Import and make your language learning real

Updates, Tips and Known Issues
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I posted this recently on the LingQ blog - http://lingqcentral-en.lingq.com/import-make-language-learning-real. Look forward to your feedback.

One of the most powerful features LingQ offers is the ability to import any content in your target language and study it using LingQ’s functionality. It’s not always obvious how or which content to import so I thought I would provide examples of how I use this feature.

Importing news articles

Perhaps the most obvious place to import from are the many wonderful news and informational sites around the world. Click Import Lesson from the Tasks dropdown in the main navigation bar. When you are on the Import Lesson page, you can find a list of Resources in your target language. There are certainly many more great places to find content of interest but this gives you a good place to start.

Import lessons into LingQ

For example, I am studying Italian so I regularly import lessons from one of Italy’s largest newspapers Corriere della Sera. I could use the Import Lesson page and copy and paste the article, title, text, image and original url. Or, I can use the Chrome Extension to import all of this information with 1-click. In this case, I have the Chrome Extension already so I will simply click on it and choose to import this article into LingQ.

Import using Chrome Extension

Once, I’ve imported the article it looks like this in the LingQ Reader. With the Chrome Extension you do also have the ability to create LingQs right on the page but I prefer using LingQ’s interface since I prefer the Quick LingQ mode using the Dashboard View and it allows me to manually select and LingQ words and phrases as well.

Importing emails

Another great use for importing is reading correspondence in your target language. First of all, going through it on LingQ helps me understand the email much better than using Google Translate, and secondly I get to add all new terms to LingQ for review. There is nothing like using real correspondence to learn from!

Importing Forum Posts

There are many great discussions on the LingQ Forums in many languages and it’s a great place to interact in your target language. Import posts of native speakers to understand and learn from what they have posted. When you feel comfortable, submit your own comments and have them corrected using the Post for Correction option. Of course, once your posts are corrected you will want to use the Import function on the correction report to import all your corrections and new vocabulary.

There are many great ways to use the import feature. These are just some of the ways I use it. Let me know what content you import in the comments.

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Twitter feeds are good, too. If you have any friends who are native speakers of your target language, follow them on Twitter. If you don’t, look for reporters and bloggers who cover topics that interest you.

Twitter is especially good for kanji-based languages, because you can get so much more information into 140 characters. But even for alphabetic languages it gives easy-to-digest snippets that will often point you to longer articles.

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I’ve been importing a lot of content in French and Spanish. Mostly I look for any content I may find interesting where I have both the audio and the transcript available. Then I import it using the regular import feature.

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That’s a great idea! Twitter is great way to practice reading and eventually writing short bits of content.

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That’s the way to go there. It’s not always easy to find audio with transcript though!

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I occasionally like to import things “the hard way” by copying a page or two of material in my target language. Typing helps me to improve my spelling while I type.

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I import articles I am interested in and have native speakers of my target language record themselves reading the article which they email to me to import later. I try to keep the article length down to 5-7 mins worth of reading. I also offer to do the same for my friends. I really like LingQ.

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II I must to lern to use the programm and the language to. I want to learn , deutch,

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Yeah, agree. I have some paid podcast subscriptions I import as private lessons. I think there is a whole business model you could be exploring at LingQ around brokering high-quality interesting content for a $$.

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As a beginner, I always look for content on the internet with audio, native transcriptions, and if available, English translations. In the case of the French language I find that there’s a ton of this type of content available for free across the Internet. I import this content typically as private lessons. I find that the way lingq visualizes my lessons by colour coding lings and unknown words is a great way to gauge the overall effort I have to make to understand the lesson. Lingq is sort of my master database of what I do and don’t know. I’m finding it very motivating to import more lessons, and see that fewer words are listed as unknown.

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There actually is a little paid content in our library. It is something we would like to do more of but most people seem happy with free content. We do plan on expanding this at some point.

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That’s great! If you have particularly good sources for this type of beginner French content, let us know and we can add them to the list of suggested resources on the Import page.

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Sure, would be glad to. Here are some of the free beginning resources I found and have been studying from. Not sure if they’re already in your library, and in addition, I haven’t had a chance to go through your already extensive French list. I wonder if any of these could be added and shared publicly on lingq? For now I’ve been adding some of these as private lesson imports.

  • BBC Ma France - 24 units, each with free video / audio, transcription, and English translation - BBC - Languages - French - Ma France - Preview - Summary
  • La Guinguette - out of circulation French learning magazine. Has about 10 years of back issues. Each item in the back issues contains a free download that contains the full audio, and the French transcription. English translations are provided with magazine articles. Also includes separate French lessons on key grammar points covered from the artibles - http://www.laguinguette.com/
  • OffQc - Quebec related French culture and language instruction. Contains several free videos that have been transcribed and translated into English - http://offqc.com/
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Even if the BBC shares the material for free on the internet, we have no permission to share it here on LingQ. But you can use their material as private lessons. Same for laguinguette.

You can only share lessons if you have gotten permission from the provider, material that is under a CC-lizenze (including commercial use) or in the public domain, or that you have created on your own.

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Great! I have added those to the list of resources for French. As Vera says, you can’t share those lessons in the library because they are protected by copyright. However, if you give those lessons a rose they will show up on the Exchange where other members can be linked through to them and import them into their own accounts. You do need to input the original URL in order to do this.

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Cool, thanks, I hope others get benefit out of them. I wonder if I should clean up my imports before giving the lessons a rose first. I’ll make sure minimally that they all have the original URL set.

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Here’s a site that I found through some shared lingq.com easy French podcasts - seems to contain tons of free audio and transcribed content - http://www.podcastfrancaisfacile.com/

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Okay, I will start importing short statuses of the French pages which I’m following on Facebook. :slight_smile:

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Elsewhere in this thread @kimojima wrote “I’d like to hear the before and after experiences of someone who copies, for example, just one Harry Potter book (or any full novel) into LingQ by hand.”

Well, I typed two pages of one of my current books … at this rate it would take me another 133 days until completion :slight_smile: I did notice though that @kimojima’s suggestion of mindful transcription is worth bearing in mind.

Rather than doing what I usually do when copy-typing, ie looking at the words I have to type, type them and let my mind wander to whatever else I have to do, cook or clean, etc, this time I paid close attention to the content and structure of the various sentences and paragraphs. This way I will have a running start once I am ready to work with the text in LingQ.

P.S. I have not taken up the challenge, I am just experimenting with this particular kind of “Import”. :slight_smile: