As one who has been using LingQ for over a decade. I recommended LingQ to my sister who wanted to learn Spanish. She used Lingq for less than a month, I couldn’t get her to stay any longer.
These were her complaints.
She didn’t like the content that LingQ provided she found it boring.
(I think this is a common complaint. I think its mainly due to people not knowing that LingQ is not mainly for finding content, but instead allowing content that you love to be more accessible. LingQ needs to continually get this message across to new users.)
She found the website to be very complicated.
(Again I think this is a common complaint, as a long time LingQ user I even find somethings to be a bit confusing.)
Now back to your original question. I would absolutely recommend LingQ.
Being able to see your progress through all of the stats that are tracked really helps keep up the motivation. Looking at the graph that shows you how active and what you did each month is really important. I would say LingQ overall is a great place to learn languages. But you need to know what the purpose of lingQ is (Importing your own content)
Probably for the same reason why most wouldn’t recommend to learn a language by text books. It doesn’t work for them, so they assume it won’t for everyone else.
But to be fair, as the thread is about whether one would recommend LingQ, this is subjective to begin with. You don’t say, “I recommend this because I assume that there might be the possibility that it could work for you.” You say, “It works for me. It’s cool. Give it a try!” (Or something along those lines).
I agree with you that one can learn a language from the beginning on via LingQ, or via a text book, or by any other mean. The question is whether it is really the best way to restrict to one learning style or medium, which isn’t what most of us here are doing anyways.
I agree with her. But as you say, LingQ is best when it helps us find content and import it. I wish LingQ had some very accessible tools to help new users do this. As things stand, such tools are buried away deep in LingQ’s resource pages, and they are virtually impossible to find for a newbie.
Again, I have to agree. When I first started here, what I desperately wanted was some kind of tutorial, but the ones on LingQ are difficult to find, text heavy, and a bit hard to use.
What I think LingQ needs iare some video tutorials - readily accessible, maybe linked on a banner on the home page - to show people how to find and import material (videos, books, etc), and showing them how to best use the app.
I totally think you can…especially if you’ve use comprehensive input and/or Lingq to learn another language. For someone who has maybe learned in a classroom setting before, or expects that kind of handholding or organization probably will flounder a bit, especially if they don’t check out some of the videos or “user manual” =).
I would totally start new languages here personally (and have on a couple of new ones beyond German and Spanish).
“Q. How do you personally benefit from LingQ?”
For me, the best thing about LIngq is the actual linqs. I use it as a note taking app. When I see a word, I make make a note about that word (or copy someone else’s note) and move on. When I see it again, I can call up the note instantly. That’s brilliant.
I’d recommend Lingq to people who are hardcore self-teachers, as D.lfzM pointed, out, but I don’t know many people like that. I’d also recommend it to people who already have the basics of a language, and want to do more reading in that language. Again, that’s not very many people I know.
LingQ’s most basic action is to read. It takes one mouse click to do that - you click on the lesson and - hey presto - you’re reading. It takes another mouse click to listen to the lesson, and another if you need a word translated. If you have the TransOver app, you don’t even need to click on a word to get a translation. So 2 or 3 mouse clicks, not 7 keystrokes.
Not sure what sort of computer/tablet/phone you’re using the LingQ app on, so I have no idea where you get the “7 keys” from, but maybe you should invest in a mouse.
I have previously recommended LingQ to several people, but have have had to stop that. In my opinion the error rate is not acceptable for a commercial tool, and the worst problems are with the key functionality for importing videos, which is THE key functionality. Since similar errors are appearing, disappearing and reappearing, I suspect there are some fundamental flaws with the tool’s solution architecture.
The pros:
You can become totally and fluently literate by using LingQ and get a really good understanding of spoken language. I don’t see how Duolingo or Rosetta Stone could ever do that or even come close to doing that.
What I’d warn people about is:
It’s very hard if you are totally new to the language you are learning.
LingQ works best for people who like to read and have some understanding of their target language.
If you are starting from scratch, you need to start with really easy material and constantly repeat lessons. This requires a lot of discipline. I’d recommend using a lot of material with pictures alongside LingQ if you are completely new, something like illustrated children’s books or Rosetta Stone.
There is a bit of a trap for people to get into the gamification of just trying to accumulate known words, while one should also do a lot of listening.
In language learning, regardless of LingQ and how it works, people tend to underestimate the effort they need. People might use LingQ and say it didn’t work, because they didn’t put in the hours, but this happens a lot with any app or learning method. I am almost a hyper-polyglot at this point, but the effort and hours I have to put in to learn a new language and the amount of mistakes and misunderstandings I make are still staggering, especially if it’s of a language family I don’t have experience with.
Yes. People who are used to having a teacher tell them what to do and how to do it in a classroom setting often just don’t get it, how you should just go for it yourself cause it’s out there and yours for the taking.
Many of the import issues actually tend to be on the provider…Youtube and Netflix have made many changes in the past that have broken the LingQ directo import. To me this is just the cost of having this great feature. They could keep all the cool features off and we just be able to import text manually and upload audio, but some of these features are quite convenient. Yes, it does sometimes make the application seem unpolished, but overall, at least for me it’s very much worth it, but I can understand some people’s irritations.
“It takes 7 keys to read, translate and hear a sentence, nearly its most basic action.”
That is annoying when using sentence view. As a beginner, I need sentence view. It’s annoying that I have to make the same series of keystrokes over and over again, thousands of times. It would be nice if I could set defaults that control what happens when I click >. If Lingq is software for self-teaching, we should be given a little more control over how we use it. It would also be nice if we could control the TTS speed in sentence view. The setting is there on the screen, but it doesn’t do anything.
“I’ve been using a computer and a mouse every day for over 30 years. I don’t know why anyone would want to avoid using a mouse.”
To avoid repetitive strain injury, like carpal tunnel syndrome. Not an issue for some people, big problem for others.
The problem is that they advertise that feature. If they would explicitely state that they cannot guarantee this functionality, there would probably be much less complaints. But if you come with the expectation that this is a core feature, and than it isn’t working for a long time or not at all (the Netflix import never worked for me, but to be honest I gave up trying after a while), than the excuse that this is a 3rd party issue doesn’t count, if this dependency wasn’t made explicit to begin with.
I can’t say I am fully committed to LingQ and have install Lute 3 and LWT to see if that can meet my needs for reading German text, it can be used for other languages of course. I will continue utilising LingQ for now but I do not see it as the ultimate solution. Also, The benefit of LingQ is it is nice to have a community to feed off when struggling to understand concepts, grammar, etc
