New user here; wondering what are some useful lessons (including other materials) that will help learn french via comprehensible input.
Most of the lessons I have seen here on LinQ include both text and audio; which although good; I find difficult to acquire information in context and make sense of what things mean. I often find myself repeating over words and re-listening again to certain material just to try and make sense of a word or phrase. I feel that; although useful in some capacity; it is extremely taxing. It feels as though it is not how a person should naturally acquire a language, at least in the beginning.
An example of what I am looking for, is from the the youtuber Alice Ayel who is featured in the lessons on LinQ. She teaches language through contextualized storytelling. Along with the text and audio; I can breakdown what is being said and shown; which makes it easier to comprehend the information. That being said; I am struggling to find content both here and elsewhere that provides information similar in this way.
Essentially; I am trying to acquire a language in the closest way that a child would; but with the approaches of an adult. (Any other material/content here or elsewhere is welcomed.)
Finally; is there better way to filter out results in the beginner section?; as there is a lot of content to choose from and is difficult to determine what is useful at this stage.
On thing is “comprehensible input” and quite another teaching through storytelling. The former is more general, it simply refers to engaging with material in a way that you can understand, by any means. The latter refers to a particular way of getting the meaning across. All Lingq lessons are designed to be aids to the first method.
Although storytelling can be an interesting method for getting acquainted with the language, it just doesn’t scale. Eventually you’ll have to tackle real content and I don’t think you can learn a lot of vocabulary through storytelling. Typically there is a huge gap between storytelling lessons and “normal” material, so that the former method doesn’t prepare you so well for the the next step, which is exactly what you are experiencing. Anyway, there is in fact little content available in that format, as you have discovered as well.
If you get lost reading my advice would be:
Begin with simple material, such as this: Conéctate - LingQ or this Conéctate - LingQ and periodically step up the level. I don’t think Lingq “mini stories” are that simple.
Try to understand the structure of the sentence, not just the meaning. For example the first sentence in the above course is “Où allez-vous?”, you translate it and get “Where are you going?” Go now through the words and make mental notes of “which word is which”, “oú” is where "vous is “you”, “allez” is “are you going” you can see that there in not a direct word to word correspondence, get used to that kind of quirks.
Sometimes, you can also try to learn more about the structure of the language. You can do that as you go, by researching those sentences whose structure you don’t get, either by googling about them or asking in the forum. You can also do this more systematically by gradually reading a bit about the grammar of the language, take it slow, just read occasionally about it and don’t try to memorize, it’s just an aid to help you understand better and it’s not indispensable if you dislike it. the “as you go” method does work as well.
I can see how conversational material is useful compared to storytelling. The sentence mode is definitely useful; but as you can imagine very slow; but I suppose it will be become easier as I get more acquainted with the language.
Yes, you are likely to go very slowly in the beginning. This is to be expected and nothing to worry about. It is better if you read very little material every day but actually understand it, rather than to rush through mindlessly. You will find that you can read much faster as you get used to the language. Give it a couple months.
Je vous souhaite du succès!
Btw, this is where, IMO, storytelling is useful: by combining a slow but sure process as the one I suggested with storytelling lessons you get the best of both worlds. On the one hand, you build strong understanding that will be a good basis for tackling real material later on; on the other you get faster, more enjoyable and more relaxed exposure to the language through stories. Alices’s lessons are great, btw, I hadn’t watched them before.
Once you can read more fluently, you’ll find you don’t need storytelling so much because the texts themselves provide you with enough context for understanding.
For now, you can work on the stories as they become available and read sentences in the meantime.
I’ve been looking at the ‘beginner 2’ lessons for French and some of them have ridiculous audio. Normally I can listen to the regular speed French news on YouTube and catch about 65-70%, but in some of the beginner ‘2’ lessons the woman speaking exaggerates the elisions to an absolutely ridiculous extent. A notable example is the last Part A sentence in Histoire 15 of LingQ mini stories “Peut-être qu’elles essaieront la semaine prochaine”. You have to listen to it to believe it!
For straight up beginner it’s worth doing simple stuff for a while because jumping in above your level will just crash everything. The best content on here after that are the Inner French podcasts.