I know a lot of people like the LingQ flashcards. I used them for a spell, but got burnt out. For a long time, I swear I was addicted to SRS flashcards. And what I’m going to say next, I just realized, is going to make me sound like an informercial, so let me clarify here and now: I do not work for this company! I have nothing to gain by sharing this information! It’s just something I think is cool.
It’s called “smart.fm” and it’s free. When I first saw it, I was skeptical, because I thought it was only word lists that somebody else created, which annoyed me to no end. But it turns out, you can add your own content, which is what I’ve been doing. For French, I’ve been mainly using a site called yabla.com, but I’ve got a LingQ podcast in there and I intend to add more.
In fact, I’ll just include one I just created for the lyrics to La Marseillaise, which is maybe not the easiest song in the world to sing, but someone brought the lyrics to a French language group that I’d gone to last night. I found our in-meeting translation to be torturous, so this morning I dug in and created a list of all the words that were new to me, and here’s the result of that:
And then, here’s some vocab from a LingQ conversation (#92 Serge & Marianne – American Health Insurance):
So I realize that these are “my” words, and not necessarily what someone else might want to learn, or even how. But I thought I’d share these anyway as an example of what you can do with it.
Katie, there is no problem sharing our content with other sites. However, we would like you to acknowledge the source. This is the same courtesy that we extend to podcasts and sources that allow us to use their content.
Serge and Marianne put a lot of effort into these podcasts and do them for LingQ. Please find a way to recognize them as the creators and FrenchLingQ podcasts as the source.
With regard to smartfm. It looks like a good site. How do you like the text to voice pronunciation that they use? We intent to introduce text to voice at LingQ as well.
I used to play with smart.fm a year ago, today I looked at it again. It seems quite interesting.
I am going to create one more smart.fm account, RussianLingQ by name, and try to create some vocabulary lists for Russian lessons. Perhaps, it will help to promote LingQ
Steve, Mark, may I use RussianLingQ name? =)
Also I discovered that some companies are listed as smart.fm partners: iKnow! by DMM英会話で英語。ちょっとの努力で、大きな成果を。 - iKnow! But I can’t find terms of partnership anywhere (the word “sponsor” at the link raises some doubts…)
"The system combines proven learning science with the latest in adaptive, semantic and social Web technologies. " http://bit.ly/bM9frS
I have just tried smart.fm. It was interesting that I was able to log in with my Twitter ID. I found that It is easy to use; it is useful for some people . . . .
Anyway, there is something missing there, although I should not jump to conclusions. For my part, I don’t like such a system that is based on “learning science.” At LingQ, especially on the forums we might encounter birds, tigers, Napoleons, Snowballs, Boxers, and humans. I love this community. I am a cat person who loves tweeting like a bird.
Well, I didn’t get on the smart.fm train because of the “learning science.” It’s just fun to use. Maybe that’s the “science”?
Cakypa, I couldn’t find the “sponsor” link that you’re talking about, but the page your referring to isn’t a list of business partners but people who’ve provided word lists or “goals” as they call them. I’ve worked through a couple of them, but over time I’ve come to realize they really haven’t been that useful to me.
I like adding my own content, and that’s what I recommend. My one tip is that you make sure you include example sentences, otherwise these turn into word lists without a context, and can make your brain go numb.
I have also noticed that I’m the only one using the goals that I’ve created, which I think goes to show how personal learning is.
Actually, what’s interesting to me are the statistics they provide about “Goals” and their number of users. The content that is solely word lists, but about some subject, seems to be the most “popular”. But how useful is that, really? I don’t know. I don’t know what drives the people using this product. I only know that I’ve found it helpful in that reviewing words for me actually enjoyable, so I look forward to it every day.
Mark, one of the future features of smart.fm is, apparently (it’s somewhere on their blog) is the ability to import xls files into smart.fm. The reason being is that adding words to goals really is time consuming (and still worth it to me). Can you export from lingq.com in that fashion?
Hypothetical perfect world: if you could just click a word in LingQ, and create your flashcard there, and then import it into smart.fm somehow, with an example sentence that won’t require too much editing, I’d be in heaven. Or maybe if you could just edit the sentence in LingQ before exporting, that’d be cool. The last time I used LingQ flashcards, I recall feeling frustrated over not being able to edit the flashcard to how I wanted it to look, so I gave up on it. Maybe it’s changed?
"The fundamental principle that drives our technology is spaced rehearsal – the simple idea that the best way to learn information is to space out review of that information over increasing periods of time. " iKnow! by DMM英会話で英語。ちょっとの努力で、大きな成果を。 - iKnow!
I should not have compared smart.fm with LingQ, especially with the forums. I see that it is fundamentally flashcard software.
@caitoceallaigh- You can export and import LingQs currently on the Vocabulary page. However, that is a feature that is only available to Basic, Plus and Premium members. As far as editing flashcards goes, the flashcards are now fully editable anytime both on the site and on the iPhone app.
“to space out review of that information over increasing periods of time”
In order to understand the meaning of the above phrase I watched the video cited below, and found that Smart.fm’s method is based on the famous theory on “forgetting curve”(Forgetting curve - Wikipedia).
Introducing Smart.fm–- YouTube
Do you want to learn something in a way like this? Should we be concerned with our forgetting curve? I have mixed feelings. I will continue to try Smart.fm.
I don’t know. I can’t tell you what to do. You might like it, you might not. I watched maybe thirty-seconds of the video. I say, try it yourself, and see what you think. It’s not a replacement to LingQ. You can use it with LingQ.
I just upgraded my LingQ account to create more LingQs, and yeah, this is pretty cumbersome stuff. I get the idea that clicking a word and creating an instantaneous flashcard is “convenient,” but it takes a whole lot more mouseclicks, manually typing, and waiting to get the flashcard exactly as you like it. I see myself using LingQ “sometimes,” but not for the core of my learning.
Ironically, I follow the philosophy behind LingQ – vocabulary from context – but I much prefer using Google Translate and wordreference.com on my own, and copying and pasting into a flashcard system of my choosing.
They are cumbersome, but reliable, hence my fantasy that the two could merge somehow. I very much like the idea of clicking a word and quickly creating a flashcard. That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, LingQ is proving to be buggy. For example, I made the mistake of refreshing my screen, and all the LingQs I had created in the last ten minutes disappeared.
I also accidentally selected more text than I had intended, and the whole group of words is highlighted, and I can’t make it go away.
In the car (as a passenger!), I reviewed some LingQs on my iPhone app. I thought that was useful. I’m back on a regular computer, and now quite a few of the LingQs I had created earlier are gone. So that’s frustrating to me.
I keep going back to LingQ to be open minded about the flashcards, but when you end up having to go through identical steps that you’d do anyway, only two or three times, I start to go back to what works for me in a more reliable, predictable way.
Regarding sentences, perhaps it’s just my attitude that’s wrong, and that I shouldn’t want complete sentences in the phrase section? It’s just that in the past, when I’ve used LingQ flashcards, I’d come up with a phrase so far out of context it would make no sense to me.
Is it just me who would like to do that? It seems like common sense, but I guess not? What do you do?
Admittedly my LingQing (flashcarding) has been sporadic lately. Lots going on in other parts of my life. But I have never lost LingQs by refreshing or in any other way. Highlighting can be a bit finicky, but you just need to refresh the page and you are ok.
I tend not to LingQ phrases as much as I used to because they are less likely to be highlighted yellow in other texts. To me there is no feeling of loss that the “phrase” is often not a coherent whole. While I realise collocations are very important, you will absorb them through the main activities of listening and reading.
The main point of LingQing is to help you listening and reading. I think a lot of people put too much emphasis on the flashcards. You are not learning flashcards, you are learning a language through input made comprehensible by flashcarding.
I have no problems with LingQ disappearing when I refresh. On the other hand if I grab too much text I refresh and it goes away. The easiest place to edit Flash Cards is in the iPod app. I agree with doo that the main emphasis is on reading and listening but I do find the Flash Cards quite convenient and not all that buggy. The iPod app makes them even better.
Doo, when I want to listen and read, I listen and read. But when I do create flashcards, I’d like it to be a quick process, with a meaningful sentence, and I’d like the review to take a couple of minutes.
I’m also not interested in being told how to learn languages. I’m saying, as a user, as a language learner, and an avid one at that, this is what I do. It’s up to the interface designer to decide if this is meaningful information. Can this help with future iterations of this product? That’s not for me to decide, but I’m just throwing this out there. Maybe it’ll help?
I’m using IE 8. And yes, I encountered that selecting too much text makes text on the entire page go away, as well. And when I say the LingQs disappeared, I’m referring to the list of words under “flashcards.” I don’t know what that means, because if I recall, it was just a list, but it struck me as strange. When I exported into a spreadsheet, everything was there.
