“From Wikipedia…”
Oh yes, WIKIPEDIA…
Ho! Ho! Ho! (Is any further comment necessary!?)
But yes, of course you can call Benny a “nemesis” if you want to, Steve!! Heck, you can even call him the municipal rat-catcher if you want!
But if words mean anything, Benny is not your nemesis.
(Friedemann could become your nemesis - but only if his evil plan to sell an improved cloned version of LingQ to the Chinese Army actually comes to fruition!)
lol…
In common usage in North America, nemesis just means a persistent rival, see 2 below. (word reference dictionary). It may have the first meaning below in the UK, and I certainly hope that this meaning does not apply, but I had better be more careful!!!
In any event I used the term lightly.
nemesis /ˈnɛmɪsɪs/
noun (pl. nemeses /-siːz/)
1 the inescapable agent of someone's downfall, especially when deserved.
2 chiefly N. Amer. a long-standing or persistent rival or enemy
Oh yes, I know all about Friedemann’s cunning plans!
(His thought waves are monitored by green aliens, who re-broadcast them directly to the fillings in my teeth!)
Okay, if the word is frequently used this way in Canada, then I guess it must be “in Ordnung”. (Especially seeing that this is a Canadian forum!)
(Gotta go now - die Aliens funken wieder…!)
I find Steve’s definitions of fluency very practical and realistic. In my case against these definitions my first goal is the “somewhat fluent” stage in Russian. I’m nowhere near this yet because although I have basic conversation I quickly get stuck through lack of vocabulary. With LingQ I’m slowly assimilating more words but its a gradual process. With work and family commitments I doubt I can average more than an hour a day study although as I’m in Russia I do get constant exposure to the language.
On this basis , I reckon my first target should be "somewhat fluent " by the end of this year. Then , my next target will be "quite fluent " which I take as being able to have a conversation , make some mistakes, but get across what I want to say and understand pretty much all the native speakers say. This goal will be to do this in a work context where I could for example do a meeting all in Russian without the interpreter. This requires also in my case learning the technical jargon and specialised terms that are needed. Realistically this might take another year or so after getting “somewhat fluent”. I think that’s an achievable end goal for me because “fluency” with making only an occasional mistake might take a very long time. I’m hoping there’s an “acceleration factor” so that once you start speaking a lot you find things do get easier. One constraint I find is that as nearly all the Russian colleagues I work with closely can speak good English, its quite hard to make the transition to speaking Russian in a work context. Especially when accuracy and time are very important. I’m sure this will be the key for me to making more rapid progress.
Benny’s approach seems relevant for only a very few individuals who have the time and aptitude to benefit from jumping into the deep end as it were. I find that its very difficult to pick up the language I don’t know just from conversation. My progress comes from reading and listening to material in LIngQ until I understand ( most of ) it. Once I really know the words, I can hear them in conversation. Its difficult to remember words you hear that you don’t know, precisely enough to be able to look them up later. I think what doesn’t help is having unrealistc expectations about your progress, it likely to make you disappointed and lose heart. I have realised that my previous expectations were too high - mainly because of the time it takes to absorb the vocabulary. I’ll go for the “somewhat fluent” first and if I can achieve that I’ll really feel I’m getting somewhere!
in some parts of the anglosphere, “quite” means very. Perhaps “moderately fluent”? I
You ask if I have had success at LingQ. I have had huge success at LingQ.
I had reached the point, working with a tutor, where I could understand basically everything she said, IF I knew the vocabulary. But my vocabulary was not very large. (Nicholas Brown says that one needs to know about 8,000 words to understand ordinary Russian speech. I knew about 3000, from my introductory classes.) And it was so frustrating, to understand so little. She would talk and talk, and I just sat there puzzled. And, yes, I could speak a bit, but I couldn’t understand her answers. So what’s the point of speaking?
Her method of teaching me vocabulary was to have me translate huge amounts of Russian text. She was quite set against using flash cards, or any kind of repetition. “Just translate,” she said. I was spending about 15 hours a week writing out English translations for Russian texts. (For about 2 years.) But I have a poor memory, and I realized, finally, that this was not working for me. Not for Russian, at any rate. (My friend learned German by a “just translate” method, but German vocabulary is more similar to English.)
Now, with LingQ, I have a perfect way of learning vocabulary. Just using flash cards a little bit is better than not at all, of course. But the LingQ approach, of learning a word within a context - with a sample sentence, and within the context of a story, or a text, which I listen to many times - this works amazingly well for me. I am adding about 350 words a month to my vocabulary. These are real words, in Anki, not “LingQ words” (which are often just a word I already knew, but having a different ending). I paid for a year’s subscription to LingQ last January, with the goal of reaching 8,000 vocabulary words (in Anki) by the end of the year. I am quite sure that I will reach my goal. And my listening is improving, as well.
And why do I not spend a lot of time on production? Because I believe that vocab is more important (for now). I want to focus on my main goal. I already have basic listening and speaking skills, but without words, you really don’t know a language. And with words, everything else falls into place.
I agree with you. I prefer to arm myself with words, and let my brain get used to the language first. Then when I have a chance to speak with a native speaker we can have a meaningful discussion. It is only really in the last two years that I have started regularly speaking with our tutors here at LingQ, which I immensely enjoy, they are a great group.
lastsafari wrote “But the LingQ approach, of learning a word within a context - with a sample sentence, and within the context of a story, or a text, which I listen to many times - this works amazingly well for me.”
Yes, this is what works for me as well. It depends on the learner (at least that’s what I think) whether certain methods work or not. Flashcards and translating texts don’t work for me.
I would also recommend listening to texts as well as reading. Hearing the spoken language works for me too, so it might for you.
I also completely agree that without words you don’t know a language, but practising saying what you do know can be good because it gives you the “muscle memory” of saying the words and makes it easier to fit new words you learn into the context and structure of the basic sentences that you are constructing. Especially in Russian where the structure of the language is so different from English.
skyblueteapot wrote: in some parts of the anglosphere, “quite” means very. Perhaps “moderately fluent”?
Yes, skyblue probably “moderately fluent” or “fairly fluent” would be better and avoid the ambiguity of “quite”. And “limited fluency” might be better than “somewhat fluent” as it get across more the idea that you could be “moderately fluent” in a subject you know well but generally you just don’t have enough vocabulary to cover all the situations that an average native speaker could converse on.
Probably, I might need at least 10000words to achieve a “moderate fluency” but I’ll only know when I think I’ve got to that level. I’m using a word frequency list to help me see how I’m progressing against the most common words. I import a limited batch of words from the frequency list into lingq and it tells me which ones it thinks I don’t know. So far I’ve only imported up to nos 1-500 most frequent words but interestingly about 10% of the words didn’t come up before although I’ve probably been through more than a hundred lessons. It just shows how much reading and listening you’ve got to do to come across say the top 5000 words let alone 10 000. I find in most of the lessons that the majority of new (blue) words only have 1* according to Lingq’s order of importance. So you just have to keep going but that’s ok because I enjoy it . For example , if I’ve done a lesson and I catch one of my new words spoken on the TV I think yes there is some progress ( as per Steve’s linguist’s manifesto which I still like to listen to!).
Interesting that Benny who has blocked me from commenting on his blog retains a strong interest in what we say here. Note latest tweet from him on the subject.
irishpolyglot 3:13pm via TweetDeck
I think it’s cute that LingQ forums devote so much time to talking about me! Funny how I can be so wrong yet be on their minds so much 
Remind’s me of my son’s girlfriend, who split up with him and then grumbled that he wasn’t paying her enough attention 
Reminds me of my 2-year old granddaughter jumping around shouting “Look at me, look at me”!
Yeah, but I bet your 2-year-old granddaughter doesn’t have a website where she claims to be a great language expert, and where she cons unsuspecting people out of $50 (or is it even $60…?) for some trashy, utterly worthless book…
Benny is a con artist.
Personally I really hate con artists.
Thanks, Benny, for promoting LingQ in his tweet…