After hearing how some people think LingQ is too difficult to use when you are a complete beginner and seeing how a lot of LingQ users seem to just open a few beginner lessons and then quit, I started looking into creating more image based lessons, based on images and texts that describe them. I made some for LingQ but LingQ is not really designed to use images too much and they don’t always come out well. I am thinking about making video content that is based on images and text/speech that describes them.
I realize since LingQ is greatly reading-based, the users here will tend to be people who find reading-based learning useful, but I am curious as to who here has experience with image/picture based learning and/or video based learning and what your opinions are on it. Examples could be children’s cartoons where the characters or narrator talks about everything the happens as it happens, illustrated children’s books, comic books, illustrated vocabulary books etc.
I am also curious to whether people here have used imaged based language learning apps and what you thought of them. Although I don’t think the one I used in the past (RS) can take you nearly as far as LingQ and is of much less use when you start being more advanced in a language, I found it very useful myself back in 2005 as I was able to start as a complete beginner and get a fairly good basic vocabulary in French from using it. Most reviews I have seen from casual learners and advanced polyglots however, tend to be quite negative for RS.
It’s a pity LingQ doesn’t accept simple formatting languages. A Markdown subset would already make a huge difference.
After processing a - news - article with LingQ, I ALWAYS reread it in its original location because the formatting, highlightings, and illustrations/photos make it so much more unique and memorable.
I think that can often be a good idea. When you have image rich material or videos you import into LingQ, to both read them in LingQ and read/watch them on the original source. That is kind of how it already works for Netflix in LingQ for example.
I think the reason LingQ doesn’t go further to facilitate importing image rich content into LingQ and make sure the formatting is retained is how LingQs main feature is being an effective “reader” app and they are already doing a lot of work on adding and improving AI features to LingQ. The image thing is just not a big enough priority for them to do it.
Well, images could also help to give the eyes some rest and the mind some idle space for a bit, and then a student can continue reading.
Visual images that summarize concepts are very useful; formatting, titles, subtitles, bullet points, charts. It depends on the text people are reading, and it depends also if they have some mental difficulties such as ADHD, autism, brain fog, burnout, and so on.
I don’t find a reason to say no to images.
Regarding what the LingQ team is doing, it’s another story.
I’m not sure if it’s exactly what you are talking about, but when I first moved to France for a couple of years, 45 years ago, I got a lot out of reading comics in French in my spare time. I was already a big comic fan as a teenager, so when I arrived in France I gravitated towards continuing to read comics. They really helped with vocabulary and everyday conversations.
I found some familiar US titles in translation, as well as a plethora of original French material. It’s kind of their thing as a nation, and there were comics available on many subjects and many reading levels. (Not just superheroes, thank God.) Even though I was on a tight budget I would hit the local used bookstores and find all kinds of interesting books at large discounts below cover price.
When I taught English in Taiwan a few years later I would assemble comic strips with English captions and dialog that was appropriate to the reading level of my students. Most of them seemed to appreciate the material.
I have kicked around the idea of creating more educational material for language learning, and I’ve also concluded that doing it in the form of videos on YouTube would probably be the best way to distribute it so that I could add an audio track to the text and images.
On the other hand, who knows what LingQ will work on in the (far) future? Maybe it will eventually work on accommodating images and formats better sometime in the future. I think it would largely depend on whether it’s going to be something a lot of users request or not.
I think LingQ will certainly be more likely to work on accommodating images better if it’s users keep asking for it. Right now it’s not a priority for them but who knows whether that could change in the future?
From what I understand, France is and/or was actually the #3 country in producing comic books, behind the US and Japan. French Belgium also produces a lot of hard-back comic books like Tin Tin, Spirou, The Smurfs and many comedic ones. I have at times found some uniquely French comics in France and in Icelandic libraries like Trolls d’Troy and some Sonic-ish figure called something like Puc Puk as well as others that happen in 20th century war times or medieval times. Asterix is also French of course.
I have found comic books quite useful for learning languages at times. I think it’s good to have a variety of options to learn from, text based apps, image based apps, books with only text, comic books, children’s books (illustrated or not), videos, movies, shows, games or whatever. Your mind can get tired of doing the same sort of thing for too long so switching it up can make you re-focus.
I tried a couple of image based language books in elementary school.
This Usborne for beginners series was not effective at all, I learnt nothing:
But Richard Scarry’s Busytown-series had a kind of vocabulary for non-English natives to learn English. Every double page had a picture of Busytown listing some words on the picture. These pictures were telling a story, at least I was imaging a story around them. It was effective for me. This is a version to learn both English and German:
I had this Busytown book as a kid too. I did not use it to learn English or Danish, which were the languages it taught, while being written in Icelandic, because I just didn’t think of it as a kid and I think I mostly used it when I was too young to be literate at all. I think my parents and whoever would read to me probably did use it to help me learn Icelandic vocabulary as a little kid though. I remember picking up some examples of this book as an adult and noticing how it could actually be used to learn foreign languages.
I think you are right in that context/story matters, both with and without pictures. Just showing a picture of a lone object and showing you the name in text or letting you hear it is not great, at least not in the long run, just like I think using sentences and simple text stories is better than one-word flash cards.
I don’t know, when we discussed about it in the past, a couple of times, they didn’t seem much interested. But, to be fair, we were talking about the option to add images inside the note field to help recall. And they didn’t care about the note field either. I stopped using them.
But I thought the reader could handle images right now. They updated something but I don’t really use them, I usually delete them and keep only the text. Are you saying that the reader doesn’t handle them well because is it buggy?
Yes, there are some bugs. Previously, there were just some problems with how the image might be split between pages and another thing was the downside that you had little control over the placement of the image in general. Then later when I was looking at the lessons, some of the images would be shown while others would not. If you check out this lesson for example and look at it in a Chrome browser and then compare to what comes out when you press the “print lesson” button, you see how not all the images get displayed, but you see them in the printable version.
Max#2: Then the longer (and slightly more advanced one I think) is this one – https://youtu.be/JOxRU2dhJDY?t=236 – (skip up to about 4 minutes in to see the map) in which he talks his way through going around two routes on the displayed map, discussing what verb to use for each section. This one is an interactive lesson in which he had the people on the livestream submit answers/guesses, and he read them during the lesson, but I think it works fine for watching later. Everything is about the visuals of the obstacles on the routes on the map.
I think Olga Jarrell has some great practice videos including this one for verbs of motion – https://youtu.be/jH6POWhfkVc – I like best the image in it of the mother pushing the stroller with the son inside it and simultaneously the father leading the daughter by hand, because that gives us practice with four verbs of motion: “walking (in one direction)”, “transporting by vehicle in (one direction)”, “leading by foot (in one direction)”, and “riding a vehicle (in one direction)” in one nice simple picture. And in that same video the videos contrasting running and flying in one direction versus running and flying in multiple directions are really good, I think–eg, the dogs playing and the bees and hovering quadcopter are great visuals for “in multiple directions”.
Allowing uploading and inserting images in a LingQ text is difficult/impossible because of copyrights. There is no automatable way to ensure an image may be used in LingQ.
For imported web pages, hotlinking - showing images hosted elsewhere - is a big no-no. It’s even dangerous as sites can detect hotlinking easily, and replace their images dynamically by whatever they want, like pornography, advertisement, etc..
Oh, wow, you are so right. I didn’t even think about copyright! Not even sure about how fair use could be applied here. This is actually a serious challenge! I know something about copyright with images and it’s a mess.
However, if it’s AI generated, that’s a total different story.
It is true that there are potential copyright issues, but it is actually possible to insert images into lessons in LingQ and share the lessons. How it works is just buggy.
I do this as well, but in the reverse order. I’m an intermediate (according to LingQ) reader of Spanish. I scan news articles in Spanish, reading quickly without looking up anything I don’t understand. I look for clues in the illustrations about what is going on and what unknown words might mean. After that pass, I bring the article into LingQ and read it in the “normal” way. Unknown or LingQed words often bring the earlier illustrations back and help decipher the meaning. It’s not what I would call image-based, but it uses images to reinforce the meanings.
I usually add the caveat that I am hearing impaired so I don’t bother with listening or speaking and concentrate only on reading and writing the language. Images and any other cues or linkages really help “stick” the language and the meanings in my memory for later recall. Sometimes weeks or months later a word will recall an image I saw associated with it.
“Images and any other cues or linkages really help “stick” the language” - that is exactly what I have found to work for me and without knowing what the scientific research says, I’m pretty sure it must be hard-wired that way with most of us to a degree, since that’s bound to be one of the major ways children learn their mother tongue.
