I have some feedback which would likely be impossible to implement, but I want to throw it out there anyways.
I’ve noticed practically all language learning resources, including LingQ, misunderstand the difficulty level of a type of text a learner is using. We are (mistakenly) taught in school and by general society that we should all start with “Hi, my name is…” “The cat is on the table” types of texts, and that from there we should gradually move “up” to things like picture books or simple texts for learners, finally working our way up to things meant for our age level….
The reality is we should start with whatever genre has the most cognates to our language. As an example, the first thing I could read and understand in Italian with no prior study was not “Hi, my name is”, it was legal documents and news articles! Because English has so much high level academic, political and legal vocabulary shared with Italian.
What made sense to me in Ukrainian more than “Hi, my name is” was a brief news article about the USA which contained a lot of loanwords from English (like “President” and “shutdown”).
I would really like LingQ to re-consider the types of text included right away in the Beginner 1 lessons, and include some texts with as many loanwords as possible like this. This will really get people thinking “Hey, this language isn’t so different after all, I can learn it!”. My mom was going through Basic Italian lessons and thought learning Italian was impossible for her until I showed her a news article where around 50% of the words were cognates with English.
The difficulty is that you might have to enable separate Beginner 1 lessons according to certain language pairs depending on what the user has marked as being their native language (a Norwegian is likely going to know English, so could use the same Beginner 1 lessons as an American, but a Chinese person might need a separate language lesson with more cognates with Chinese, for example).
I know that the user can import stuff themselves, so could go out and find their own texts high in cognates, but I am thinking about the average user who perhaps doesn’t know how to learn a language more effectively and needs more hand-holding.