I agree. Unless there was already a high degree of mutual intelligibility between speakers or readers of the learner’s language and the target language, I would not recommend LingQ to somebody who does not have at least one college semester unit in the target language (or the equivalent from some other method).
When you are learning a new language, there are a huge amount of things to learn at once, and if you are immediately confronted with a wall of unintelligible text, you’re going to feel overwhelmed and discouraged. Even if you extremely motivated, and have an extremely strong drive to persevere, I don’t think that there is reason to subject yourself to that if you can avoid it. Use some other system, which presents the basics (or at least many of them) in a more digestible formt. That way, you’re far less likely to feel completely overwhelmed and discouraged at the outset since you’re being confronted with whole paragraphs of text, but don’t understand any of the words, don’t know how to pronounce the vowels, consonants, and dipthongs, don’t know where the syllable breaks are, don’t understand the sentence structure, and have no idea what is going on or who is doing what.
I suspect that, if sufficiently motivated, a small minority of learners can put together a self-directed course of study which will enable them to break things down into digestable chunks. However, my impression is that a very large percentage of learners don’t know how to do this, and even a large percentage of those who have some capacity to do this, would rather be given explanations and shown how to do things, then have to work out everything for themselves.
Most of these things you need to really get started with LingQ are things that you can get from an introductory college course in your target language if such a thing is available. To begin with, you will need some vocabulary, but you also need some understanding of sentence structure so that you make statements and ask questions, and begin to be able to comprehend statements and questions which are presented to you in written or spoken form. You also need to understand how the vowels and consonants are pronounced, and where the syllable breaks are. This will help you figure out what words you are hearing and how the words are spelled (which is also useful when it comes to writing the words and pronouncing them, especially if the target language is generally phonetic). If the target language has a verb conjugation system, you’ll want to have to have a fairly solid grasp of the present tense forms of at least one or two hundred verbs. You’ll also want to have some familiarity with other tenses, such as past tense, future tense, and imperatives, although by the nature of things you’re likely to be much weaker in these areas because (at least in my experience) these tend not to be covered as thoroughly as present tense, and you can still work with LingQ even if you are still weak in most of the other verb tenses.
For some of these other tenses and some other structural components, I’m thinking that I might eventually have to bite the bullet, refer some textbooks, and then start creating a few basic lessons myself, so that I can then start working on figuring out the logic behind how the structural elements are actually used. This is not something I particularly want to do, because I have other projects, and this will require both time and focus, and I’m not enthusiastic about being an unpaid language foreign language instructor in a language which I am myself still learning (and still functionally illiterate in).
I’ve had Spanish in high school and in college, but did not progress beyond taking one college semester. Later on, I also found that I didn’t feel like I knew how to develop a course of study for myself, and was not minded to try to learn enough to try to teach myself Spanish. I figured that if what I wanted to do was learn how to become fluent in Spanish, it was more than enough for me to simply be the student, without also trying to be the Spanish teacher as well. After I started reviewing my Spanish in Duolingo’s Spanish course for English learners, I was gradually able to reacquaint myself with a high percentage of the vocabulary and structural elements that I had learned while taking Spanish as an undergraduate.
In May of 2017, I was a participant in a free webchat given by Belgian educational psychologist Peter Vermeulen. He’s a world-class expert on autism, and his native language is Dutch. For an hour, he fielded written posts, which were sent to him (although I can’t say whether he saw all of them, or whether the moderator only showed him some of them). I submitted three questions, of which he answered two. One of the questions I had was, whether the bulk of his earlier published work, which was available only in Dutch, would ever get translated into English. When he said that this was not going to happen because translation was expensive, I decided that I would learn Dutch, and in the next month I ordered my first Dutch-language text.
I did some studying, of and on, after that, only becoming more consistent with my language practice after I started using Duolingo. I found Duolingo to be spotty in teaching some of the fundamentals of Dutch, so I relied on other sources (including Dutch-language textbooks, grammar books, and Dutch-language learning websites), to supplement what I got from Duolingo. In any event, my grasp of Dutch gradually came to surpass my grasp of Spanish. Because of this, I think that it is safe to say that I think that I’ve managed to get at least a rough approximation of one college semester course in Dutch by means of using Duolingo and some supplementary sources.
After I’d used Duolingo for a bit over four years, I discovered LingQ, and started using it. After using LingQ only a couple of weeks, I decided that it was worth getting the Lifetime subscription to the LingQ Dutch course. Once I subscribed, it became my primary means of practicing Dutch, although I’m still unhappy that it doesn’t explicitly explain things and give examples. In a lot of ways, LingQ has a lot of the same problems that the grammar books I’ve seen have. They tend to be extremely laconic. They tend not to break things down into bite-size chunks and tend not to give multiple examples, which are often what a learner needs to get a feel for how the rules actually work.
When I did start using LingQ, I found that I could not initially understand even the shortest and simplest lessons, because so much of the vocabulary was unfamiliar. Since I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with vocabulary I did not understand, I started off with the simplest lessons that LingQ’s Dutch course offered. As I recall, the mini-stories initially struck me as being far too long and far too challenging, so I dealt with the simplest lessons first and gradually moved on to longer lessons, including shorter songs (including children’s nursery rhymes) and stories for children. For the first several months I worked with LingQ I mostly refrained from challenging the mini-stories while I expanded my Dutch vocabulary and consolidated my grasp of words which I had heard and seen before, but still had a fairly loose grasp on. (And it turned out that many words and additional meanings that I had not previously known about). Once I did get started on the mini-stories, it took me months to get through them. At that time, those mini-stories still had far too much unknown vocabulary for me to work through quickly in such a manner that I understood the stories as well as I wanted to. For larger lessons, I might just start working with the first page or two. For smaller ones, I usually do the whole thing in one gulp, especially if there are fewer than 20 or 30 new Dutch words in the lesson. When I go through a lesson, I also LingQ phrases that I think I should work on.
After working with LingQ for about 10 months, the pace of my vocabulary “acquisition” began to drop, eventually dropping from about 1000 words per month to around 100 words per month (and sometimes a bit less than that). A large part of this is due to the fact that some expressions do not translate word for word between English and Dutch, so that I’ve found it more productive to simply LingQ phrases, and sometimes even, whole sentences. Another reason I do this, is because Dutch sentence structure is sometimes considerably different from English sentence structure, so I sometimes need to LingQ larger chunks (phrases or sentences), just to get a feel for what is going on in a given sentence. Initially, I mostly LingQ’d single words. Now, I devote considerably more time and effort to working on phrases and sentences than I do on working directly with individual words. This gives me more opportunities to consolidate my grasp of vocabulary words that I haven’t fully mastered yet, but also gives me a better sense for how the words fit together in larger chunks (phrases and sentences).
Right now the LingQ Dutch course says that my Dutch vocabulary stands at over 13,700 Dutch words. And in a few days it will be over 13,800 Dutch words. I take that with a large dose of salt, but at the very least it gives ma rough ballpark figure regarding how much Dutch vocubulary LingQ thinks that I am at least minimally familiar with.
I did it with Persian, actually