Vietnamese with LingQ after about 3 months

I’ve been using the LingQ browser app for around 3 months or so to learn Vietnamese - not intensively for the whole of that time but in concentrated bursts. Here are some initial thoughts:

In a nutshell, LingQ is a really powerful tool with so much potential, but has constant frustrations.

I was pretty much a complete beginner in Vietnamese, what you might call A0 level (I know that’s not an official designation, but it’s a useful label). So my initial journey is trying to progress from A0 to A1.

Why Vietnamese? I have some good friends there who speak little English. We chat regularly online using automatic translation tools (mostly Google Translate, at a guess, linked automatically to eg Telegram) but it seems only polite to try to learn some of their language, much as they are starting to learn English. Plus I’ve always been up for the mental challenge of learning a new language but never made the time until now.

To be honest, I’m not convinced that LingQ is a good tool for complete beginners, ie to make the AO==>A1 transition. Once you have made it to A1 then LingQ has much more to recommend it - you have the basic platform to make further progress. But as a complete beginner, you have to try to learn the writing system, the alphabet, the sounds of the alphabet, some basic rudiments of the grammar and any other high-level aspects specific to the language - for example, Vietnamese is a tonal language and so it’s essential to learn the basics of the different tones and how they sound.

I’m not sure how most beginners could ever pick up all these basics from say the ministories in LingQ alone. Or even if a few are able to do so, I doubt that it’s a very efficient or motivating process. I’m sure that a key factor is how different your target and native languages might be. I could imagine that as a native English speaker I still have enough schoolboy French to enjoy LingQ from the word go, for instance. But attempting an Asian language from native English (or vice versa) is a different proposition altogether. My suggestion is that LingQ should try to partner with some other teaching institution/channel to create some sort of mini-course to make the A0==>A1
jump, from where LingQ could be used much more productively.

Even when you’re familiar with the basics of writing system, alphabet etc, I’ve still found the ministories hard going. Difficult to know exactly why this is, but I suspect that it’s a combination of reasons. One is that the initial ministories are basic but maybe not basic enough. The content words seem to be drawn from a vocabulary of a few thousand words, whereas perhaps they should start with just a few hundred, maybe even 100-200 initially and then gradually increase. And there’s not always that obvious an overlap in vocabulary between the simple words and constructions used repeatedly in messages sent to me from friends and the ministory content.

Personally, I want to learn everyday conversational Vietnamese and I’d probably find fictional dialogues based on simple everyday chat more useful as learning material than the current ministories. It also doesn’t help that ‘official’ Vietnamese is Northern dialect and is what I want to learn and am used to hearing, whereas the default LingQ voices are Southern dialect. I’m sure this issue isn’t unique to Vietnamese, but more choice and clearer labelling of voices in LingQ would be a big help. (I’m not talking about offering dozens of different voices, but where there are major dialects in a language then examples of each would be good.) And as a specific suggestion, for lesson imports it would be good to have a specific user field where a note about the specific voice could be added.

As to other frustrations with LingQ, these are regularly raised in other threads here, so I’ll only mention two types. One is that, IMHO at least, the web interface needs a major overhaul for better usability - simpler and more logical menu structures, better navigation eg between sentences, more consistent use of controls like audio playback. It needs perhaps an external usability expert to take a long hard look at the user interface and to suggest rationalisation and improvements. I’ve not personally had any issues with stability of the browser app, but as a beginner I’ve only been using fairly short lessons and YouTube/audio imports.

My single biggest frustration with LingQ is its poor handling of Vietnamese (and maybe some other Asian languages) because, in writing, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, ie each word is essentially a separate syllable. So anything other than simple nouns, verbs etc are combinations of 2/3/4 separate words. LingQ really needs to be able identify the combination as a potential LingQ target rather than the individual words. A couple of 4-word examples from early ministories: homework is: bài tập về nhà; petshop is: cửa hàng thú cưng. Yes, I know that I can create a LingQ for these ‘phrases’ (except they are not really phrases, but words) manually, and that is indeed what I do. But this is an unnecessary and distracting chore and it thoroughly confuses an initial reading of the sentence when all the component words show up as individual unknown words. Plus the page/sentence vocabulary list becomes confusingly bloated because LingQ still shows the individual words in the list as well as the combination. As a result, the list becomes eg 3 times longer than necessary and one has to really hunt for meanings.

Finally, one other general comment: LingQ is great for improving reading skills and, to a lesser extent, listening skills. But it doesn’t help writing skills so much and personally I find that having to generate text myself forces me to try to remember all the diacritics (especially tones in Vietnamese) for words; reading alone does little to reinforce learning of such vital details. And virtually nothing, directly at least, for speaking skills. Yes, I know that with enough listening immersion then speaking should eventually come. But I actively want to try speaking so that I can hold at least a very basic conversation. Of course LingQ does nothing to stop me practising speaking, but it does nothing to encourage me either.

In summary, LingQ has so much potential, but could do better. I will certainly persevere with LingQ because I can see its potential despite the frustrations, but the initial experience could have been more positive. And apologies for such a long post!

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Thank you for your experiences! I think I experimented something similar as you described with the A0->A1 transition when I tried to learn Farsi. Do you have suggestions for that step?

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You didn’t ask me, but johnd2, but I still have a suggestion:
It’s true that LingQ is totally tedious for absolute beginners. That’s why it makes more sense to get the basics elsewhere. In my opinion, textbooks with audio recordings are a good option, but you should make sure that this material is suitable for self-learners, so you don’t need a teacher as well. This way you can learn the basics in a fraction of the time it would take with LingQ. Once you have mastered the basics, you can easily switch to LingQ.

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Yes, I’ve thought about it during my struggles with LingQ :grinning: and there are several things I’d suggest. Some are to do with LingQ itself; some with the A0->A1 step in general; and some might well be more language specific.

To start with, LingQ is not a trivially simple app - it has many features and quite a number of menus and controls on its user interface. So inevitably it takes quite a while to get fully used to using LingQ. As I said, I really do think that the current LingQ version (certainly the browser app which I mostly use) could do with a thorough ground-up review to rationalise and simplify the user interface, but that’s a separate point.

So, assuming that you are using LingQ for the first time, one major issue is that you are forced to both learn LingQ AND to make that tricky language step from A0->A1 at the same time. That inevitably makes progress even slower and more frustrating. In a way this is inevitable of course for first-time LingQ users learning a new language, but it places a burden on LingQ to prioritise ease of use.

Personally, I would love to have had a reference book on LingQ that explains the LingQ approach in more detail and takes the user step by step through all the menus and controls on the UI. Yes, I know that there is some documentation within LingQ, but TBH I found this to be quite patchy in coverage and not always easy to locate a topic I wanted to check. And, yes, I also appreciate that such books can quickly go out of date in their detail, but they remain 90-95% useful, at least until there is a completely major rewrite of the app. And having this full documentation available as a book (or ebook in epub/PDF format) would make it easy to read independently on eg a Kindle.

But the main issue is of course about the A0->A1 step in the language itself. I agree completely @flexitsch that some external/supplementary assistance is really valuable to get to A1. This is not necessarily instead of LingQ, but to use alongside of LingQ until you achieve A1 proficiency and can then use LingQ more intensively and immersively as a launchpad to make rapid further progress. There are perhaps 3 aspects:

  • If I were running LingQ then I would actively seek out partner institutions/channels to create some separate mini-courses to provide basic orientation material for complete beginners. This isn’t necessarily a huge task since there may well be suitable resources available elsewhere for many languages. In Vietnamese, for example, there are some (IMHO, but bear in mind that I am a complete non-linguist :grinning: :grinning: :grinning:) excellent lessons freely available on YouTube that introduce the writing system, alphabet, basic pronunciation, tones, basic grammar etc etc. But the problem is that these are not currently pulled together in one place or expertly reviewed as suitable recommendations to make an easy starting point for beginners.

  • Introduce a few (10?) super-basic initial lessons into LingQ that use a minimal vocabulary, maybe just using the 100-200 commonest words, and that introduce the commonest phrases, sentence structures, question types etc in that language. Add a new feature to LingQ whereby a sheet of comments can be added to each short lesson to provide explanations of eg word usage. Ideally these could also be implemented as tooltips so that clicking on a sentence or LingQ shows the explanation. (This is primarily just a suggestion for these initial new hand-holding lessons, not necessarily for LingQ more generally.)

  • Have the ministory translations reviewed by a native language teacher to ensure that the vocabulary is made as simple as possible even if it is no longer totally faithful to the English original (why should that be important?). Don’t use a complex word if a simple one will do the job. And remove ambiguities as far as possible. For example in the Vietnamese ministories, there has clearly been an attempt to convert English names to common Vietnamese ones. All well and good, you may think, but unfortunately Vietnamese names often are or resemble actual Vietnamese words. So, especially at the start of a sentence, I’ve often stumbled and wasted time trying to decipher what turned out to be a character’s name. Every such stumble is a potential demotivation. (Is there any good reason why the characters in every ministory need different names? We can learn common first names in the language elsewhere.)

Finally, there may well be language specific issues. I’ve talked about how the writing system in Vietnamese uses almost exclusively single-syllable words. More complex words (what would be multisyllable words in many other languages) thereby get split across 2 or 3 Vietnamese words. LingQ doesn’t deal well with this issue at present, which adds another level of complication to its use, and could well be improved. For me, this was actually the biggest single obstacle to using LingQ effectively and happily.

Apologies - another very long post, but there are many issues and suggestions to cover.

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