I wanted to share that I’ve gone back and forth on how I can use lingQ to really help my Spanish improve at an advanced level.
I no longer need it for reading as such, as I can read novels pretty easily. And I have enough material that I never search for any pre uploaded material anymore.
What I do is something like intensely contemplating sentences.
I either upload scanned text from a page of of book that I’ve read, or go through part of a transcript from a netflix show.
I set LingQ to sentence mode and approach each sentence of which I don’t get the meaning automatically as a riddle to solve.
I’ll read it and then break down the words and phrases and pay attention to each conjugation and participle and all that, before clicking on any words/phrases to translate.
Then I’ll translate only what I don’t understand.
Then I’ll sit and contemplate the sentence again, until the meaning makes sense fully.
I found that earlier in my using of LingQ that I was leaning on translations of the words too much and not letting myself really contemplate what I’m on the edge of getting, really challenging my brain to get closer to automatic understanding of more and more difficult words and grammar.
I’ll do this for 10-20minutes a day and free flow immerse the rest of the time.
It really works! I can feel something about my Spanish is upgrading to a much higher level.
4 Likes
Thanks for this! I feel the same about my German. I rely too much on translations for meaning instead of challenging myself to get the meaning from the text itself.
2 Likes
Personally I think it is essential to build extensive study activities outside of LingQ that can grow into long-lasting hobbies you don’t mind spending hours and hours on every day. Intensive study like you describe is hard, uses up willpower, and dies out on its own if you don’t actively defend the habit. But 10-20 minutes of daily intensive study goes a long towards making extensive study easier and more possible, so I think you’ve got the right idea.
Since my extensive hobbies are reading novels and listening to podcasts, my intensive study is using lingq to stitch them together. To improve my reading, I read podcast transcripts with audio to overwrite my inner reading voice. To improve my listening, I use sentence mode with audio for practicing mental dictation by pressing the arrows keys and ‘a’ with my eyes closed to hear sentences again and again until I fully understand and imagine them written out in my mind, and then I look at the text to see if I was right. Very often I am not, and it is highly instructive. What I heard and what was actually said do not match and I improve because of it.
3 Likes
I follow the Refold path in general so my ratio of intensive study to extensive immersion is about 85:15 or 85% immersion %15 intensive
1 Like