I have seen this question pop up a few times: Can you learn a language on LingQ from scratch? or Has anyone learned a language on LingQ from scratch?
If you have some knowledge of a language before starting LingQ or you know a similar language well, you can’t really say you would be learning it from scratch. Until not too long ago that was the case with all the languages I had been learning on LingQ, but last year I started learning a bit of Polish here and that counts as being from scratch, since I knew no Polish or any other Slavic language. Already being a polyglot is still an advantage but it’s from scratch nonetheless.
It seems to me a lot of people who try using LingQ from scratch give up because of lack of visual aids and game elements to dumb the learning down and a lack of independence. People aren’t really told what to do on LingQ in which order, which lessons to begin with, whether or how often to repeat them and so on and thus just give up. I of course have experience with LingQ, years of learning independently etc. so I’m not going to have that problem.
My learning has been and is slow, despite being a polyglot. I have lots of other things to do, including improving and maintaining other languages I previously learned on LingQ. It was certainly a lot harder to start with a language where I hardly understood any words on first sight.
What has been a big difference is mainly how much I repeat lessons and that was more true at the beginning than it is now. When I learned languages similar to ones I knew before, I didn’t like the repetition in the mini-stories, where it’s 1. story 2. story again from a different perspective 3. questions about what happened in the story. I found it very helpful when learning Polish though. At the start I would also re-read the mini-stories several times.
When learning a language from scratch it is very slow and tedious at the start. Because you hardly know anything, you won’t understand the context so well, so context won’t help you understand new words. It gets a lot easier once you have put in more work and more of the common words become known and you start getting the gist of some of the sentences you see without looking up the translations. I anticipate the speed of learning only going up and up until I start having a really good understanding of the language, at which point I expect it to slow down. I don’t expect to have much capability in the language any time soon. I am really going to handle this like a slow marathon, little by little as I learn the other languages, I’ll learn some Polish and maybe have some real capabilities in it years down the road.
I would say the key is just grit, patience and repetition. Balance repetition with not getting too bored with the same content. Use more difficult content sometimes but switch levels, use some easy content and some more difficult content, depending on your level of energy and interest. Going back to easier content might also make you see how you have progressed and thus motivate you.
At this point, with just under 5000 known word forms, I am having a small breakthrough where reading really simple content has become a lot easier and enjoyable, but if I look at some more complex material, I am totally lost. I realize there will have to be a lot of small breakthroughs before I have any real mastery of the language.
It is very important to not just read and remember to listen too, but I think it’s ok to have periods where you just read or just listen and thus work on one skill. It is also not bad to click on words as you read to hear how they are pronounced, even if you don’t listen to the whole audio.
I did it with Persian, actually