Lingq isn’t about being good for lazy people. Comprehensible Input (and perhaps variations) is the best way to learn a langauge (at least well supported by research).
having audio is important
knowing what’s going on is supported; generally due to a teacher but translations is a method to do this and some recommend it if you can’t have a teacher 24/7.
interesting content is good.
It’s about getting a good approximation of the best methods to learn languages, not about being good for lazy people.
And again, they need a button to do next sentence + audio + translation.
All I ever seemed to do when I was learning French in school was grammar exercises… Maybe teaching methods have changed since I was in school, or maybe you just went to better schools than I did.
Plenty of parents spend a whole lot of the time with their children correcting their grammar mistakes. Wrong gender, case, pronoun or preposition used, wrong conjugation etc…
Grammar is what describes the relationship of the words you use to create something meaningful. So learning it is as important as acquiring vocabulary. Of course you’ll don’t have to master it, similar to how you cannot learn every single word in a language. And of course the qualtity depends on how it is taught. In a classroom motivation and adoption to the pupils skills and needs is crucial. If the teacher just follows some random pattern that neither motivates nor makes sense to the pupils, they’ll most likely won’t learn a whole lot. But if the dose is right, and the pupils notice they start to understand texts they couldn’t before, it can be very motivating.
I am not quiet sure what number “hefty” equals to, though.
I came to the conclusion that the lesson has too much formal instruction, not enough actual input. I guess that is how languages used to be taught in schools, in the same way that they teach physics and maths. I was totally confused by the lesson, and yet I understand the concepts they are teaching. I suspect most of us would agree that grammar should be taught in context, and in small amounts and that seeing words and grammar in real sentences is more useful than formal teaching.
I don’t know how math and physics are taught in your country, but isn’t the usual approach to give the theoretical fundament (what are we talking about? what properties do the objects have? what tools do we have to our disposal?) and than practice what you’ve learned by solving exercises?
For example:
It is problematic to state numbers “as is” in some situation, for example stating how high the rent in a certain city is, as it is hard to judge on whether the amount corresponds to expensive or cheap.
You than argue that you need a reference, like the average income in that city and that you can judge on whether the rent is cheap or expensive by evaluating how much of the income goes into the rent.
You practice the kind of calculation and than apply it to various other situations.
Grammar can be taught pretty much the same:
You have a problem, like you want to express that one statement is the prerequisite of another one, or like in your example that you have verbs were the subject and the object are the same and you need a specific way to express that.
You have to know how this is done.
You need to practice this.
Obviously an explanatory video will most likely only cater for the first two points. The practice is something it cannot take away from you. In a classroom a teacher can practice with the students, but only this far. And different students might learn different things at a different speed. So it is also the responsibility of the students to practice those aspects they aren’t good at yet.
A language is very different from a subject such as physics. For example it is massively more complex, which is why at school I excelled at maths and physics, and flunked French.
There is plenty of evidence that languages should not be taught as per physics, maths etc. It is also widely understood that language learning takes place largely implicitly i.e. without conscious awareness.
In this video, there is a huge amount of explanation which sent me to sleep, and which was superfluous. At best the video is a very inefficient way to teach German. The key grammar concept is actually very easy, and is best taught through lots of examples. Imagine teaching ice skating as follows:
Now look at the blackboard. See how the student lifts the left leg, moves it over the right foot, and sets it down on the ice. While doing this the left and right arms are in the positions shown. Note also the position of the upper body.
It just doesn’t work.
In the video they should have just stated that some verbs are reflexive, explained how to form a reflexive verb and given some examples. That’s why I prefer to study real examples of input, roughly graded to my level.
You can read and hear millions of words at a level of the langauge you can understand, with translations when you want them. To the extent it works, it’s close to my ideal way to learn a language.
Chiming in as a fellow RSI sufferer. I suggest the Evoluent vertical mouse and Kinesis Freestyle 2 keyboard (propped up at a 45 degree angle with their tent attachment or just a tissue box). These were life changers for my RSI issues. Good luck!
Trackballs are also quiet good for those who find using a regular mouse uncomfortable. The one I am using is the Elecom Huge Trackball. Another benefit of those is that you don’t need to move them, which is good if you have a tiny desk or lots of stuff lying around on it (which is the standard case for me ).
It’s both. They present the language as per an academic lecture, which I find tedious and sleep inducing. I prefer to learn from input with bare bones grammar explanations as and when needed. For lower intermediate German that content has to be curated of course i.e. matched to the level.
Grammar explanations usually fly over my head unless they focus on the meaning of example phrases.
You seemed to be suggesting that classroom teaching should largely be explanations of how grammar works, and the exposure to input is to be done in free time outside class. That I disagree with. Certainly when I was learning French with the Alliançe Française and L’Institut Français, that is not how classes were conducted. Nor was it like that at school. I have memories of an old reel to reel tape recorder playing the voice of an old French man with a 60 cigarettes a day habit mumbling unintelligibly. Not the best example, I guess.
That is a misunderstanding. What I was trying to say is that due to students usually only spending a very limited time participating in classes, the teachers only have a limited time to practice with the students. That’s why I think that if the students want to make good progress, they need to practice outside the classroom, too.
In addition, the more time students spend on studying things on their own that they actually can study on their own, like building up vocabulary by reading a lot, the more time in class can be used for things they need the teacher for, like asking for grammar explanations or getting feedback on pronounciation etc.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with that. School language teaching in Britain gets a bad press, but in truth your final sentence sums it up quite well.
I haven’t thought too much about language teaching in schools, so I’ll leave it to people with direct experience of teaching to comment on what is most effective . For what it is worth my memories of learning French at school are unpleasant.
But with regard to the video I posted, if I want to understand grammar, I look it up in a book or online where I can take my time to understand it. That said, some people may like that style.
I do it basically the same way. Although I sometimes watch video explanations, too if I can’t find a good text-based one. I mainly prefer text for that I can read it faster then it takes me to watch a video with the same amount of information.
In regards to the video you’ve posted. I just took a short look and would say that the explanation is unneccessarely complicated imho. And for some reason the speaker isn’t german. I always find it best if I get such information from people both educated in that matter and beeing native speakers. If one of the two conditions isn’t met, you easely get wrong information. The information in the video seems to be correct, though.
The funny thing about the video is that it basically states everything you need to know in one sentence at the end of the video. “In this sentence we have to use a reflexive pronoun because subject and object are the same.” Scrap everything else.
I didn’t know that. I will avoid the YouTube channel. As an aside, there are a lot of German courses on YouTube using robot voices, I am sure one had grammatical mistakes. It must be an easy way to make money.
Smart learners learn to work around their weaknesses and overcome them.
It’s easy for me to tire of constantly looking things up in a traditional dictionary. It’s easy for me to lose interest. Call that laziness if you like. For me Lingq is a smart choice to get a transcript and try to focus on interesting content without interminable interruption chasing down words in a dictionary.
It’s also easy to lose interest sitting in a chair reading. I can stay engaged with content doing other things like enjoying a hike in the woods while listening to playlists on Lingq.
I like LingQ. But there are many things that are really annoying in the learning process.
Most of the features of the app don’t work as they should. I can’t recommend this app now because the price is very high for this quality.
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