Yeah, it’s a process called OCR. Not an easy thing to do but the best languages for it are some of the big European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc…
@Aybee77: “…from the free lesson shown in the library, do you expect a beginner to be convinced of the efficacy of the lessons, and want to spend the money on them?”
This is actually a very good point. If you are going to offer people a free sample, it may not be the best idea to show them just the first unit. (In almost any course for complete beginners, the first unit generally contains only a small amount of the target language at a very basic level - and it is often not very indicative of the units later on in the course.)
I actually agree with much of what you are saying here. I’m not suggesting that these PDQ courses are as good as the lessons that you and Oscar (and others) create. But I think they are quite okay as a FIRST STEP for some people who are complete beginners.
But as I have said before, it’s a real pity that LingQ have started by uploading PDQ - because these are not anywhere near the best Linguaphone courses on offer. (Their better ones are entirely on a par with Assimil.)
I’m using the Assimil French course now and am really enjoying it. Next, I’ll move onto the second course while using graded readers. Really, it’s a great way to start a language. If I had good copy of one of the older Linguaphone courses for French, I’d use it too (like I did for Dutch).
We would love to offer Assimil at LingQ but they have spurned us!
If I had had access to Assimil for Czech I would not have used it. The beginner texts at LingQ and then real content like newspapers, radio Prague and literature is all I need. I also have a small Teach Yourself book that I refer to from time to time but which I have trouble concentrating on. i can’t remember the grammar explanations and find the dialogues boring, as was the case with my Russian and Korean Assimil books way back when.
Steve, we’d really all love to be like you when it comes to language learning. To be able to pick up 20,000 words in a few months, not need spend much time on beginner materials because we have outgrown it in days or weeks; to almost instantly be progressing through books on history and philosophy.
I would love to be able to do that. We all would. Maybe after a dozen languages and when learning a languages related to the ones I know, I will.
For now, my book in Yiddish on the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto will go unread. Why? Not because I’m not game, not because I’m not interested. The reason is that I simply don’t know the language well enough yet.
I say this out of respect Steve. I do agree with what you say about input and native materials and all that good stuff. It’s all great. But I just know that it’s too overwhelming for beginners at language learning. Please don’t give people false hope. Give them realistic hope.
I think that a lot of learners could do what I do and benefit. Few are willing to LingQ as aggressively as I do, but what is more important, many learners don’t like to deal with uncertainty. They don’t like the fact that they don’t fully understand something. The go over easy content again and again, trying to nail it down. They feel more secure doing that.
I agree that reading a book where you understand little is tough. But doing it on LingQ is not nearly as tough.
I think it is matter of choice, and the fact that we have been conditioned to learn things one lesson at a time, building on what we learn as we go. To my mind this is an ineffective way to learn languages.
I can see seshem’s POV too although I am determined to emulate Steve. Maybe the key is to trust your instincts about how all languages work. There are perhaps certain universal ways that people organise information so if you can only pick out a few words in a paragraph just trust your intuition about the rest. If you are wrong, who cares?
@Steve: “…reading a book where you understand little is tough. But doing it on LingQ is not nearly as tough.”
I agree with this, but finding e-texts in a workable format can sometimes be a really serious pain in the [blankety-blank] !
With my Italian, I started working with the text of Leonardo Sciascia’s great anti-Mafia novel, “A Ciascuno il Suo”, having bought the audio from “Il Narratore”; but it took so darned long to import and re-format the text from my pdf file, that I soon had to give it up.
It was a case of spending 15 or 20 mins doing dumb text-editing for every 5 mins or so doing actual LingQing! I just couldn’t keep it up for more than about 3 days. :-0
How do you manage with your e-texts, Steve?
Rank, I stick with the classics, or news or history subjects, where I can find the text on the Internet at Gutenberg or wherever.
10664 thousand Dutch known words - 9260 Lings in 3 months. Yup, I’m definitely with you on that one Steve.
I think that the lack of dealing with uncertainty is true. Though, I think that as someone who has learned 12 languages, you have developed a great ability to deal with uncertainty. You may have already had this to some degree when you were a beginner at language, but I think that you have developed this over time to a greater degree. The beginner learner has not yet, as I see it. I’ve seen that my own ability to deal with it is increasing as I learn more. I think it’s both a skill and an attitude.
You’re right, LingQ makes it easier to deal with difficult materials, but that can still be extremely difficult. The difficulty being too high, people just won’t do it. A bit of human nature there I guess. I’ve loaded up the first Harry Potter book in French and have looked at it and it’s just way over my head. For now. For a few months, I’ll be working through Assimil and beginner readers (found some interesting ones) then I’ll go through the second Assimil and another batch of readers. After that, I’ll try to get into the Harry Potter series, other books and news articles. It took me over a year and a half to do the same for Dutch. So, that’s an improvement.
I agree that learning single lessons, one after another, is ineffective. For my Yiddish and French, which are both at an early level, I am using beginner materials but I’m not working through one lesson at a time sequentially. Instead, I’ll go through many lessons at a time, criss-crossing over the material in several passes. For example: I’ll listen to 10 lessons, then listen and read another 10, always keeping my bookmark and reading through the whole set of lessons, etc. I want to try and get the most out of this material while I can still stand it. Your 30 repetitions goal which you’ve stated a few times is working for me.
That’s something which is always in contradiction: trying to get the most out of something, so as to make a solid foundation and trying to pin absolutely everything down on simple material and never progressing past it. I think that I’ve found the right balance, for someone at my stage in language learning.
Imyirtseshem, which graded readers are you using?
Here are my thoughts, after 3 1/2 years of hard LingQing for Russian I have created nearly 60 000 LingQs, and learned about 17 000 of them.
I now have a vocabulary equal to reading books written for 8 year-olds (eg Paddington bear). I haven’t done the maths yet, but would guess these books are written assuming a vocabulary of some 7 or 8 000 word families. It’s hard to find materials simpler than this, for the simple reason that children younger than 8 years old struggle to read a story and generally have them read to them by Mummy or Daddy (who can explain all the hard words).
Such graded readers that I have been able to find (English language only) typically cover only about 3 or 4 000 word families. I’m not convinced that it is possible to get a 7 to 8 000 word family vocabulary (equal to a native 8 year old) purely from graded readers.
I want to get my Japanese up from beginner 1 to intermediate 1. I would like to do it by reading simple children’s stories, which may well be available for free on the internet. The trick is to find material of the right level while you are still rubbish at reading the language 
In summary, I think there is nothing wrong with Steve’s approach in principle, but I would prefer to stick to simpler texts for the first few years.
Rank, why are your PDFs causing you such grief? What’s wrong with them?
The Alex Leroc series and various CIDEB readers at the moment. I’m hoping to get some more soon if I can.
It’s really a difficult thing to actually get these sorts of materials to read, for most languages. Only a few of the most common ones have anything available.
Yes, Hape explains my problem with pdf’s perfectly.
(How I wish they had the text of “Il Ciascuno il Suo” right here at LingQ…)