After being a huge advocate of LingQ and ascending to a higher level in numerous Languages such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Spanish for many years, I decided to stop using LingQ since my personal goals with LingQ have been completed and fulfilled.
Wanted to share my personal thoughts and everything I’ve learned with LingQ throughout the intensive years.
I used LingQ with an Anki philosophy, and I gained a lot of vocabulary acquistion from ignoring all known words and focusing only on yellow/blue words. Also utilized the arrow keys, number keys, and k/x keys to learn words extremely fast. It’s the best keyboard shortcuts to exist.
LingQ is extremely fast for learning how to read and learn new words but honestly not that fast for improving listening comprehension in terms of efficiency. It’s great but there are new apps or existing apps now that are faster personally such as Migaku or Language Reactor that can work with LingQ if you want to learn how to read well and listen well.
The community is great and supportive and couldn’t have done it without the active members.
LingQ personally is great if you’re an active reader, but I realized 5 years later that I was never a huge reader and only wanted to focus on having conversations with people, which I sadly claim that reading doesn’t help me much in this case. Only for learning how to read transcripts more faster and smoothly. Personally would rather be illiterate but can have conversations and watch movies.
Great app to learn multiple languages simultaneously to get a great foundation of each language. I would claim it’s the only app that lets you learn multiple languages very quickly through vocab acquistion in a speed aspect.
Been a follower of Steve for 10 years, and he has taught me a lot about language learning and life through the lens of language learning. Now, currently ready to ascend to the next stage, which is focusing on trying to communicate with other people across the world with the languages that I’m learning and massive listening input and less reading input. Gonna be using other apps such as Language Reactor since I think it is LingQ version 2 in my opinion. LingQ has been a great application and hope I can come back in the future in hopes of more useful functionalities. For those who know me, thank you for your knowledge and wisdom. Gonna be studying as usual. Can always find me at my youtube channel if you’re curious about my progress.
With my accumulated knowledge, I created charts and personal theories that might interest others who are interested.
You definitely did a lot of intensive studying, and you achieved a lot since when you started. Now that you are transferring those consistency skills to speaking and interaction, you will find how much you can progress with all the hidden input you have accumulated.
I usually don’t comment on YouTube, but I’ll definitely watch some of your videos in the future to see how you are progressing.
I personally had to change my journey quite a bit due to a series of issues, but I’ll come back stronger.
Language Reactor is definitely a good match for LingQ, like ReadLang. I use a lot of ChatGPT with LingQ nowadays. We live in a moment where we don’t have a lack of tools, and if we are consistent and determined, we can definitely achieve a lot. You definitely have that with you.
Just subscribed to your YT channel. So the conversation can continue there as well
(Unfortunately, AI/ML is increasingly eating up all my free time - even the time I have for SLA).
Anyway, your journey in learning Chinese is still a prime example of “beast mode” and an inspiration to all of us!
“That reading doesn’t help me much in this case”
It depends, I’d say:
Reading transcripts while listening to real-life conversations (of several native speakers) is still a good strategy. However, comprehensible input isn’t enough. Rather, we need deliberate practice that includes input / output activities and a bit of grammar.
The tools themselves are far less important than establishing this kind of habit-based practice.
Reading alone is also still useful for refining our vocabulary (and our comprehension).
Thanks for the support as usual! Actually, have doing the transcript while listening has always been the approach so far. Would say that it’s super effective for listening!
Then talk about the topic with an LLM (I normally use ChatGPT and Talkpal).
That works quite well, at least from a B2 level and above for languages without tones or pitch accent.
I’m not sure how good the LLMs are for Mandarin, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc., though.
Could you explain a bit more what you mean when you say Language Reactor is basically “LingQ 2.0”? I’m not quite sure what you mean by that, and I’d be really interested to hear more.
I recently discovered Readlang, and I have to say, one thing really stands out: the contextual translations are much better than LingQ’s, at least in my experience.
The whole system also feels much simpler. I even managed to create a script that adds an audio control bar, so I can loop sections, add bookmarks, and use a few other useful features.
I’m not saying this to criticize LingQ. I still think it’s a very good app. I just personally prefer Readlang.
As for Language Reactor, I’ve been using it for about a week, but I still feel like I haven’t fully figured out everything it can do. Do you have any tips or features you’d recommend?
I’m also testing Lingopie. It looks promising, although I still find the translations quite literal. Another issue, just like with Language Reactor, is that you can’t really select a whole group of words at once, which can be a bit frustrating when learning Modern Greek.
Hi Karfas, if you visit my stream and ask me to demo my style of language reactor, I’ll gladly show you.
To your question, I say it’s like LingQ 2.0 since you can also learn words and you have statistics for known words. Huge difference between LingQ and Language Reactor for known words from my philosophy is that LingQ’s known words reflect your passive reading vocabulary but it’s not reflected as passive listening vocabulary. Language Reactor is the opposite in which listening known words is more noticable and more focused and less likely to be reading known words. Language Reactor will help get to listening fluency a lot easier and more transparent than lingQ opinion wise. I use the LingQ/Anki Methology to approach Language Reactor. I can abuse the high efficiency for listening comprehension but can’t do so for LingQ. LingQ is good for reading passive vocabulary mainly. Language Reactor is good for listening passive vocabulary accumulation. It’s all perspective honestly. This is the perspective of speed and efficiency.
In order words. LingQ can’t be rivaled for learning words extremely fast depending on method and Language Reactor is really good for learning listening vocabulary really fast. Not sure if it’s the fastest as I’m still searching for that answer
