New user: Super confused on how to get to the actual lessons???

Support & Feedback Forum
1

Just signed up for the 12 month premium for learning icelandic, but I am super confused, it wants me to click on a lesson. Which appears to be a short story or text where I can click on each word individually to have that word read out, and each word it tells me has like 60 different meanings. I can also have it play the full story.

But where are the excersizes? where are the lessons where it introduces words, maybe with pictures, and gets me to pronounce things? At the minute I am just clicking on words and they turn yellow after clicking on them.

I am not sure how I am supposed to learn from that, but couldn’t find anything on the publicly visible website about exactly how it works before signing up.

2

There is a review button in the bottom right corner if you want to review the page with SRS exercises. It’s ultimately a much slower way to learn than just reading and listening to massive amounts of content though.

You can have a squiz at some of the topics in the open forum or search PeterBormann’s posts to find a faster way to learn.

You create cards (turn words and phrases yellow) if you want to add them to your review list.

There is also the Lynx feature where you can have a written conversation with the robot about the lesson.

If it’s not what you expected you can always send an email to support to cancel as LingQ offers money back in such cases.

3

You’re not missing anything. This tool is really at it’s best when you import material at the level you’d like to read, and then just read it while marking difficult words yellow. Over time you will develop a library of material and a list of problem words to review on your own. There are no traditional interactive or progressive lessons but they have easy material pre-loaded for you to consume. Go grab yourself Magic Treehouse or something like that in your target language and load it in.

4

Fellow Icelandic learner here, hi!

Firstly - I’m not sure if you were aware, but Icelandic is one of the languages that you can learn for free at a premium subscription level. If you have already paid for a premium subscription but do not need it to learn any other languages, you can ask the developers for a refund by posting a request in the Support & Feedback forum.

Secondly, the main idea behind LingQ is that you learn through exposure to your target language, not so much through exercises. There is a review feature that you can use to reinforce learning, if you want, but the method is mainly based on consuming large amounts of content. As you read and listen to materials in Icelandic, you will soon start picking up vocabulary and sentence patterns. You can also find a short Grammar Guide in the menu (in the lower right corner of the mobile app, or upper right corner in the web app). If you want to practice grammar, I can recommend the LanguageMaster website by @roosterburton.

There are a lot of beginner-friendly materials in the Icelandic Library, thanks to the efforts of Rökkvi Vésteinsson (@rokkvi). If you are learning Icelandic from scratch, I would recommend the following courses:

ĂŤslenska meĂ° myndum 0.0 (for learning basic vocabulary) - this course, and the follow-up courses ĂŤslenska meĂ° myndum 1.0 and ĂŤslenska meĂ° myndum 2.0, have pictures to help you learn. Note that the pictures are only visible in Page View, not in Sentence View.

ĂŤslenska meĂ° ljĂłsmyndum 1 & ĂŤslenska meĂ° ljĂłsmyndum 2 - more basic Icelandic, this time with photographs.

Einföld íslenska - very simple texts in Icelandic. There are also several follow-up courses such as Einföld íslenska - Dýr (with short lessons about animals) and Einföld íslenska - Matur (with lessons about food).

Íslenska fyrir alla 1, 2, 3, and 4 - a traditional beginner’s course in Icelandic consisting of four textbooks and their audio materials.

5

I would like to add that LingQ is based on a completely different idea than apps like Duolingo, for example. I have used Duolingo before and I think it’s fine for learning some basic vocabulary and sentence patterns, but I never felt like I could get very far with it. It felt like an endless repetition of isolated sentences that wouldn’t be of much use if one wanted to read a book or have an actual conversation with someone.

I have been learning Icelandic on LingQ for a year now - and I’m sure I had learned more Icelandic in the first three months of using this app than I ever could have learned using Duolingo (assuming that Duolingo offered Icelandic, which it doesn’t). Over the last year, I have read over 1,1 million words of Icelandic, including eleven novels and dozens of lessons and newspaper articles. I don’t think I could have gotten this far in a million years using a Duolingo-type learning app.