Great question. I use LingQ chiefly for aided reading and keeping track of my known vocabulary in that context. I also use it some for aided listening.
Additionally, I think the community of self-motivated language learners here is really strong and this is great place for the sharing of ideas.
I use it for reading and listening to books and audiobooks, and for the review system. I like LingQ because it has nearly everything I need all in one place, and it doesn’t demand that I spend hours setting it up. I don’t have to download any programs (as I did with Anki) - it’s all online, and all in one place.
I’ve tried Anki, Language Reactor, and Duolingo, but they just didn’t work for me.
Anki is too fiddly, and I have to do too much work to get it set up. making flashcards is a chore, and all the flashcards that you can download are formatted differently, so I would spend ages reformatting them.
Language Reactor, I feel, is just not user-friendly enough, so, like Anki, it’s too difficult to set up properly. The subtitle settings are somewhat bugged, and the subtitles often don’t match what’s actually being said. Here on LingQ, we can easily fix that. On LR, we can’t.
As for Duolingo, it’s too focused on grammar, so it’s not a good source for fast learning. I could spend a year on Duolingo and at the end of it, I would know a lot of grammar, but my vocabulary would be very small, and I’d be no closer to speaking than I was when I started
I only use Calibre to convert files so they work in LingQ.
It’s an assisted reader. It allows me to read any content I want to (except for physical books…but it can do that if you have patience and time). It’s very easy to import a lot of different content, whether it’s from youtube or the web or importing e-books.
It allows me to choose from a wide variety of online dictionaries to get meanings (you aren’t stuck with a single dictionary that might give you the wrong interpretation).
Now, with whisper it can add a transcript to imported audio files. For German and Spanish this works quite well. (May not for other languages so ymmv).
Another cool new feature is the “simplify” action. I was doing something like this using chatgpt, but it’s nice to have this feature built in.
It has great stat keeping. To me, this is one of the most important features. When you feel like you’re making very little headway in the intermediate levels, your stats will show you otherwise. If you have a strong perseverance you might be able to keep forging ahead using other assisted readers, or google translate extension, but I think most people don’t have that willpower. I do somewhat often read outside of LingQ using that, if I just want to quickly peruse something, but usually I do import it.
Anki - SRS…I don’t use SRS in LingQ or other apps. Initially I did do some in Memrise for German awhile back, but my progress in LingQ has been FAR quicker.
calibre + translator - I have done this to see how it worked (albeit a few years ago). It was ok. Yes, easier on the eyes for reading I’ll agree, but as an assisted reader, LingQ is better (for me) - multiple dictionaries, stat keeping, PORTABILITY is a key one here too with the apps for phone and tablet. Can’t do that with calibre. I do most of my reading not at a computer.
language reactor - great tool. I use it for a lot of my movie/tv show watching on Netflix. On youtube I find it too clunky, but have it tried it there in awhile.
readlang plugin - haven’t tried this. i think I’ve heard some good things. If it can help record the stats in readlang itself then it sounds great. If not, why not just use google translate extension? I do hope in the future LingQ could do an extension like this that would record the words in the application (and the stats).
duolingo - I’ve used in the past and generally think it’s ok for beginner stages. It will not help you very far though. I also think you’ll progress much faster doing reading and listening.
So, the key things to me that I don’t think the other things beat is - flexibility in content choices (i get to choose from nearly anything), stats, great choices for looking up meanings, portability.
“So what do you use LingQ for”
That is good question. I have made far more rapid progress in my French comprehension using LingQ than ever before. However, that is primarily due to reading the transcript while listening to audio, which is training my brain to recognise the patterns. However, there are other tools that also allow me to do that. I am finding too many bugs in LingQ when watching a YouTube video. Plus I discovered that I cannot import a Netflix film, just the transcript, and then the audio is a robot voice which totally negates the reason for watching a Netflix film, which is to accustomise myself to ordinary french i.e. not that spoken by radio presenters and university experts which I already understand. Unfortunately the content in LingQ is not compelling, for me anyway. In German I’m struggling to find interesting A2 material, once I’ve gone through the courses.