Hello, I am wondering what you guys think about reading in your target language? I mean real books that you hold in your hands. I do not personally like technology, but I use it for my education and my language learning, but I would rather be able to shave of time on the computer but still be learning my language with something I enjoy, which is reading. The method that I thought of is to read through a book that is from a genre that you like, but when you come to a word you do not know, you look in a dictionary and see what the word means. You do not have to memorize the word just know it for the moment. It will take a while to get through the book this way but I am thinking that the words that show up the most will appear so much that you will eventually remember them and be able to use and understand them. It is proven that forgetting helps with memory so that is why I think this method would work.
Steve recently did a video on that topic. I suggest you take a look:
Youāve described the purpose of LingQ in a nutshell, except you are wanting to do it with real physical books.
While I love physical books, what you describe sounds awfully slow. Why not take advantage of these look ups using LingQ?? Thatās the exactly what it is for.
If you donāt mind going a lot slower then by all means use physical books. Do you currently use LingQ for reading ebooks?
Another alternative if you want to use physical books is to use one of these fancy translating pens. Steve mentions heās been using a translating pen. Maybe itās in the video that Zoran provided. Iāve bought one made by NewYes to use when reading a physical German magazine I subscribe to. I havenāt used it a lot yet as I spend a lot of my time in LingQ.
I like reading for language learning, but I donāt generally look up every unfamiliar term since it slows things down too much. I try to find books or articles that are close enough to my current language level that I can get the gist of the content, and then I look up some key words as I go.
I see what you mean. I have not been using Lingq for ebooks yet, I am not very good at finding things like book transcripts with audio online. I think that even if the process is slow, I will try it and see how well it works for me.
Audio is not necessary for importing (and you wouldnāt get audio with physical book either).
Agree with tuotila. You donāt necessarily need audio for the ebooks. I donāt know good sources for Romanian ebooks unfortunately. I think bamboozled mentioned a couple of options on the other thread you had about content.
I did just do a quick search regarding romanian online ebook stores and it mentioned this one as the biggest:
Looks like it sells other stuff as well. They need to be DRM free. Possibly there are some other sources that are free, but youāll have to do a little investigating yourself in that regard. You can import anything thoughā¦news articles, wikipedia articles, etc.
If you did find some ebooks, even when there is a corresponding audiobook (I buy both if I can), I listen to it outside of LingQ anyway. Because the book gets split up, it would be a nightmare to actually try to slice the audio up to match.
Good luck
I bought a physical copy of a book that I first read on Lingq, and I am re-reading it bit by bit. I learned a lot of vocabulary from this book with Lingqās help, and I donāt think that I could have tackled it otherwise at that point in my learning. This time through Iām not looking up every unfamiliar word, relying on context and my memory of the story.
I recently started reading ŠŠµŃŠ¾Š¹ ŠŠ°ŃŠµŠ³Š¾ ŠŠµŃŠ¼ŠµŠ½Šø (A Hero of Our Time) by Lermontov. I started with a physical copy but soon imported it into Lingq (from a public domain copy on the iānet) because this type of older literature, set in an exotic locale, still has too many unfamiliar words for me. I was enjoying it and getting a good gist of the story w/o looking everything up, but Iām the type who likes to understand everything, even if I wonāt meet many of those words ever again. :-\
Eventually you should be able to comfortably switch entirely to physical books, but I personally dont see much use in it before you are fairly comfortable reading in your target language.
I probably read around 10-15 books on LingQ before I tackled my first physical book in French. At that point I barely needed any dictionary help. After going through a thousand or so pages of MĆ©moires dāOutre-Tombe (my first physical book in French without using a dictionary aside from the very rare exception), I was basically fluent. My advice on book selection would be something fairly repetitive and simple (biographies is a great genre for this purpose).
With Ancient Greek it was a very different matter since it does not in my experience make much sense to use LingQ as a base for Ancient languages since you cant really use graded texts (aside from guided commentary/selections etc). I went straight from textbooks to physical books without using Lingq. I do use LingQ for Modern Greek now, however, and as a supplement to Ancient Greek (primarily biblical texts).
I do have one thing that I have thought of about reading in your target language. If you simply read through the book and you only look up the words that you think might be essential for understanding it will go quicker then looking up every word you do not know, but, if you are reading through a book, you will learn what way the author uses words, and this will help with those words to get acquired. Lingq is amazing but for my situation where I do not like using technology for large periods of time, I think that this will help because there are no other things on a book to distract you. I hope I made that clear, I am not the best at explaining.