Starting a Language from an Intermediate Level

Support & Feedback Forum Ideas & Requests
1

Good Afternoon,

A while back, I started LingQ for Portuguese. However, I have a few Brazilian friends and I also speak Spanish fluently, so I picked up a LOT of known words very quickly. Ironically, though, this killed my motivation, because it didn’t really feel like I was actually learning anything new and so I just kind of forgot about it. However, I DO still have a desire to learn the language, but I also don’t want the words that I truly do know to count for coins even though I do want them to count for the amount of words I know in the language. Is there any way that I can do this?

2

Use material that suits your level. And ignore the stats. :wink:

3

I started LingQ in Spanish after several years of studying it and being at an intermediate level, but not enough time using the language. I was at B2 word count (per LingQ) in less than 3 weeks, and C1 in 2 months. Like @Obsttorte says, just ignore the coins and other stats if they are not important to you.

I import books and read them; I import YouTube videos on topics that interest me, read the text and listen to the videos; and I create my own prompts in AI for specific topics that I want to learn the vocabulary and phrases.

LingQ is still one of the best platforms that I have found to increase your vocabulary quickly.

4

Learning a language from scratch with LingQ isn’t a good idea anyway. It takes far too long to master the basics with LingQ. You can do that much faster with “conventional” methods.
LingQ is ideal for expanding your vocabulary and practicing listening comprehension if you’re already reasonably good at the language but not yet fluent. So you’ve done exactly the right thing. If you feel like you’re not learning anything new, then you’re at the normal intermediate-level plateau.
Do what the previous posters have already advised you: import content that interests you, and eventually you’ll realize that you’ve actually learned a great deal without being aware of it.

5

-get a frequency list as a text doc.
-Import it into lingQ
-Mark those words you know well.
-After that when you sort lessons by % new words it would be a little more accurate to your level.

or

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Just like others have proposed just read stuff at your level and mark words you know, Even if you start over with beginner content way below your level you can complete them super fast.

As for for the coins I have no solution but I would just ignore it.

6

I suspect it depends on how much your TL differs from languages you already master.

I’m a French speaker and I started learning Spanish 1 year ago with Paul Noble’s audiobook. It kept reusing the same small set of words ad nauseam and gave me a false sense of progress. All I remember from it now is how to book a room for 2 nights - **1

Then I moved to Assimil. I liked the format, but it was quite dense. I often felt guilty starting a new lesson because I didn’t remember everything that was in the previous one.

LingQ showed me it’s ok to forget what a word means because I will run into it later.

I went back to Assimil later, and I enjoyed it a lot. It fills the gaps, like grammar.

**1 https://youtu.be/plv8QYobwvI?is=Vogil6UHm_4bRkbC

7

You either do what @Hsingh described: a frequency list, or grind through the words as they come. You can join a hard core challenge to make it more fun. That was what I did when opened Swedish and English, both I already knew on a satisfying level when I joined Lingq.

8

This is something that people say, but I don’t actually think that’s true. I’ve started multiple languages from scratch on LingQ. There’s no reason why you can’t also use something else. Tackling things from multiple perspectives is always good.

But the biggest reason why beginners don’t do well with LingQ is because they’re expecting to see results too quickly. As long as you believe in the process and just work your way through the mini stories or any beginner content, at a reasonable pace, after a month you will have made significant progress, more than if you had started with a traditional approach.

When you don’t yet have confidence in the approach though, that early affirmation that you’re learning something, which you don’t necessarily get from LingQ, is helpful in keeping you motivated and active. But in terms of actual effectiveness, starting with LingQ is, in the long run, a very efficient way to start a language.

9

As a -native - Spanish speaker who also speaks Portuguese, I do not mark the words as known just because I recognise them. If I am not able to produce them, to write them correctly, then I just let them on stage 2/3.

So, even though I am not solving your doubt, to me coins and so on are useless, but I highly recommend you change your approach with this language or at least give it a go.

10

That’s my current approach with Japanese, which I started roughly half a year ago. I worked through a small workbook (in Korean, as an attempt to try out laddering), use a Kanji practice book as well as one for grammar whilst reading to the transcript of a language learners podcast on LingQ, which usually provides a new word count of about 50% (agglutination + creative word splitting). My impression is that I am making good progress.

However:

  • I’ve learned the hiragana and katakana beforehand using Anki. Learning an alphabet with LingQ solely is probably possible, but somewhat inefficient, I guess.
  • As stated I am learning Korean (for about 3 years now). So syntax, grammar as well as partly the Kanji are somewhat familiar, despite me beeing an european.

So I would prefer a multi-way approach, but that has been my learning method since beeing a kid. I guess using LingQ alone might not be as efficient, but this can be different for others. And it depends on several factors, especially how close or far the language you wanna learn is to the ones you already know. That beeing said using LingQ (or reading in general) is a pivotal point when it comes to vocabulary and phrase acquisition, which imho is the backbone of language learning.

Obsttorte’s advice :wink: : Start the language learning with several tools. You will see what works best and what motivates you the most, so you can always shift more focus on that and remove focus from other means. And if this results in you relying on one source, like LingQ, only, so be it. If you start using one source only, you can only speculate on how using other sources would benefit or hinder your progress.

11

I’m curious what constitutes ‘conventional’ methods.

The one issue with LingQ is the lack of structure, the user needs to create that structure themselves. That can be a disadvantage, or an advantage. It’s probably not for most language novices, a proper course, with lessons and explanations might be more suitable. I certainly don’t recommend flash card style apps, such as Duolingo, Busuu and Babbel.

It took me a long while to figure out a way to use LingQ that I enjoyed and allowed me to make good progress.

12

What’s the problem with that?! Try doing something yourself.

13

A language novice probably doesn’t know how to learn a language, hence they need structure.

I started out with Duolingo, followed by Busuu and Babbel, and unfortunately I believed the exaggerated, if not dishonest, marketing claims made by these companies. I then wasted 18 months using LingQ to study German and nothing was sinking in. I eventually figured out how to use it ‘properly’. I doubt that I am a unique case.

14

If you wouldn’t mind, can you explain what you were doing to use it “improperly” before? Always good to know specifically what is confusing or what went wrong so we can try to direct the experience better.

15

What is your proper way now on LingQ? It will not explain grammar concepts, though as it is primarily a reading tool so I am wondering what has changed in your approach.

16

I might give some feedback as well, even though the question was not pointed at me, if I may.

Imho the whole advantage of LingQ is that it speeds up a process that would have worked 50 years ago, too, but would have taken much more time. Reading through texts, looking up words you don’t know, is an approach even my mother used 20+ years ago to teach herself Greece. She bought greece newspapers at the main station and spent half the sunday translating the articles. Obviously, looking words up in a printed paper dictionary is somewhat time consuming.

When it comes to LingQ the impression one can get at first is that the whole process of creating the definitions is super important. I think it isn’t. A definition doesn’t have to be perfect, it can even be wrong as you can correct it later on anyways if you stumble over it again. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter if it is wrong. If you start to spend too much time per word looking it up, or if you try to add all the grammatical nuances of a specific word into the definition, you just waste time and the effect of LingQ - speeding up the look up process - gets destroyed.

I personally turned on the ‘pages move to known’ feature after having it turned of for a long time, and use LingQ in combination with the Google Dictionary plugin as well as (the super useful) Yomitan plugin on browser. I create definitions for a few forms of a word, but not for all, use the existing definition or the ai definitions (sometimes deleting parts of the latter if it includes other parts of the sentence) as much as possible so I don’t have to type (despite beeing a somewhat fast typer).

There is no fixed rule, but I always try to outweight the amount of definitions created with the amount of time needed. If I create too much definitions, I waste time. If I create too less definitions, I may be in the need to use the dictionary too often, repeatedly looking up the same word, which wastes time, too. With Yomutan and Google Dictionary, the latter is less of a problem, though.

Obviously this approach can be problematic for those who want to use the LingQ Spaced Repetition feature or who care a lot about the stats.

Another aspect is that it would be good to encourage new users to import content for learning and advice them how to do that. You should always work under the assumption that your customers never have tought themselves a language before or never attented a language school. I assume there are a lot of new users who are already on the older side and may had their last contact with language learning in school. So they are probably a bit lost. If you throw a guide at them in a language they are about to start learning, it isn’t useful either.

You can see it in comments made here in the past, that some users assume that the app will provide them with texts they can read. Beeing more informative on ways of how the app can be used or how it is intented by the designers might be helpful. I described one way that works for me, and that is, of course, shaped by the specific characteristics of the languages I learn. Others may use it quiet differently. And the way it is designed might differ, too.

17

No problem. I came from Duolingo and similar apps, and used the sentence review mode, where you go through each sentence in turn, and do the exercises for the sentence. After a while I stopped doing the exercises. With German I found that nothing was sinking in, words and simple phrases weren’t sticking. Essentially I was using LingQ as a form of Duolingo, or flash card app. I looked at some of the instruction videos for LingQ but there were huge numbers of them, and I didn’t find them helpful.

Eventually I worked out that I had to ignore the statistics, slow down, find material specifically created for learners, revise previously studied videos, and practice output. I no longer use the sentence mode exercises. My statistics in German are much worse, but my progress is much better.

I go through each sentence, figure out what each it means, then I play around with it. I try to recreate it from the English translation, then create new sentences with a different subject, a different tense and so on. I might Google a word or expression when it does not make sense. Finally I listen to the video from start to finish, stopping to lookup a word if need be, I use videos from YouTube channels such as the news in German for learners from tagesschau. I initially used some learner videos that were AI generated and had errors. Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of those on YouTube.

For me the difference is in part the use of output whereby I create new phrases based on the phrases in the video, and use machine translation to check them. I also use Anki, but usually with sentences as verbs are highly context dependent, and work in partnership with other words especially prepositions. I find that also helps me learn the grammar. In a sense my learning is more active and less passive. This is how I originally studied French at school and evening classes. You are given a short text, you ‘study’ it i.e. figure out what it means, then you do simple output using the text as the basis, and the teacher checks it. I need to do more output in German, but it is slowly progressing. With French I just listen to lots of input, but my French comprehension is quite advanced.

My biggest problem is learning words as I have a poor memory. As you know repetition helps with memorisation.

18

This!

I find reviewing - complete: reread the full lesson, or partial: just the yellow words - the most important and efficient task in my learning process, but LingQ makes it pretty hard, when not completely impractical:

  • Complete: open an old lesson and it takes over the head of the lesson list. Do that a few times and what you were currently working on has disappeared. Loin des yeux, loin du cœur.
  • Partial: when “quickly” reviewing a 15 minute podcast-based lesson on a tablet for its 10-20 remaining yellow lingqs, they will be scattered over 20 pages on a tablet, and double that on a phone (see the summary page request below).

Here are a few suggestions that would greatly improve on reviewing lessons on LingQ:

Summary mode: just the yellow/blue/.. words:

Temporarily hide a lesson, till it’s time to review it:

Hide finished lessons: focus on pending and unfinished lessons

Review all of today/yesterday/the past week’s lesson:

(Originally suggested for the playlist, but maybe better applicable to reading lists)