Hey LingQers!
I’m looking for anyone who has found the Mini Stories useful/effective and would be willing to share their story for a blog post.
What language/languages did you study?
What was your routine?
Why do you think the stories are so effective?
Anything else you want to share is welcome. You can add your feedback right here or email me at elle@lingq.com
Thanks so much 
I found the mini stories for Arabic too hard even walking into them with prior A1 cefr. Even at 2000 words known, the lessons are showing 50-65% new words. By comparison, I imported graded readers and they are showing 30-40% new words only.
I believe you do need to relabel the ministories as beginner 2, and create a new batch for beginner 1
I also asked the AI about certain wording and it did suggest to rewrite sentences so you might want to have a native speaker or teacher have a look at all the Arabic varieties for accuracy in terms of appropriate vocab, and in terms of appropriate sentence structures
I don’t care for the mini stories. They aren’t interesting, and because they are just translated directly from one language to another they don’t take into account how languages can vary in grammatical complexity. I’d recommend getting rid of the requirement for mini stories in adding new languages. Since people can create their own tailored beginner content with AI now, they seem outdated and unnecessary to me.
I second what @sma_grodorna wrote. Besides grammatical aspects the direct translations completely ignores any cultural aspect, an important aspect of language, and the fact that nowadays everyone seems to pay with dollars just let them appear awkward. There are tons of beginner materials available online for many languages, so I consider them relatively pointless. And as the tutorial is already in the target language, they probably contribute to new users feeling overwhelmed.
Instead of requiring the mini stories to be translated for new languages, it would probably be better to provide a rough overview over the essential aspects of the language and may a list with some good starter materials.
I think the ministories are excelent.
They are cost-effective because they are already done in multiple languages.
They cover a lot of grammar points. You do not realize this until you see how they cover the dual in Arabic, the causative in Japanese, aspect in Russian, subjunctive in French etc…
Sure, if you do an easy language or a language with many resources, you’d better look for more interesting content. But they work pretty well if you want to crack a difficult language with little available material. Good luck finding interesting compelling beginner content in Armenian for instance.
Also if you study multiple languages at once, they work well because you already know what they are saying in language A and you can avail yourself of that knowledge when studying language B. I do this by downloading the ministories in my phone in languages A and B. Then I create a playlist like this: Ministory 1 in Language A, Ministory 1 in Language B; Ministory 2 in Language A, Ministory 2 in Language B… This way, I have each ministory in my short-term memory in language A (which is usually the stronger language out of the two, the one I am “reviewing”) when I next listen to the same Ministory in language B (which is usually weaker or newer than the other language). It is almost like having a bilingual audio reader.
I also prefer more interesting content with cultural significance, like the “History of Iran” that is loaded in the Farsi Lingq, but the Ministories have their own role and advantages.
I burn through them quickly when learning a language that is similar to another language I already know. I did successfully use the for Polish, a language I had zero experience with to be able to get to the next level and read more complicated material. I had to read the lessons several times, especially at the beginning. It was all about loads of repetition, but it got me to the level where I could understand some of the simple podcasts for Polish learners and understand a bit of the news.
In my experience with the mini’stories learning German, they get really repetative and really boring really quickly. I stopped after the first 20 or so. In the beginning, they were too difficult and I honestly wasnt learning anything. When I got to the level where they were readable, I no longer neaded them.
They are great for languages of the same language family. I have been learning German for two years, and if I wanted to start Norwegian the mini stories would be great. But, I started with Chinese and they are just way too difficult to be of any use to me right now. They wont be useful for my Chinese studies for probably until around next year.
I am also not very fond of the Mini Stories - they are too repetitive to my taste. In the very beginning, the question-answer format seemed useful, but it soon started to feel frustrating to listen to the same phrases over and over again. However, that might also be because the language I’m currently focusing on (Icelandic) is syntactically similar enough to other languages that I know that I don’t really need that much repetition. If I was learning a language from another language family, I might find the Mini Stories more useful.
It’s not so much about the amount of grammar points covered, but more the structure (or the lack thereof). The grammar points get thrown at you in an order dictated by the english original, and in grammar intense languages even the first lessons can throw so much grammar at you, that, especially due to the lack of explanations, you can get overwhelmed pretty quickly. So for those languages a good workbook as a starter is probably more useful and will give the learner so many examples, that the mini stories become pointless imho.
Please note that I didn’t ask for them to be removed, I just find it unneccessary to have them as a prerequisite for new languages. And I know that there are languages that haven’t got that many resources available. Hence I wrote that beginner material is available for many languages.
Btw.: There are beginner podcasts available on YouTube and books on Amazon for beginners who want to learn Armenian. Not as much as for more spread languages, of course. And I can’t judge on whether they are interesting. But it is beginner content, so probably not.
The mini stories aren’t compelling, either. Especially due to the lack of cultural reference. That is what usually bothered me the most about almost all Short Stories for Beginners books you can find out there. Most often those are just texts translated from English into as many languages as possible. But they tell you nothing about the country or the people. So trying to find material that is available both in the target language and in one you can understand and utilizing ai is probably a more worthwhile approach. Especially if you use material that isn’t that complicated, for example because it was written for teenagers or features images, like comics or mangas.
I do not think the Ministories should be necessary to open up a language either.
Armenian learner here. 
Honestly, I hated mini stories first - they seemed too boring and too difficult for a beginner at the same time. But when I got serious with Armenian, I fell in love with them.
They even seemed designed specially for Armenian - there were so many little discoveries planted for you along the way. Like, the word in the new story gets linked with the related word from the previous story, etc, a thousand things like that. They felt designed with so much care and skill!
If you concentrate on the story, it’s boring, of course. But if you concentrate on the beauty of the language shown to you, it feels like poetry, every sentence with its meaning (language features for you to appreciate), every sentence connected with the rest. Everything matters, and all together is so heavily packed with information.
The only(*) other texts+audio in Armenian I found comes with a studybook. And it felt so less professional in comparison! Like, yes, the author made an effort to include in every text examples illustrating grammar points just covered, but that’s that! In mini stories, it’s done on a multidimensional level.
(*) Armenian podcasts for beginners that you mention are so.. almost non-existent! I’ve been monitoring for more than 3 years now, and I’ve literally found no more than one hour worth of text+audio! (And when I say “one hour”, it only means I don’t want to bother estimating more precisely.) And it is usually so heavily mixed with English anyway, that I could only use it after editing a video (taking, say, a 10-minute video, cutting out everything English, etc, thus getting a 2-minute video which I can listen to several times).
I just never said thank you to whoever designed them. Thank you.
Fair point! Thanks for the feedback. I will pass this information about the Arabic stories on to the content team.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks so much for this feedback!
I appreciate this feedback, cheers!
Thank you for your response 
Wonderful! So happy to hear you have found them useful 
I thought the Russian mini-stories were pure gold. Telling a short story using very common verbs and set phrases along the way. Then retelling the same story with the verbs conjugated from a different person and different tense. Then the question and answer sessions showing alternative verbs and set phrases, function words to discuss the given story. Someone put a lot of thought into these and they are excellent learning tools, getting progressively more difficult through the series. I’ve gone back and reread them twice already and will certainly be rereading several more times. Well done!
I’d say that the usefulness of the mini stories largely depends on the language. I wouldn’t doubt that whoever created the original ones put some thought into them. But to me it always appeared as if they then just get translated into the other languages, with only minor modifications made. This isn’t a big deal if the language translated to is similar to the original language, which I suppose is English. But if the differences get bigger, all thoughts that might have originally put into it don’t play out anymore.
The first language I have used LingQ for was Spanish. The mini stories were okay for that language. The difficulty was gradually increasing and the idea of telling the same story from different perspectives was useful, too, as Spanish features verb conjugation. It is also useful to have Q&A if the word order in statements and questions differ, which is the case in my mothertongue German, too, for example. German, Spanish, Russian etc. are all european languages, though, and as such feature a lot of similarities.
The second language I have started learning and am still learning is Korean. Korean doesn’t feature verb conjugation in the sense that you have to modify the verb depending on the person who is performing the action (1., 2., 3. person singular/plural) and the amount of tenses is relatively low. But the verbs get modified based on the status of the person who is performing the action described by the verb as well as the status of the person you are talking to and the situation you are in. Some verbs get replaced with others if the person performing the action has a high status. In addition, auxiliary verbs are commonly used. On the other hand, if there are no differences in status, it doesn’t play a big role from which perspective a story is told. So the repetition in the mini stories isn’t helpful. In addition, there is no difference in word order between statements and questions. So the Q&A part isn’t that helpful, either.
Another aspect that doesn’t even exist in German, English and Spanish (and probably many other european languages) are bound nouns. These are nouns that cannot be used on their own but have to be precisized using participal forms (think of subclauses used like adjectives). The latter are especially important as Korean doesn’t feature relative clauses. However, while bound nouns can be found excessively in all kind of literature, their are quiet underrepresented in the mini stories. There are also many grammar points that describe similar relationships between clauses, but differ in nuances. As those nuancial differentiation isn’t made in the european languages I know and probably many others, they aren’t represented in the mini stories.
In summary this causes many important aspects of the language not beeing touched at all, although fundamental, while redundancies occour beyond usefulness due to the translation. In addition, the difficulty of the stories isn’t neccessarely in the order the stories are presented.
So, I am not saying that the mini stories are complete nonsense and can’t be of use, but they become gradually less useful the more the language you wanna learn differs from English. It is a general issue I think LingQ has, that it is highly English-centered, causing a lot of unpleasencies for those of use who try to learn a language that hasn’t got that much in common with English.
So if the mini stories are mandatory for adding new languages, it would be good if the same thought that have had been put in the original ones would also be put in the new ones, to ensure that the aspects of the language that are essential are really featured.
I find Lingq mini stories quite useful. However, I wish this series would continue for higher levels too. For example, there could be separate series for Intermediate 1 and 2.