I feel like I’m just scratching the surface with LingQ. What are some of the services it offers that my fellow Spanish users feel have been the most beneficial? I listen to 2-3 lessons each day, but I’m just curious if I should be doing more? I’m a bit overwhelmed with the user interface, so hoping someone can point me to the best tools here for the time spent on it.
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I think someone could give you a checklist of all the tools relevant to them on LINGQ. But it’s almost worth exploring the options yourself.
LINGQ is a tool that helps you manipulate and study foreign content, it tries to set a pathway by setting coin counters, daily goals etc but these are not super relevant for learning a language.
I think it largely depends on your end goal. Do you want to think and communicate like a native? The answer seems to be consuming an enormous amount of input and talking to natives. You better strap in for 3 lessons a day for 5+ years or drastically bump the input.
I’ve seen posts here that explain to set a base at 60k known words, 3000 hours of listening, enormous stuff. Good luck
Just my 2 cents.
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Thank you… sort of what I was looking for. I’m able to do MUCH more studying per day, but I feel like LingQ is hiding some of its best secrets somewhere. I can do the listening lessons many times per day, but I wasn’t sure if there were key features that many felt were the real strength of LingQ. Thanks, R.
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I think for me, the real strength of LingQ is to be able to read a LOT of content so that I’m constantly getting exposed to more vocabulary without having to constantly look up words in an external dictionary, as well as the ability to listen and read a text simultaneously.
For Spanish in particular, there is a tendency for native speakers to run their words together and this is the first time I feel like I’ve really been able to see and recognize each word separately which is really increasing my comprehension.
I am currently trying to spend at least 30 minutes/day listening and I get 50-100 new words/day through reading. I’m thinking of adding Italki sessions when I hit the 6 month point, but wanted a stronger vocabulary base first. If I had more time, I’d add additional listening as that’s definitely my weak spot.
Hope this is helpful!
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About doing more studying per day, recently I have bougth a book in Ukrainian. It was a love story in a style very easy to read. I was so happy being abble to understand that much that I spend 2-3 hours per day reading. It’s mostly about finding something you are eager to read. I remember in spanish it was Isabel Allende ‘Eva Luna’ and ‘retrato en sepia’.
About tools, read the forum. There are many experienced people. They will tell how they use LingQ.
Steve Kaufman video are great to understand the method around LingQ.
Import tool is really great to choose the content you want.
Flashcard system looks great at the beginning to review a text. Personnaly I don’t use it anymore as it takes time that could be better inverted in studying a new text.
Phrase mode is very usefull to focus one phrase. I listen one sentence. I try to guess what it means. Then I look for words meaning. I reread the sentence trying not to use to translation any more. Eventually there are the games in “analysis mode” to play with the sentence and memorize the words.
My best advice put in place a routine you like during which you take pleasure. That way you won’t get bored and with time it will pay off.
Also, Lingq usage changes with time, level and specific langague you are studying.
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Yes. if you are using a tool like LingQ your progress will be very fast when it comes to developing vocabulary range. The more vocabulary words you know, the faster the language will be comprehensible for you. For example, try reading a physical book without lingQ. You look up the meaning of an unknown word by the time you are on page 4 or 5, you come across the same word again; you already forget the meaning. However, with LingQ you can look it up quickly by simply clicking on the word. You can also study individual sentences in a sentence mode if they are ambiguous (try this with a normal physical book it is not possible i.e intensive reading). Also, your already looked up words can be traced back in different text that shows whether you still remember them or not. It is like natural SRS built into reading. That is the purpose of creating LingQs.
In short, reading is more efficient via LingQ. You save a lot of precious time. Also, if corressponding audio is available you can make your listening more comprehensible to listen to by studying the text beforehand. Otherwise the same audio will be gibberish/noise to listen to.
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Yes, very helpful. I’m hearing a lot that reading and reading and reading is the key…
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Excellent advice… thank you.
Thank you for this bit of advice.
I’m trying to read 3000 words a day.
I’m mainly learning Greek.
I use sentence mode and a mouse or macro keyboard. Rooster has a keyword mapping tool that may help. Get it so showing the next sentence + audio+translation is easy or one button click. God knows why this isn’t automatic.
Greek has gone from impossible to being difficult. I’ve read 1.6 million words and need more before I’m really good. But I’ve learnt (really = recognise) 10000 words and it’s helping in a difficult language.
I basically do nothing but read.
I’m curious what you mean by a lesson. A Mini-Story?
As others have pointed out, LingQ is more of a tool than a program. Much depends on your language goals and learning style.
I suggest focusing on Sentence View with content within your range and which you find interesting. Importing your own content may sound complicated, but it’s pretty easy for straight text.
Personally I use LingQ with text I’ve imported or with lessons LingQ provides which look right for me. I work through each sentence, getting the vocabulary, puzzling over the grammar as necessary and listening/shadowing to the Text-to-Speech voice for pronunciation.
I don’t bother with most of LingQ’s other functionality, such as importing audio or video or printing flashcards or all the testing games.
You are in control with LingQ. Find out what works for you. I suggest you start with the basics in Sentence View.
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In my opinion the most useful aspect of LingQ is the Library and its collection of content, graded by levels. This is particuarly important as a beginner, where LingQ and volunteers have made the Mini Stories, and other users have shared other beginner content, which is hard to find, especially for certain languages.
The second most useful thing is that by marking Known Words and lingQs, you can easily see how difficult new content (by the number of New Words and its %).
Apart from that, other useful aspects are useful at certain levels:
Beginner - Sentence Mode is useful to see sentence translations, so you can better understand the grammar. The playlist on your phone is also useful to relisten to content you have actively studied, when you are out and about.
Lower intermediate - LingQ Extension to import YouTube videos you have found by yourself. Alternatively, consider using the free Chrome extension Language Reactor, or (haven’t tried it myself yet) @roosterburton’s extension to watch YouTube videos, connecting to your LingQ data.
Upper intermediate - Whisper to transcribe podcasts (if you don’t have it on your own computer already)
LingQ is not designed for advanced users, so once you get to an advanced level, you’ll probably move on.
Honestly, though, for Spanish, you probably don’t even need LingQ. You could just watch Dreaming Spanish videos on YouTube to get to a lower intermediate level, then move onto watching other YouTube videos with Language Reactor.
Do as much as you want. Ideally at least 30 minutes or an hour per day.
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THANK YOU! This is very helpful… appreciate you taking the time to share this list.
I think everyone’s stated everything I would’ve said. So I’ll just highlight the key features to me:
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sentence mode. - I almost always use this exclusively. It’s incredibly useful to get the translated sentence as the meaning of the individual words can be quite different depending on the context. I will always translate the sentence first before clicking on the individual words.
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Importing - It’s important to be able to import content that you are interested in. There is a lot of content, and as was pointed out, especially for beginners, there is quite a lot of useful beginner content. At some point, however, when you’ve gotten past the beginner stuff you may want to search for content that you find interesting to you…books, podcasts, youtube videos, news. You may find much of that here already, but if not, you can import it.
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Statistics - It’s nice to see progress. Without the statistics you can be a little in the dark. There are times you will feel you’re not improving, but the statistics will indicate otherwise. Each new word, each word read, each minute listened is progress. Even if it feels like you are standing still (or sometimes feel like you’re reversing!)…the statistics will help keep the motivation (at least for me).
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Dictionaries - quick lookup with a variety of useful online dictionaries
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Whisper - transcribe the audio into a lesson on import. (ymmv depending on language, but Spanish is good). See below
re: Dreaming Spanish. - nfera’s suggestion. I love this youtube channel. It’s great. The one thing I wish they had though was the transcript. You can of course get the auto generated one from youtube, but you’ll be missing punctuation. With LingQ, you can grab the audio (use an online youtube to mp3 converter), and import that and LingQ will use the Whisper functionality to create the lesson/transcript for you in Lingq. Then you can also approach things from the reading side. For me, I really need to SEE the words. As great a job as they do at the DS channel, there’s just something about seeing the words that is helpful to me. So doing both the reading, and the watching of their videos is great.
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Thanks, Eric! Great points all around. I’m going to have to take a look at Whisper.
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