gaoli said: the problem is finding input that is comprehensible at your level
That is true indeed. I pick up most of my books on eBay, inclusing German short stories, and linguistics text books. They are usually almost like new, and don’t look to have been read. The German A2 short story book I picked up on eBay is very good.
With French I was able to listen to input well above my level, as we share so many words, and the grammar is similar to English grammar. Thus one can get the gist of the input, and some of the details, even when the level is high. I suspect the same could be said for Spanish. I am not sure this is true with German, though I would be interested to hear other viewpoints.
Currently I’m reading, sans LingQ, two “French Bilingual Bridge” books: "Classic Science Fiction Stories " (Beginner) and “Classic Fairy Tales” (Intermediate) by Vallerie Wilson. Nice books, nice job.
I find the books pretty easy. It is refreshing not to be hacking my way through the jungle as I have with Harry Potter, Salinger, Hemingway, wikipedia, French newspaper and magazine articles.
So I haven’t taken the laddering approach. These Bridge books make me wonder if I might have been better off looking to bracket my reading for input closer to my comprehension.
OTOH, I read what I wanted to read, I enjoyed it in my way, and I did learn a fair amount of French. So I’m not sure of the trade-offs.
I might have made more progress with less effort using graded readers – if I could find ones that were also compelling. But I might have been so bored that would have slowed down my learning.
I also wonder if my exposure to more advanced language features will pay dividends later in my learning that I would have missed with laddering.
I like Steve K’s freewheeling attitude to find ways of learning that you enjoy and keeps you in the language.
When I started German on LingQ, I used the short stories and other material, and I think they. are too advanced for a beginner, even one with six months of German like me. I later imported YouTube videos which were simpler, and I feel I made more progress. German feels very alien. However, French shares a lot more vocabulary with English, and the word order is much closer, so I think it’s easier to understand higher level texts, and get some benefit.
But at the end of the day it’s not a race, enjoyment comes first. It’s very easy to be self critical, and miss the progress one is making. And just think of the poor people slaving away at Duolingo, making very slow progress.
I had a similar experience in Turkish. I tried the mini-stories last April and got frustrated and stopped. In August I found a couple of series of Turkish lessons, and after going through them (December?) I tried the mini-stories again, and they’re useful to me now.
I notice that if I scroll down from the mini-stories, LingQ has a bunch of simpler lessons in Turkish: several different series. Maybe those work for beginners.