Learning phrases with LingQ

Support & Feedback Forum
1

I’ve been listening, reading and going through the vocabulary when I feel like it but I’ve hit a little snag.

When I look up the words I can make sense of them but when I look at a sentence in which all the words are known, I often don’t know what it’s saying. This is common to language learning, from my experience, but I have questions.

  1. Should I attempt to learn those phrases?
  2. If the answer to 1 is yes, then how can I do so with LingQ?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

2

I think you just start becoming more and more familiar with the language as you keep using LingQ (and listening on your own). You get to a point where you can spot the phrases, even if you don’t know what they mean. And then you just look up the phrase on the web (e.g. WordReference for French) or ask on the Forum (e.g. Ask Your Tutor) and then save the answer (the whole phrase) as a LingQ. Then, seeing it in your Flashcards will help you to remember it. But I think ultimately you’ll learn the phrase by seeing and hearing it in different contexts.

3

Interesting.

So I can select a phrase as a LingQ? I hadn’t tried that yet.

Thanks Peter :slight_smile:

4

By the way, this is the particular phrase I’m having trouble with:

Il y a encore plus de livres ici.

5

I would say: There are still more books here.

Is “Il y a” the part that confused you?

If you highlight “il y a”, it should come up with the English equivalent. If not, then definitely Google Translate or WordReference will.

6

Yes, “il ya a” was the bit which confused me.

Surely it’s a collocation but it’s not an easy one to figure out. :slight_smile:

Looking it up, I get “there is”. But can this be both “there is and there are”?

7

Yep. It can be both. Also, if you want you can not only save “il y a”, but “il y a encore” as well to give you two slightly different entries of the same phrase into your database.

8

I’ll give that a go, thanks for the advice Peter.

9

Hello, ‘Il y a’ is made of the three words, subject (il: it), pronoun and verb so I also suggest that you also save the pronoun Y. You’ll find many examples with this pronoun. Y is often translated by there.

10

I have saved “y”. Since I’ve never even looked at French, I’m adding almost everything. haha

I’ve noticed that I can’t work out a lot of French words. They are just a blur to me at the moment.

But, it’s still early days…

11

I do it by ear. I’m a “no knowledger” in Japanese, mostly it sounds like blahblahblah to me. But when I listen to a piece a few times, a few phrases stick in my mind, like phrases in a piece of music. When I get round to it, I go through the lesson again, find the familiar-sounding phrases and LingQ them. In time I learn them. If a phrase is common I will learn it faster than if it’s a phrase that crops up only occasionally.

BTW I end up with thousands of LingQs at status 1. I tried to learn them all when I started in Russian, but it didn’t last long. Again, if a word is common or memorable, you will remember it, and at some point you will bump it up to known. If it stays at 1 for a couple of years, then it’s not an important word, and when you feel like it, you could purge all those “clutter” words.

12

Thanks for the advice and sharing of your experiences. :slight_smile: