I’d like to share my two cents about LingQ to maybe contrast with the criticism that I keep seeing on this forum.
I obviously can’t comment on LingQ’s functionability with Chinese or Japanase characters, but most of the bugs that are being reported have not bothered me in my learning experience with the website. On the contrary, the website has really done wonders for my Russian and am not sure that I could have reached fluency in about one year (!) without it.
It is no surprise that my classmates keep saying that “It’s all because I’ve spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe”, which obviously helped but can’t be the only reason since any Westerner knows a ton of foreigners who can’t be bothered to learn the language of their new country even after living there for decades.
I would never give advice to people about language learning in real life, but for those interested, here are the tips that I’ve found most useful:
Find interesting material
Do not spend more than 1 hour per day on each language that you’re learning
Try not skipping a day
Always challenge yourself with “hard” material
Also, don’t be impressed by LingQ stats aside from “words read” and “lingqs learned”.
Thanks for reading me!
edit: English. My written English is getting really awful.
Awesome! This post was a quite good one to learn some useful tips which worked for you.
Lingq helped me to improve my English. The idea behind it is obviously working for me to acquire the second language. Only problem with Lingq is that the company probably don’t have access to financial resources to invest in the website and therefore only a few people try to run the whole operations. That obviously causes to postpone some big projects thatare considered important for customer satisfaction. But I understand. It’s still my only source to study English.
Lingq stats are not always reflecting real level in target language but I think it’s a good way to follow the learning trend. One can say that he/she should challenge him/herself with harder materials or go for easier ones this week/month.
I fully agree with you. For the characters: well in some moments it really gets in the way but in general it makes it so much easier, and in the end you end up getting used to the system errors, at least that was my experience.
Lingq is a very good tool for learning languages, it’s not perfect yet it’s worth it. It’s okay to point out your issues but if you don’t like it you may simply not pay, because after all no one is compelling you to do so.
Thank you for the nice comments! It’s always nice to hear that we are helping people achieve their language goals!
@Miznia - 1. The pinyin and traditional characters are converted automatically and there isn’t much we can do there. We can’t possibly manually go through and correct all the lessons in our system ourselves, never mind issues that arise in imported lessons. We do have plans to enable manual adjustment of those characters once the initial conversion is done. That will eventually be something that Premium members and content providers will be able to do.
2. The few words that don’t allow you to LingQ them are an issue. It is not an insignificant issue, however, and does only affect a small number of words, as you say, so it’s hard to justify directing our limited resources there when we can otherwise be working on things that affect all users. However, we do recognize it as an issue and hope to get to it before too long.
3. We have tried to optimize the word splitting as best we can and there really isn’t much more to be done here. Word splitting is unfortunately, not an exact science. What we have done is enabled all Premium accounts the ability to edit any texts so that you should be able to go in and adjust the word boundaries yourself. Your edits will then be saved for the next guy.
@leuropeanite - Are there specific issues affecting you? I use LingQ all the time, as do many others, and don’t have any issues. If you are having issues please reach out to support so we can help figure out what is going on?
Thanks for your responses, my post was really to say that I don’t think the Chinese support is bad. I’d like to see #2 fixed at some point, that’s about it.
Thanks for sharing your advice. I agree that most of the bugs here haven’t stopped me enjoying my time here. Why wouldn’t you give advice to people in real life about language learning? Just curious lol. Also how do you tackle not skipping a day of language learning?
I really annoys when people are complaining about Lingq for me it is the best way to learn a language I have been learning Spanish for a few months now and would have given up ages ago if it was not for Lingq and being able to import interesting content, I understand that people are having issues with the website but if you’re really unhappy with it just leave.
You can love the system and yet be frustrated that it is broken quite often. I’m not a fan of your ‘sit down, shut up or get out’ attitude.
Are you the kind of person who buys an electrical product and just throws it in the bin because it malfunctions or do you go to the manufacturer to try and get it fixed ?
I agree with some aspects and do understand we are paying for a service, but I am very happy with the service and will continue using it, I hope your issues get resolved.
I really second this man. I don’t believe I would still be on this journey if I never found Lingq. The set-up of it all is just superb. The only problems that have really annoyed me are when the iphone app malfunctions as that means I cannot listen outside. All the others glitches are very workable indeed.
I don’t think lessons refusing to open are ‘workable’ glitches. It might be ok for some people, but i have a son and once he’s in bed and i settle in for some reading, if it doesn’t work i miss my chance to use it for that day.
@lockmacfly I see that you are studying Russian, and we actually have 50 Russian Mini Stories available in the library already. Last 10 stories should also be done very soon (we will have 60 Mini Stories in each language, not 100).
