into an external dictionary and write the definition yourself. I.e. a complete time-waste.
I was discussing this issue the other month:
The comparison for me would more be like reading while listening on LingQ at ~55 wpm, reading while listening on YouTube with Language Reactor at ~150 wpm (I just tested it with the Harry Potter audiobook on YouTube with auto-subs at 1.3x, but having to repeat sentences every now and again) or true extensive reading while listening at 1.65x/~240 wpm. In this case, using my reading while listening speeds, we would be talking about 10M words read as extensive reading while listening, ~6M with Language Reactor and ~2.5M with LingQ. As mentioned, the LingQ reading speed is so slow because of the amount of time it requires to get a decent definition (which often includes pausing the audio to open up a dictionary and write a definition). With the translation under the subtitle on Language Reactor (aka bilingual text), you can merely glance down often to get a good definition, without ever having to click anything, hence the increased reading speed.
Is extensive or intensive reading faster for vocabulary acquisition? - #43 by nfera