I’m here for a few months but I’m still not sure of the proper way to use lingq about learning vocabulary.
First I tried to use Anki and exporting every new words from Lingq, but I’m tired to use 50 apps for the same thing and the SRS of Lingq isn’t that bad.
The thing with Lingq that is weird is that you click to memorise a specific form of a word. Should I create my own word with all the form listed ? Or just learn the way it comes any new form of this same word ?
By example, in german you have :
I’m bringing food
Ich bringe essen
He’s bringing drinks
Er bringt trinken
When I’m encounter “bringt” for the first time, should I learn all the present conjugaison of “brigen” or waiting to encounter new form ?
It depends on you.
Somebody hates the grammar and hopes that reading different forms of the same word helps him eventually understand and use these forms without to learn them as grammar patterns. And it really occurs with our children.
But I believe that learning of the main rules (but in small pieces, step by step) can accelerate greatly our language study.
You can use my small German grammar lessons with a lot of examples from the courses for Beginners here -
DEUTSCH VON ANFANG AN, SCHRITT FÜR SCHRITT, DAS DEUTSCHE VERB, DEUTSCH FÜR ANFÄNGER.
Good luck!- Viel Erfolg!
tl;dr; Every word is a word just lingq them and don’t do anki.
This is how I think about words. You create 13 Lingq or 26 Lingq. I would say 13 for the first couple of months.
I would say skip the weekend have yourself some rest. After a while when you are done with the lesson listen to it once.
Every month you will have one or two days that you will naturally overshoot where you will lingq like 250 words. Try to realise this isn’t you’re new average this is a once or twice a month thing. Just focus on doing 13 lingq a day except in the weekend. Everyday you will add like 1 - 4 words to known words. Except the days you overshoot where you will add like 40 words to known.
After 6 months you will have 1000 known words. This is where you will need to read a story with like 20 chapters from beginning to end. Try to see if you can do 60 lingq a day. After another 4 months you will be around 3000 known words. This time overshooting might mean you create like 500 lingq.
So you are now 10 months in and have around 3000 known words. This all without anki which forces SRS on things you don’t read often.
So you went with a slow pace for 10 months. Now I would advice you to go waaaaay faster than anyone believes is possible. I choose a book maybe a german classic novel and try to create more than a 1000 lingq a day. This would take up all you’re free time. This would give you around 4000 known words a month.
This is what I’m going to do with Arabic and Russian. I do 13 lingq Arabic only through the week day and have started doing 26 lingq in Russian during the week day after months of doing 13. Overshooting in Russian is around 500 - 700 words because I really like the course Russian Progress. These days have happend only 4 times in the past 3+ months. In arabic after 2 months I haven’t overshot above 40 Lingqs.
Because of the slow pace the first 10 months I’m able to keep with it. And I hope because of the very fast pace in the end and feeling like I’m unlocking the language soon I will be able to do 1000 lingq a day for like 90 days.
I’m not sure that it’s a good method to do 1000 lingqs a day. You will be just soon overwhelmed with them ann can lose all your motivation.
It’s much better not to hurry, especially at the beginning and to learn how to manage, how to operate all new words, making up with them small phrases.
After 10 months of going slow I think a person can do like a 90 day streak or a 30 day streak. Again not in the beginning. Only after a period like 10 months.
I saw this video on Joe Rogan Experience with Pavel Tsatsouline about Soviet Weight Lifting. He talked about “peak performance” these soviet coaches would have their students work 2 weeks hard atleast 20% more and 2 weeks more relaxed.
He also said also they would not increase more weight till months later they wouldn’t touch the weight. Most people think you won’t get stronger if you don’t add weight. Which is correct, but they would not add a bit of weight. They would jump (increase) in weight a lot.
that’s why i say do 13 LingQ a day for 3 months then 26 Lingq for another 3 Months and then 60 LingQ for 4 months. And then try to do atleast 500-1000 LingQ for a couple of months and then go back to 26 LingQ a day or 13 LingQ a day. If that makes sense.
I have bumped up Arabic from 13 LingQ to 26 LingQ a day. I am now at 500 words. After like I think 3 months. So I hope to be above 1000 words in another 3 Months.
I don’t expect to go higher than 26 LingQ’s a day in the next 3 months. It really isn’t something I need to go faster I have the patience (hopefully) to do 26 LingQs for like 2 years.
Anyway to answer your question I don’t know if my Arabic is working for me I am adding words to known everyday.
I was watching Peppa Pig with my daughter in Russian for fun without subtitles. I only understood things like “Little”, “Thank you”. and “Yes/No” I know around 1500 words in Russian. I have done only LingQ for my Russian. I don’t think that Listening will help me get Russian to “click”. I have to get it above 20 000 known words.
Even though I probably could read around 30% of a Peppa Pig episode in Russian. I only could understand like 1 - 3% when listening. This is because I think that if I don’t know one word in a sentence that whole sentence will be something I don’t understand. So only sentences that are 1 word are sentences I can understand.
Let’s say I want to tell someone ;
(my arabic) This is difficult (500 words)
heda … (I don’t know anything else that would help me)
Translation: This
Sentence I want to say in Russian; This is difficult. (1500 words)
My russian: зто болше работе на меня.
Literal translation: This is long work to mine.
Sentence I want to say in French; This is difficult. (9500 words)
My French; Je pense que c’est difficile.
Literal translation: I think it’s difficult.
At 500 words I can say almost nothing in Arabic. But my Russian is around 1500 and I feel around 1500 I could like survive in the language by speaking really really poorly. Around 10 000 in French I feel like sometimes I even can add some “personality” into the sentence". But I think it’s just not how French people would say it.
I try to enjoy all three phases. Arabic for I am learning everyday. Russian for I can make up sentences even though it’s not what I want to say. And French because I feel like I can express myself a bit. I don’t push myself. Just 13 or 26 LingQ’s everyday but not the week ends.
It does :). Just a one more question. You mentioned 13 to 26 LingQs per day, you are now at 500 words. You mean 500 LingQs or 500 known words in your database?
Why I am asking, and that was the initiative to my original question, how do you “exactly” build your known words up, how do you work with LingQ as a program to, simplify, learn new vocabs.
I mean, do you carefully search for the meanings of the new word, use several of dictionaries, do you do the flash cards often. Or do you prefer just the reading and except this, as you see a new word, just find quickly the meaning or pick one of the best translation of other guys and focus on, continue the reading (don’t focus too much on revising etc.).
If you click my profile icon you can see a bit more of my stats.
I was talking about known words. Let’s say I see the french word “parlons” I click on it and it says “talking”. I would be like I didn’t know that. So it would be a lingQ.
I don’t want to know that it’s from “parler”.
I don’t want to know if it’s in past tense.
I don’t want to know if it’s something I could make feminine by adding an e “parlonse”.
It’s a LingQ to me and I move on. I don’t know the diffrence between “talking and speaking”. I don’t even know it in dutch. “praten en spreken”. So I don’t want to be able to translate them well. If I see “spreken” I would just think hey that is talking.
Let’s say the word in french “agréable” I would think this is someone who agrees alot. But in French it doesn’t mean someone who is agreeable. It can, but I feel like they also call objects agréable. Again I could be totally wrong.
I try to not focus on this. I just LingQ before the day is over and sometimes I listen to the lesson when I finished the lesson and got the 13 LingQ or 26 LingQ. Whatever my streak is set to. I don’t re-listen to any lessons. I’m doing the Book of Steve in French. And still have half of Russian Progress in Russian. I am trying to find a course in Arabic that has lots of lessons. I’m not really interested in finding the best material.
I used to look in forums and youtube for hours and hours and do no learning French for myself. Now I just try to keep my streak going during the weekdays and things are going much better.
Most times I don’t feel like I have the energy to do so I just LingQ really quickly and hardly translate the sentences in sentence mode because I just don’t push myself. I just want to keep a minimum of LingQ’s. During those days of rock bottom I know I feel bad but maybe like a couple of days later I LingQ like 200 words and hope they come sooner than later, but I don’t push myself.
What about LingQs which have been created before buy you see them again? As you mentioned , no special translating or searching a detailed meaning of the word…?
There are lots of LingQs that I see and I just know I’ve seen them every week for months and months. If I don’t guess what they mean…
I try to not care… again I try… It’s difficult… I would love to put them in Anki and just be done with them sooner, but I can’t juggle an Anki deck above a couple hundreds of words.
Some words are a close guess like “next option” instead of “other option”. These close guesses are something that after a couple of weeks I adjust and just set on known words.
I also have words were I guess “below” but the word is “above”. These words after 6 months I still don’t get. I think once these words are set to known it will make my ability to guess other words stronger.
I think language learning is a guessing game… It’s not a “can someone teach me what the correct meaning is”
Some words after 20 years we realise we just “guessed meant something completely different”.
Like a Knight to me is a soldier. I guess someone can be a Knight without being Knighted by the King. I don’t know if I’m correct.
A chapel of ease to me is a church were there isn’t any fancy stuff. I don’t know the difference between chapel and church. And these are just examples of things I guess the meaning of.
I don’t like that I’m so ignorant about these things. I’m saying it to just explain how I got to accept that I can lower the bar of when I “know” a word. A lot of words are put on known in LingQ by me that kinda shouldn’t, but I’m ok with that because after a month I know I’m better at Russian and most words are words I guess the meaning of correctly. I try not to expect me to be an expert in Russian and it sometimes is quite difficult to accept.
The thing with words not repeating or repeating not often enough is the main argument against massive reading as a principal tool for language learning, so I don’t think anyone has definite answers for you questions. Maybe Steve, as he’s got a metric ton of experience.
Recently I have started to test out a hypothesis that it all depends on the amount of reading and that you have to read much more stuff than most beginners assume. There’s a guy here in the the forums that basically imported a couple of books as a near total beginner in Spanish and did one full lesson a day with very good results (LingQ divides imported material into lessons that correspond roughly to 5-7 pages of a normal paperback).
This got me interested. I suspect, based on my experiences with learning English, that it might take 2-3 books of 250-350 pages to get to a point where you can read for pleasure. I’ve got no idea how many “words known” would take take, but judging from my progress with “Harry Potter” in Greek that’s not such a insanely high number. Maybe 10-15 thousand.
However the amount of work is quite more than I expected. I do around one lesson per day and it takes me maybe an hour, leaving me very little time to do other language related things. I realized that I had been learning at quite a leisurely pace before. One full sized lesson is like 2000 words, while a single mini story is 350 (and the words repeat three times). So it’s an equivalent of pushing through one half a mini stories course per day.
This experience is quite weird, honestly. I feel like I learn a lot, but I have lowered my standards for when I add a word to known so much, that I can’t brag about my numbers any more.
I go sentence by sentence. I always start with trying to understand the meaning first and only afterwards I click the yellow and blue words. I follow easy logic: I only add to known those words that I can understand on that particular day in that particular context. It doesn’t matter for me why I can tell that X=Y. If a known word trips me up, I bring it back to yellow. Some I vaguely remember, but not exactly understand, so I bump them up a level (they catch my attention next time). There’s A LOT of yellow words that I don’t even remember seeing before. If there’s a weird word that for some reason comes up in one section of a book very often (like a “broomstick” or effing “goblin”), I add that to known, even though I know there’s a high chance I am going to meet it again 50 pages later and I will have to check the meaning once more.
Because I do so much reading, I don’t have time for revision. And this is sort of the major problem with this approach. You could argue that if I spend - let’s say - half the time reading and half the time actually learning the words via deliberate practice, my overall level would improve more quickly.
However, I have not yet found a good way to cram vocabulary that would be effective and painless. That’s why I am very curious about this experiment. It requires a lot of sustained effort, but I feel like I am getting somewhere or at least I have some fun solving my puzzles, a sentence at a time.