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LingQ pros and cons | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4468 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 116 14 April 2012 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wanted to share with everyone my opinion of LingQ, and get your opinions too, in a neutral environment where we, hopefully, won’t be
censored or pressured too much by anyone. I enjoy writing product reviews, and hope some learners might find this useful. Background: I’ve been using LingQ for 2 months, to study Russian, French, Mandarin and Japanese. I read every day in Russian, and twice a week in the other languages. My approximate reading levels are A1 – Russian, B1 – Mandarin, B1 – Japanese, B2 – French. Very brief description of LingQ: It’s a site with extensive libraries of graded listening and reading material in several languages. You go to the library, sort on the level of material you want to study, and choose an article. You open the article, read it, listen to it, and download the audio to your mp3 player. There is a mouse over dictionary for your use when you read. If you click on a definition in that dictionary, a link is formed (called a lingQ), and the site will remember that is a word you want to learn. You can review the words in the site’s flashcard tool if you want. Next time you read an article, the lingQ words will be highlighted yellow, the words you don’t know will be blue, and words you know won’t be highlighted at all. The site keeps statistics on how many words you know, etc. This is the nuts and bolts of the site, and it can be used for free as long as you have a limited number of articles and lingQs in use. It costs $10/month for unlimited. I pay for unlimited. There are other services offered, like personal tutoring, essay correction, etc. To use these services, you have to buy points, and then use them to pay for the services. Pros: I can do all my reading and listening in one place. The libraries are extensive; way more than I need. The fact that the material is well organized and graded saves me tons of time. The mouse over dictionaries are very convenient. The highlighting is very helpful, and makes the material more comprehensible. Overall, this is an absolutely superb tool. With the possible exception of my SRS, it’s the single most useful language tool that I have. Regardless of the cons listed below, I highly recommend it. Cons: 1) The message that many users take away is that the best way to learn a language is to read and listen and not worry about other skills. The reading and listening will take care of the other skills. I know others learn languages differently from me, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m just concerned when I see many beginning learners doing nothing but reading and listening, thinking that grammar and conversation will be taken care of. There is talk about using conversation and essay services, but many inexperienced language learners just seem to read and listen. Then they ask questions like “how do I know when to begin speaking?” “when am I going to fully understand everything” etc. This probably isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a learner, but it’s unbalanced and inefficient imo. I sort of knew how the owner claims to learn languages before I joined. He really talks up this extreme method, but if you listen to him enough, you’ll find out he does actually study grammar and converse too. Unfortunately, people take home the reading and listening only part, and assume the rest happens by itself. This is further propagated by many articles in the library. Anything with LingQ in the title will be full of this strange language learning technique brain washing. One of the first Russian lessons I opened, for example, was something called “The lingQ Manifesto”. So bizarre. It said stuff like “My goal is to speak freely. I don’t care about mistakes. I won’t study grammar. My goal is to speak freely.” Ok, that one was obvious. Then I went onto one that was called “a simple story”. It was a 20+ part story. It started out alright. Some woman was asking a lot of questions about her brother of his apartment building’s manager. To make a long story short, the lady bribed the manager to let her into her brother’s apartment so that she could break up her brother’s relationship. When her brother’s alleged girlfriend walked in, she started spouting lingQ philosophy. I couldn’t believe it. So now I know to avoid stories with lingQ in the title. 2) In the lingQ introductory video, the owner claims to have “learned 10 languages the lingQ way”. This is false, so it’s unfortunate he put it in his advertising. 3) Japanese text parsing isn’t very good. It’s only about 90% accurate. I still use the tool, but it’s a shame they won’t do a little more development to clean it up, and make the mouse-over as good as free mouse-over dictionaries. 4) I don’t use points. I’m actually interested in some of the services, but I refuse to use points because they expire. You have a limited amount of time to use them. Pretty much all the members hate this, and there are frequent threads arguing about this. Plain and simple – it’s a shady business practice. Sure, we’ve seen this happen with frequent flier miles and telephone minutes, but those policies are also hated by customers. I bet they would make more money if they reversed the policy. 5) The forum has a lot of good content and contributors, but it’s ugly and not well organized. It’s a very cheap, watered down version of a forum. There isn’t even a quote button. 6) It’s impossible to PM other members. If you want to share your email in private, you need to make them your friend and make your email visible by your friends. Summary: LingQ is a superb tool, and I’m going to continue to use it. To me, it’s just a tool, and I will continue to ignore the philosophy, avoid the lessons with “lingQ” in the title, and stay out of the forums. If the point expiration policy is reversed, I will use other services, but I’m not holding my breath. What is your opinion of lingQ? 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5563 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 116 14 April 2012 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I tried it out for French, Japanese and Korean, but gave up very soon.
My main problem with French and Japanese: Those blue words. I have a vocabulary of several thousand words in both languages and it's very time-comsuming to mark down all known words as known, and when I don't do that, the blue background and the pop-up dictionary are rather distracting. As for Korean, the dictionary was very poor and relied on google translation a lot. Apart from that I can't work with Korean material without grammar explanations, a hyperliteral translation or a translation in Japanese. (The dictionary with Japanese as a source language is more than poor, by the way.) All in all it didn't seem worth the time I needed to invest into making the site work for me, and I don't see how it would cut down the time I needed to invest per lesson in the long run, unless I use it as my only study tool. The site gives me about the same level of intensity as using a librivox audiobook, gutenberg book + pop up dictionary (though I prefer normal dictionaries, they are good training for finding the basic form of a word, or in the case of Japanese for handwritten input/radical lookup/guessing the reading of a kanji), and it doesn't make it easy for me to work with a text in a more or less intensive way. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6394 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 116 14 April 2012 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Back in 2008 it made my comp go crazy. I don't lament not using it.
As for the philosophy, I liked how someone put it in another discussion on LingQ, that learners can be divided into 4 types based on whether they study the "hardcore" way or naturally: 1 grammar hardcore, vocabulary hardcore; 2 grammar naturally, vocabulary hardcore; 3 grammar hardcore, vocabulary naturally; 4 grammar naturally, vocabulary naturally. None of these ways is one size fits all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5526 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 4 of 116 14 April 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just use it as a clearinghouse for podcasts and audiobooks, which I think it does well.
I just ignore the philosophy, but I like to watch Steve Kaufman's videos on YouTube. I only visited the forum once because a certain polyglot claimed he was being attacked on it. I thought the polyglot was being a little dramatic. Why do you think we'd be censored for expressing honest opinions, Wulfgar? Edited by Michael K. on 14 April 2012 at 11:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6706 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 116 15 April 2012 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Nowadays I'm only participating in the forum. Before, I was losing points, found the website very slow, had problems with the flashcard import/export function, didn't like the Chinese parsing... the list goes on. I really liked the "word count" tool, though, but after some years I stopped using the system for the above reasons. To my knowledge, there's not much that I can't find someplace else on the web - for free. Online voice chats possibilities (that are available all over the place, in any number of languages), Rhinospike, SRS programs etc. Texts...
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4927 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 6 of 116 15 April 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
Have you tried using Learning With Texts? It offers a lot of what LingQ offers, the cost being only your setup time (well, and looking for text). It offers some decent statistics on your progress, too. I've only ever used LingQ for its forums, and even that's been recent. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dandt Senior Member Australia regarderetlire.wordp Joined 4421 days ago 134 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 7 of 116 15 April 2012 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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i've had a membership for over a year but only did a lesson today. I didn't do anything just because i didn't have
enough time and eventually forgot to go back. i didn't mind it. i like the idea of it keeping track of the words you 'know' and such but i'm not sure i'll use the site regularly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4468 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 116 15 April 2012 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||
I made one post in a lingQ thread that got deleted right afterwards. But more than censorship, I thought it would be a little tough to post this on the lingQ forum. I consider HTLAL to be more like neutral territory. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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