I’m interested in using LingQ as I find myself getting bored with traditional tools like Duolingo. I like the concept of immersion with actual native content, but as beginner, I don’t understand 90% of even basic content. Is LingQ more useful after you have a beginner’s knowledge of vocabulary and grammer, or have brand new language learners found success with LingQ from the start?
For anybody who found LingQ successful as a beginner, do you have any tips for how best to use this site?
Thanks!
Hi tx2005, welcome! My tips are:
My feeling is that you don’t need to be able to understand basic content. If you read some beginner material, either a lot of it or multiple times, you will pick it up.
What I do find helpful (to varying degrees, depending on the language) is an awareness of what kinds of grammar issues exist in the language. For example with noun cases that cause endings to be added to nouns, if you don’t know anything about the endings, you might understand the word (or find a hint somebody already made for the word) but miss important meaning provided by the ending. You might start ignoring endings. But if you at least know that there are such endings in the language, it’s a lot easier to notice them while you’re reading, and guess what they might mean.
For Spanish I guess issues are more like verb tense/mood/person and noun gender. If your native language didn’t have articles or plurals, I’d include that too. Just knowing that those are a thing.
I started from scratch with Lingq also with Spanish and the advise I would now give to someone that was in my position is to go through all the beginner material 2-3 times. then with the audio listen to it multiple times. you want to aim for 1.5 hours of listening each day or 2 hours then once you have completed more lessons and have more of a selection to choose from I would bump that up to 3 that is what I am currently focusing on the moment. and I read for 1.5 hours everyday. any questions give me a message.
Steve recommends in several of his videos that you get a simple intro. book and thumb through that to get a “feel” for the language and then start the Lingq beginner 1 lessons and the mini-stories.
Duolingo isn’t ‘traditional’, it’s a modern ‘gamification’ platform designed to make people think they’r learning but really they’re playing a computer game.
I started reading straight from the off, struggling through.
If i had to do a language from scratch all over again, i would now, with millions of words read and a few years behind me, do it this way:
Learn phonology first, before ever reading a word. Why ? Because my reading became fluent while my listening skills were worse than that of a toddler.
Then i would do a basic overview of the grammar. Does it have gender ? How many verb forms ? Tenses ? What are the basic ways to express different tenses ? Noun/adjective gender agreement etc ? And how do these things all SOUND ? Because in French there might be dozens of different written forms but they SOUND the same.
Then i would dive into some basic ‘learner’ stuff just to see everything in action, and keep referring back to it until i got a sense for the language. Everything i read at this point would have audio.
Then once i felt comfortable i’d get into reading stuff that interests me. There are no ‘levels’ in language. There is just stuff you know and stuff you don’t. I can read Proust but can’t understand some idiomatic joke on the youtube comments section. You will at some point need to fight through all this, looking stuff up, reading extensively and intensively to get to grips with it.
Be patient and it will come.
Duolingo isn’t ‘traditional’, it’s a modern ‘gamification’ platform designed to make people think they’r learning but really they’re playing a computer game.
I started reading straight from the off, struggling through.
If i had to do a language from scratch all over again, i would now, with millions of words read and a few years behind me, do it this way:
Learn phonology first, before ever reading a word. Why ? Because my reading became fluent while my listening skills were worse than that of a toddler.
Then i would do a basic overview of the grammar. Does it have gender ? How many verb forms ? Tenses ? What are the basic ways to express different tenses ? Noun/adjective gender agreement etc ? And how do these things all SOUND ? Because in French there might be dozens of different written forms but they SOUND the same.
Then i would dive into some basic ‘learner’ stuff just to see everything in action, and keep referring back to it until i got a sense for the language. Everything i read at this point would have audio.
Then once i felt comfortable i’d get into reading stuff that interests me. There are no ‘levels’ in language. There is just stuff you know and stuff you don’t. I can read Proust but can’t understand some idiomatic joke on the youtube comments section. You will at some point need to fight through all this, looking stuff up, reading extensively and intensively to get to grips with it.
Be patient and it will come.