Part of my job here in China is to devise a mid term development plan for our Chinese colleagues. Improving their English skills is part of that. Beyond casual sampling of some of the Chinese dialogues in the Lingq library I have never used Lingq myself and I believe that motivation is the key to success no matter what method you use.
Still, I am pepared to offer the people here paid lingq memberships if they like the system and are willing to put in the time. I might give some of them a demo and see what the response it. I certainly won’t push it if I sense resistance. If we end up doing this I might actually find out how effective lingq really is.
I wonder if lingq actively targets corporate customers. I think they are probably a better target group than schools or other public institutions. Large companies pay for many things including expensive language training courses and would gladly pay for a product if it works.
If we were to roll out Lingq here, would there be the same modalities as for home users?
@Friedemann - We appreciate any referrals you can send our way! With most new members it’s a matter of having them understand what to do and establish the habit in the first week or so. Then, they start to see the benefits and stay with it. To get people started, I recommend the Why LingQ video which they see when they first log in and the lesson page video which they can watch in the Tasks and Forum tab on the Lesson page. After that there are a lot of other resources on the Help page.
Friedemann, we have in the past approached potential corporate users. We have found that it is very time consuming, frequent follow up meetings are required, and the number of people in any cohort who will get active learning a language, using LingQ or any other method is small.
In addition we have had the problem that LingQ has been difficult for newcomers to understand. We have been working hard to make LingQ easier to use and understand.
The ideal would be that a company made LingQ compulsory, or course. Usually, however, the training managers react much like government and institutional people. “What are the credentials of your tutors” “How do you teach grammar” “Show us a list of your clients”. So after much effort, often involving travel, we fail.
Of course if our members can become champions within their companies that would be great, and members can earn 200 points per month for every paying member that they introduce as per our referral system.
“In addition we have had the problem that LingQ has been difficult for newcomers to understand. We have been working hard to make LingQ easier to use and understand.”
I reckon it depends a lot on the level that people have in their target language when they arrive here.
LingQ has been getting better for complete beginners - but this is still a clear weak point in my opinion.
If LingQ were my baby, I’d be working round the clock to add more great beginner’s content like “Eating Out”. And I’d also try very hard to get more professional-sounding recordings of the existing material. (For beginners clear audio quality is an absolute necessity and not just a luxury, in my opinion. At more advanced levels it’s not quite so important.)
