What is this purpose of this page.....to teach or to sell?

I have just bought a graded reader and have started to ‘try’ and learn from the page, but LingQ have decided to put a distracting BOLD link at the bottom of the page to try and sell more graded readers.

My question, as always when thinking about these things is, what is the purpose of the page, for me to enjoy something I have just purchased, or for LingQ to try and sell me more?

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That does look annoying. I hate to sound cynical, but a common marketing practice is to try selling additional items or services to people who have already bought from you before. If the situation is as you describe it, that could be what is going on here.

I haven’t bought any of the supplementary material here on LingQ. I have read / listened to quite a few of the original Lupin stories that are available for no additional cost in LingQ’s French library. Those are 100+ years old, and have not been rewritten to fit into a “graded” format. I don’t know if those originals would be useful to you or not.

LingQ has a feature which I’ve never used myself which supposedly uses AI to convert more advanced writing into a simplified format, using a more limited vocabulary, (like graded readers do). I don’t want to use the phrase “dumbed down” to describe it, but that’s the general idea. You can supposedly do the same thing yourself using something like ChatGPT and then import the resulting simplified stories into LingQ yourself.

I hope that helps!

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You could just use the courses that come free with you subscription. There are lots of books and lessons in the French library which you don’t have to pay for. When I was studying French here there were Arsene Lupin books there for free and lots of classics like The Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables, The Stranger (l’Etranger), Jules Verne books etc.

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Ultimately LingQ is a commercial product, and they are heavily geared towards marketing, with adding new features given precedence over making existing ones work well. The associated videos on YouTube are adverts, albeit cleverly disguised as educational videos.

I find that the so called progress statistics are a very poor measure of progress, and are more for marketing and addiction purposes than learning. I am sure others will disagree.

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