So in 2020 I posted about having reached 100K known words in my first year on LingQ
Now this LingQ blog feature catches up with me to find out what has happened since: https://www.lingq.com/blog/scandinavian-languages/
Feel free to comment on this or ask me further questions about learning, about the Norse languages in particular or anything really.
Outstanding work. Super inspiring read.
Maybe a little comment for those who are interested: Faroese and Icelandic are mutually- or nearly mutually intelligible on paper, depending a bit on factors like how sharp the reader is and how much experience they have with languages in general or Norse ones specifically. They are far from mutually intelligible in spoken form though. The accents are very different, with Icelandic being “hard” and fairly clearly pronounced, while Faroese is soft and blows a lot of air. It’s a bit like Icelandic would be Spanish and Faroese would be European Portuguese.
For anyone curious, even though I am fluently literate or very near so in all the languages mentioned except Polish, my written French and Spanish are terrible and much worse than my spoken language and although my Polish numbers are somewhat high, I am only half towards being literate, am much less competent in listening and can hardly write or speak at all. Moral of the story: There are severe limits to how good you can get at any one aspect of a language by just getting good at the other aspects.
Could you tell us a little more about how you got started learning Spanish? What initially motivated you to learn the language, and what resources did you use on LingQ when you were a complete beginner?
As I understand it, LingQ generally doesn’t teach grammar through a traditional, step-by-step approach. Instead, it is primarily an input-based platform that allows learners to read extensively, look up unfamiliar words quickly, and encounter vocabulary and grammatical structures repeatedly in different contexts. Given that approach, did you use any resources outside LingQ to build a foundation in Spanish grammar?
I’m also curious about how you approached listening in the early stages. When you were starting from scratch, what resources did you use to develop your listening comprehension? Did you begin with beginner-friendly material, or did you immerse yourself in native content from the outset?
Finally, why do you favor a reading-heavy approach over one centered more heavily on listening? Do you ever worry that extensive reading, especially when subvocalizing unfamiliar words, might cause you to internalize incorrect pronunciations before you have heard those words spoken often enough?
Spanish makes sense to know because it is a widespread language spoken by an enormous amount of people. It also made sense in how my French would help me learn it faster. When my internet friend Carlo challenged me to learn it, I did not do it right away though, because I wanted to work more on French and Dutch first.
I started with the 60 mini-stories and then pretty much whatever I could find in the LingQ library. One series I read a lot and listened even more to was Espanol con Juan. When I started learning Spanish, the balance of reading vs listening was not nearly as biased towards reading as when I started learning French on LingQ.
Why have I relied more on reading than listening? Because you can’t acquire vocabulary through listening unless you also have something else to make the vocabulary comprehensible. That could mostly come from two different things: Having visual content (you’re basically watching videos, TV etc) or if you already know a language similar enough to just be able to understand the words. I tend to read first and listen later on LingQ. One thing I do a lot when I read in LingQ, to still learn how to say the words, is simply click on the words as I read. Since LingQ plays the word when you click on it, I can still hear how it’s pronounced.
When I am already quite advanced in a language, I much prefer listening over reading and I’ll watch loads of videos in the language, mostly news and history, but sometimes social commentary and psychology too.
I have not built a foundation in Spanish grammar at all and now I find I really need to start doing that. To a lesser degree, that also applies to French. The grammar of Dutch and Norwegian is similar enough to that of other languages I know so I don’t need to study grammar for those two that much at all.
Inspiring. The article mentions that 60-70k known words in Western European languages is a good point for jumping off LingQ. When do you think you might stop using LingQ for Polish? In Ukrainian, I have 72k known words and can read news articles without many lookups, but most novels still require LingQ to understand. Just curious what your plans for Polish are, since it’s so similar to Ukrainian. Thanks!
I don’t know Polish enough to be able to make a very reliable estimate, but I have a feeling it’s going to be 80-100K words or so, perhaps even higher. I am now at 44K and I still can’t read fairly basic novels all that well in LingQ.