I was enjoying the story “Who is She?” in Italian and Japanese–until it turned into an advertisement. It was anti-climatic to say the least. Are all the stories from LingQ going to morph into the same schtick, or are there stories that are simply stories, with reasonable, interesting endings?
What exactly you were annoyed with in the “Who is she?”?
You mean that at the end “she” is learning a language on Lingq. Yeah, that’s a bit odd but I think it was meant as an inside joke, rather than an advertisement. However, I do understand why you disliked it. I found “Who is she” useful for learning but quite disappointing as a story. No other Lingq material, to my knowledge, contains self-references, certainly not the mini-stories. “Who is she” is one of the first Lingq stories and it shows.
IMO, Lingq-created content is useful, as I mentioned, but not very engaging as narrations. for example their endings are seldom interesting, although they’re usually at least “reasonable”, so be warned. It would be great to write more complete stories, with some conflict and resolution as a learning tool and translate them into as many languages as possible.
However, there is other content on Lingq (although not created by the staff) that works as a story. For beginning Japanese try, e.g.,
Notice that the vast majority of the content on Lingq is not created by Lingq itself. The only exceptions that I can think of are “Who is she”, “Eating out”, and the mini-stories. That Lingq-created created is also the only one that you can find in different languages, the rest is language specific.
Never read it…I did just skim to see what advertisement you might be talking about. In the german version it’s a little confusing because it refers to the Linguist (which is a book by Steve) but some of the translations say LingQ. Ultimately I’m not sure why it offended since you are reading on LingQ, but nevertheless as ftornay points out, the LingQ content is there just to get you started and it may or may not be engaging to everyone. Most beginner material in any language learning environment isn’t terribly interesting. You just have to use the excitement of learning something new as the motivator until you get to interesting content.
However, this is where LingQ shines, because you can find your own content online and import it. I’m sure others have imported some decent, interesting content that you can look at already as well. This does mean you might need to spend some time searching for things that might be interesting but it’s well worth it in my opinion.
Maybe try the LingQ mini-stories? They might be a little more engaging than “Who is She”. To my knowledge they don’t reference LingQ at all. The sooner you can get past the beginner material you’ll start to find more interesting content. Take a look at the youtube videos Eric (not me) has done on the LingQ channel. He’s learning Japanese and maybe some of his tips can point you to some interesting content.
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The last lesson of my purchased Assimil Japanese With Ease advertised itself, and I don’t have a problem with it; I was using Assimil after all. It’s still useful for vocab, grammar, sentence construction…
アシミルおかげで日本語を「無理なく」覚えたでしょう。
Thanks to Assimil, you have learned it “with ease”.
そのためにはこれらのアシミルの本はあなたの好伴侶にならなくてはなりません。
For that your two Assimil volumes should remain your trusty companions.
