Today I joined Monthly LingQing Challenge because I thought it would be a nice way to stimulate myself to keep studying with this platform, but I admit I was quite surprised when I saw that the leader in that competition has created the incredible number of 23859 LingQs in the last month!
But he wasn’t alone: many people have created thousands of LingQs in that short period of time - which, honestly, doesn’t make much sense to me because it would be simple impossible to review all this material and I don’t think I would learn so much with this strategy.
You do not have to review them in the first place. At least, I do not do that, can not endure this tiresome process. I also think that a lot of the users don’t review their lingqs either.
That’s the point. I realized I always used LingQ in a very different way of most part of people because I usually try to really learn at least 75% of my LingQs before pick up another lesson.
But I still don’t understand. If you will just read and not review your flashcards, why are you using this platform? Just to have quick access to dictionaries? But Google Chrome has an extension that already does that and is much more practical.
Just to clarify: I’m not criticizing people who creates a lot of LingQs. I’m just trying to understand their perspective.
I have never tried the extenstion you’re talking about but I guess that it is not as useful as Lingq. The Lingq System allows you to create lingqs that’s what really matters, that’s why I use it. That is the selling point, you see.
I find your question a little bit strange, to be frank. Creating Lingsq is the whole point of the system. There’s nothing peculiar about the people who do that extensively.
Don’t bother about the number of lingqs and about reviewing them!
Everything depends on you.
As an independent learner, you can choose the method of your language learning which is more useful for you. This independence is the most important thing in lingq.com
You can use thousands of lessons for different levels in the libraries here - not only texts but also some grammar lessons if you would like to use them. You can import very different materials from the internet into lingq.com if they are interesting for you.
A lot of learners here consider that the most important words will be repeated in different podcasts and they can finally remember them without boring reviewing of flashcards. But some learners don’t object to repeat flashcards.
I claim again - everything depends on you!
What about me - I repeat new words 1-2 times a week using ‘multiple choice’ - it’s a good and easy tool that needs less time than flashcards but it’s quite effective for me.
Good luck!
Google Translate has all kinds of problems. Using it (in Google Books) to read an ebook on a phone gets very frustrating.
In my opinion, flashcards are only worthwhile for core vocabulary. If you’re at an intermediate level, you will encounter thousands of low-frequency words, and drilling them with flashcards would be a very joyless process. Reading, and keeping track of known and unknown words in the process is an effective form of reviewing vocabulary.
I don’t actively review my LingQs but I care very much that I am tracking whether I know the words. If you think about a word you’ve already LingQed before checking its definition, that is almost the same functionality as a flashcard.
The Chrome extension (I assume you mean the Google Translate one made by Google themselves?) is decent but you have to highlight all the words I think, and click a button to hear TTS. (But maybe you mean a different extension…) The way that LingQ tracks various types of progress (read/LingQd/known words) is a huge draw for me.
For me, I signed on to the Lingq service because reading was my weakest skill and I do find that this site helps to motivate me to read in my target languages. I am not tolerant of just getting the big picture while missing some bits, and also, I do have the impulse to somehow note unknown words and expressions for future consideration. In both of these, Lingq is helpful.
I’m at an advanced level in all of my target languages, which means that the new words and expressions I’m coming across are quite rare. I get absolutely nothing out of just creating Lingqs and moving on…I might as well not bother. Because the new words/expressions with that particular meaning will not come up again for hundreds of pages of text, if I’d simply marked a Lingq and moved on without ever practicing it, there would be no possibility whatsoever that it would stick. So it is essential for me to use the flashcards to review new vocabulary (Note that re-reading already marked-up text is good practice to review the vocabulary, and I do try to get myself to do it, but I find it even more boring than doing flashcards).
Maybe creating large numbers of Lingqs and moving on would be more useful at an earlier stage of language learning. Someone who’s working at picking up basic vocabulary will be seeing the common words and expressions they’re focusing on often enough that they will begin to recognize them, even without explicitly practicing them.
P.S. I don’t find the statistics to be the least bit meaningful or interesting. If you jump in at a high level but haven’t yet read many texts, your “known word” count will be low. Meaning less than nothing! But then maybe others love the stats…Different strokes for different folks!
“A lot of learners here consider that the most important words will be repeated in different podcasts and they can finally remember them without boring reviewing of flashcards. But some learners don’t object to repeat flashcards.”
Sure, but the point is that I’ve never perceived the first possibility you mentioned before and I was surprised. It’s quite obivous when I think about, but well, it only came to my mind these days.
“What about me - I repeat new words 1-2 times a week using ‘multiple choice’ - it’s a good and easy tool that needs less time than flashcards but it’s quite effective for me.”|
“drilling them with flashcards would be a very joyless process. Reading, and keeping track of known and unknown words in the process is an effective form of reviewing vocabulary.”
“Maybe creating large numbers of Lingqs and moving on would be more useful at an earlier stage of language learning.”
You’re completely right and maybe that’s because I never noticed these two possibilities: I always used LingQ to study Italian and English, two languages I can read pretty well. But now I’m interested in Russian and it’s completely impossible to focus in every single word I read because at least 80% of every text begin blue! But you’re also right when you say important words will be learned just because they’ll appear a lot: I truly memorized something like 20 words in two days without so much effort, what never happened to me when I used to try to memorize absolutely everything.
“P.S. I don’t find the statistics to be the least bit meaningful or interesting. If you jump in at a high level but haven’t yet read many texts, your “known word” count will be low. Meaning less than nothing! But then maybe others love the stats…Different strokes for different folks!”
That’s a fair point too. Funny story: one day I saw I guy copying the answers of another student in a Italian course ingress level evaluation (I don’t know if this construction is right. I’m trying to talk about that test you try to solve in order to identify your language level at the beginning of a course). The result: he has been send to intermediate 2 without knowing ANY word of Italian. He had to admit what he has done at the same day, obviously. Crazy and egocentric guy.
Look, what I tried to explain in my first post is that I have been using LingQ for a long time with another approach and this is interesting because reveals two completely different strategies: you can create a lot of LingQs and simply be patient enough to wait the simple word repetition will stuck the most important parts of that information in your brain or you can deliberately make a great effort to memorize and understand absolutely everything about most part of every word you see in your materials.
Maybe it’s a little silly, but I never have thought about that and always used not only LingQ but Assimil too in that way, which can explain a lot why I’m always anxious to finish these books and begin to read real content. So maybe it’s interesting to discuss this sort of things because many people can be doing exactly the same than me without never thought about that.
The last two days, I tried to study exactly this way: creating a lot of LingQs and just enjoying the reading. And I can’t disagree, it’s a much much better approach.
“I don’t actively review my LingQs but I care very much that I am tracking whether I know the words. If you think about a word you’ve already LingQed before checking its definition, that is almost the same functionality as a flashcard.”
That’s a fair point: it’s a similar mechanism.
“The Chrome extension (I assume you mean the Google Translate one made by Google themselves?) is decent but you have to highlight all the words I think, and click a button to hear TTS. (But maybe you mean a different extension…) The way that LingQ tracks various types of progress (read/LingQd/known words) is a huge draw for me.”
I don’t think this extension is similar to LingQ, I just mentioned it because in my former position I thought someone who doesn’t review his LingQs is only using this platform as a online dictionary, but you get a very different picture when you think about LingQs as the way you explained in your first paragraph.
If you know the show, that guy copying answers reminds me of “Mr. Bean” on the English comedy. Anyway, I don’t hardly ever use the SRS review, but I would only use it for words at a certain level of understanding (e.g. trying to get all words at lingq level 2 to level 3) I only switch a word to known in context when i notice that I came to the word and just “knew” it. I also sometimes will not bother lingqing a cognate and will just switch it to known.