One question that I have and have always had when listening to Steven on YouTube before I ever came to lingq is: why bother creating lingqs if you’re not going to review them? I guess they do allow you to know if you’re come across that particular unknown word or phrase before and if so, how you defined it at that time…And they have some value, as a form of measurement of how much you’ve “accomplished” that day…
When you say: “…there are going to be so many more words that you will learn quickly, that won’t need so much review…” That’s when I set the word to “known” - I don’t just blindly keep on reviewing it even if I know it! (for now) And if a word doesn’t “click” but I feel that it’s important, for example, it’s a word I’ve searched for multiple times before when trying to communicate, then I’ll set it back to “1” again and again until it does stick! The only meaning of the numbers for me is: when do I next want to review this word? in one day or three? (or more)
The idea of limiting myself to a certain number of minutes of SRS a day - perhaps the vocab due for review associated with a particular text - is a good one. As is the idea of switching things up by dispensing with it all together for a while to try that out (once I find some good long source to chew on for a while)…
I never review the lingQs.
I do update the stats from time to time.
I find it is motivating to see the increase and it get closer to the goal.
I like the “you have reached 1000 words” or whatever. The gamification part of it.
I like that about duolingo also but otherwise I think duolingo doesn’t really work for the amount of effort put in.
I also like getting the certificates at each level.
Even though the certs are not real it still feels like an accomplishment.
So it’s motivational… it’s tangible and it’s not open to self doubt.
Like “man, I have done 300 hours of watching videos, how come I don’t understand this perfectly” is a demotivational but seeing the word count and words read and hours of listening go up towards a goal is definitely motivating especially since I have done the language learning process before.
I dunno, that’s it for me.
The books can be bought for really cheap at LitRes. I think you can get an account without a Russian credit card as that’s what my wife does. There you can get a ton of ebooks and audiobooks and they are cheap (like 2 euros for a book and 5 euros for an audiobook).
The audio is generally not good. I looked for professional audiobooks I could buy but found nothing. Some books are on YouTube but the recordings are not professional. This channel has a few
I don’t think it is a problem to look everything up if you want to. The only problem I think is if you start getting stuck on trying to work out very rare terms that you likely will never see again.
“I will point out that guessing from context doesn’t work well as well as many of us think it does.”
I agree. I don’t think I can guess much from context. Usually when I move on from a sentence having not fully understood it from reading it I am taking the risk that the information I missed was not essential.
I don’t know if you are using the new beta browser for reading but it actually has a nice feature. If translations exist for a text you can have them put under each sentence when in normal text mode. I worked out a way to have translations generated for all sentences in a text so now I am reading with Google Translate translations under each sentence. If something is unclear, I might glance at this translation to see what I missed before moving on.
It depends on what you mean by review. I think in the absence of an explanation, I picture people saying they are using SRS to review. However, my main point is you don’t need to do SRS to review. Getting input through reading and listening IS the review. When you see that word again in context that gives you a chance to review. Another option that I’ve used in the past, particularly if I want to “review” vocabulary from a particular lesson, especially if it is a long one, is to go into the lesson and jump from yellow word to yellow word. Reading them in context and seeing if I now remember it. To me this style of review is better, because you see the word in context, not in isolation where it may even be difficult to verbalize its meaning or if it may have many different meanings depending on the context.
re: learning some words quicly, vs. getting stuck. It sounds like you’re on the right track. What I meant was that I think some people will keep reading the same lesson over and over again until they know the meanings of all the words. Or they won’t move on to the next lesson until they feel like they know all the words well enough to use them in output. My suggestion is not to do that (if you are)… First of all, your passive vocabulary will always be much greater than your active vocabulary, so to not move on for those purposes, you’ll never progress far. If you don’t move on to new lessons even if you don’t know some words passively, you’ll also slow down your progress. Hopefully what I’m saying makes sense.
As always, do what keeps you motivated. If SRS feels beneficial and motivating. Keep at it. I mostly wanted to say it isn’t necessary to use it, because you are reviewing words every time you read or listen.
Oh yeah, got the Litres account ages ago. It’s decent for some things. However, if you have to read the book on LIitRes then it can’t be used in Lingq. unfortunately - like the Goosebumps books. However, some things do work out.
I spend most of my time reading and listening.
I use the word/phrase status feature to increase the probability of moving vocabulary content from passive to active: I set the status of a word or phrase to “learned” when I know it quite well from the context.
From time to time I do a little SRS work. Words/phrases are moved to “known” if I can reproduce them in the reversed flash card mode.
I like your idea of reviewing by jumping from word to word within a text! Sounds like a good alternative to SRS.
“…some people… won’t move on to the next lesson until they feel like they know all the words well enough to use them in output. My suggestion is not to do that…”
Agreed!!! (though I didn’t always know this!) Now my goal is to pay attention to the new vocabulary and move it a bit further along the scale – the one that goes from “completely unknown” to “immediately, flexibly and accurately usable”.