Totally agree with this!
I started Spanish some years ago then stopped and then picked it up again this September. It might be too early to comment on my current level, but I can share something that made a significant difference between how I used LingQ years ago and how I use it now.
LingQ is just a tool. It helps with making input comprehensible, but then a lot depends on what you do with it. It is too easy to keep reading more and more just by clicking on blue words, and perhaps that strategy will get you somewhere, but it is like driving with GPS all the time. Your brain never learns the routes because it doesnāt have to. What I found to be the key to learning with LingQ (and any other tool for that matter) is spending sufficient time on reviews.
Steve talks about it all the time. You have to listen and re-listen (as well as read and re-read) those mini-stories (and really anything you add to LingQ) dozens if not hundreds of times. My new mantra for language learning is: Brain craves novelty but it needs repetition. So make sure you dedicate a lot of time to reviews. That was the biggest game changer for me.
I absolutely agree.
I cycle through my material a lot. And every time when I come back it gets easier and easier. I probably end up reviewing 80% of the time and getting new input 20% of the time. It might even be 90%/10% or higher.
When Iām starting to get bored I get a new thing and then I repeat some lecture I had a while ago that Iām interested in again.
EDIT:
I was reminded by Azarya and Twelvedesign, that I probably have the % a bit skewed. See comment below. 
I went from zero Spanish to passing a buisness level Spanish interview and gaining a 10% Salary increase within 12 months.
My experience in both Japanese and French has been the opposite to be honest. I only started making real progress once I quit āreviewingā . Reading new content became the review itself as I kept seeing the words in all contexts (old and new).
I never used lingq as an absolute starter though. My opinion might be different if I were to start from the very beginning.
I think the problem with too much review is you get a false sense of success. It quickly evaporates once you switch to a new material. There ought to be a good balance and that is a highly individual thing.
I am using LingQ for Italian.
About 2.5 years ago I met an Italian and fell in love with him. This past January I moved to Italy to marry him (wedding was in April). I had been using Duolingo on and off since he and I met just to try to learn a little of his language, but I really wasnāt getting anywhere, I could name most common food items (fruits, vegetablesā¦) and animals, but I couldnāt really make a complete sentence.
I found a Facebook group for language exchange shortly after I moved to Italy and started to exchange English for Italian with different people from the group using video chats. I also would attempt to talk to my husband in Italian. I love my husband, but he is not the academic type and if I wanted to learn how to build a house, he could teach me that, but he is not capable of teaching me Italian- he will correct my pronunciation or verb usage and help me with a word that I donāt know in Italian, but he canāt sit with me for an hour and teach me.
One of the people I was working with told me about LingQ, at that point I could maybe have a 10-minute conversation before I ran out of words that I knew. I checked out the site and started with some of the beginner lessons. I liked the set up and felt that it was helping me a lot with adding to my vocabulary, so after about a month my husband and I agreed that I would pay for one year.
In the 3-4 months that I have been using LingQ I have gone from barely able to speak any Italian to speaking at about the level of a 2-year-old. My grammar is far from perfect, but improving, and the people I speak with tell me that I am easy to understand. I am immersed in the language though as my husband and I are living in Italy. I teach English online as a job and do language exchange lessons with several Italians to improve my Italian and their English, so my immersion is not 100%, but we watch TV in Italian and most of the people around me only speak Italian. My comprehension is still kind of low (I would say 50-70% at slow speeds, much lower at natural speeds), but compared to closer to 10% when I got here a big improvement.
I do lessons almost every day, some days when my husband and I have been out all day and I have been in full immersion for the day I will just set my playlist to play while I do other things to keep my streak, but most days I listen to my playlist for at least an hour while I do other things, do one or more courses, and the review at the end of the lesson(s). I have not used the writing forum yet, but I do intend to at some point but right now I know that my Italian writing skills are not good because I want to spell things using English phonetics rules (the quizzes at the end of the lessons show me just how bad my Italian spelling isā¦).
LingQ is definitely not my only resource for learning, but it is the one I consider my go-to for self-study, and I do think that it has helped me a lot.
Best of luck to you!
You ānaturallyā review the most common words and phrases by reading novel material. The frequency of words follows Zipfās Law, so most materials have the same most frequent words. At the start (as a complete beginner) I relistened a lot and reread to some extent too, but now that Iām about lower intermediate, I find that my brain becomes complacent with lots of reviewing of material. It gets boring, my brain shuts off, and I just donāt concentrate very hard. When reading new, novel material, I have to concentrate much harder to understand what is going on. Even if you pick lessons with very low new words (like 5% or something), your brain still has to concentrate harder because the most common words are jumbled in a different order because the story/content is different. Your brain learns how to use those same words in different contexts. And, as the plus, you very slowly learn new words at the same time.
In fact, Iām thinking that because I always only listen to content, which Iāve already read, my brain does not expect novel content to come from listening. So on the few occassions, where Iāve listened to novel content first, it is suprisingly hard! Like I have a hard time. My guess is that my brain became somewhat complacent during my listening times over the many months, because I already knew the story (like reading, as mentioned above). Iām now thinking that my brain is not used to novel audio content, so I may need to train it and start listening to novel audios, as opposed to audios Iāve already read. Idk. Just a thought.
EDIT: Or maybe the listening content was too much above my level, so take it with a grain of salt.
Hmmā¦ Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Iām studying Russian at the moment and watch a new episode of Spongebob almost every day. More often then not I donāt repeat it.
I guess the % are a bit skewed as I donāt record the time watching movies or series in my target language but only the things I do here. Thanks for making me reflect that. 
I also agree with the post of twelvedesign, a good balance is key.
In the beginning loads of repetition is great and further down the intermediate path repetition goes down and new stuff gets more interesting.
At least that is how I feel.
I just keep it where my interest goes. If I want repetition I do it, if I want new stuff, I do that. My main thing is to keep having fun and keep absorbing material.
If I lose interest mid paragraph I just change to something I want to listen to/ read through. Zero shame.
I know for me, the more I output, the more the input sticks. Itās like my brain doesnāt see it as useful until I try to use it. I think it needs to be a balance. Lots of input, yes, but I need to also speak often, even if it is just memorizing phrases and using them.
100%. For me I have experience of learning one language āto completionā i.e. advanced level (spanish) and two to intermediate (french and russian).
For Spanish, after doing heavy input I immersed and I remember burning situational conversation pieces into my brain as a result of struggling in a conversation. I remember for example one time getting flummoxed on āse fueron?ā [did the rest of them leave?] when this one girl in our group asked me that and at the time my knowledge of past tense was stuck on past perfect. I tried to guess by saying āsi quieres decir, han ido los demasā [you mean to say they have gone away, the rest" and she said āsi, han ido los demas?ā. After that it was like it was burned in and I went and looked it up afterwards and I remember that conversation still even after 20 years. There are probably hundreds of little snippets like that in my Spanish.
That IMO is the BEST way bar none to learn.
Unfortunately, though, for me, no way am I ever going to get that with French or Russian. I donāt have the time (or frankly the desire at this stage in my life) to fully immerse so Iām stuck with input-only and so am looking for heuristics that optimize input only.
It is quite possible, however, that we are evolved for the first method and the input-only method is shockingly inefficient to get to ācompletion/advanced/fully fluentā.
From a native English speakerās point of view, ALL OF YOU sound like Arnold
I might not yet have what many would call a āsuccess storyā, but to me it counts
I first learned Italian in school and was overly excited because I always loved Italy - the country, the culture, the food, the people and of course the language. Unfortunately, our really brilliant teacher died and we got the history/latin teacher in Italian too, so we learned it as Latin is taught in schools - or should I say motivation was as low as it could be.
Over the years I forgot the little Italian I knew, so every trip to Italy I spoke less and less, in the end I completely stopped and switched to English, sometimes German.
Last year I went to Brescia with my family and we went to one of those tiny stores, where they sell hand-painted tableware, quite cheesy - but we love it. In the store there was a very kind old lady, a proper ānonnaā one would say, that only spoke Italian (and not exactly a language-learner friendly version of it). She was so kind to tell me about where the plates are crafted and how old the tradition was, but I hardly understood a word, she repeated everything three times.
I felt bad because I would have understood that back when I was 20 and I really wanted to understand it. The story of an ancient and traditional craft, brilliant! During the same trip, we visited a paper manufacturing museum we discovered by accident. About the same thing there, they had english descriptions but I could tell they were poorly translated and hardly captured the story of that beautiful handcraft.
This was when I decided, Iāll give it another try and learn the language that I love so much properly. I researched, asked other people and finally discovered LingQ, Steve and a whole new world of language learning.
After a month of learning with LingQ I already had a feeling that I might have even exceeded my former knowledge and skill from school. Grammar was a foe back then, today itās one of the most fascinating things for me. Now Iām in the 6th month, I can see my progress and Iām really happy with it. I might not have the confidence yet to start casual conversations, but Iām working on it.
And I have a clear vision, a goal. Weāve already been to Brescia twice, if I visit that beautiful region again, I will go back to that nonna in the store, buy some more hand-painted tableware and tell her about being my motivation for learning Italian - ma questa volta in italiano corretto. E forse potrĆ raccontarmi di nuovo la storia di questo manufatto belissimo. Non vedo lāora!
Everybody has a story, this was mine. And I hope it will continueā¦
Over the course of a year and a half, I went from being probably A2/loooow B1 in Russian to pretty solidly B2 (I still suck at understanding movies and tv shows, but stuff related to my career field is very intelligible) through just reading and reading and reading and a fair amount of listening as well. As a result, I was able to score a really high Russian language score on the government language test and get picked up for my dream job.
It took time, but it for sure worked and Iām very thankful for it.
About a year and a half ago, I was at a A2-ish level of French where I hadnāt really studied for years. For reference, French is my third language, after my mother tongue English and second language of Japanese.
Motived by some planned personal travel, I evaluated recent yearsā advances in tools and really settled on three things.
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LingQ - Initially, I used more of the SRS-oriented features. Once getting solidly to B1, I transitioned more to just using LingQ for reading and/or listening assistance, where I import everything I possibly can into LingQ before consuming. Most of the content I consume today in LingQ, I manually import quick before its reading and/or listening. The vocab I know vs donāt is very, very close to my color coding in LingQ.
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Intermediate-level YouTubers - I discovered many of them via LingQ. Several years ago, the intermediate level āhumpā was MUCH worse in overcoming. There has long been basic content (think phrasebooks, etc.) for a language and at an advanced level you just consume content in the language. How do you get over that hump? With YouTube (especially) thereās now a viable little business for YouTubers to offer intermediate-level ācomprehensible input.ā In French, I think of Le French Club, Alice Ayel, innerFrench, Fred, MaProf, Elisa, Pierre and his wife, and Elisabeth. Much of this content is already imported into LingQ. If itās not, I will for my own use. While now I also can consume certain types of native content in French, I still use these. The people who do this work are all interesting, personable people.
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iTalki - Iāve completed almost 100, thirty-to-sixty minute lessons/conversations.
Today, for the first time ever, I had an iTalki instructor mention āC1.ā
Anyhow, LingQ remains a primary tool to consume lots and lots of input. It takes lots and lots of input. The brain does the magic. These tools just help the brain do its thing.