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LingQ pros and cons | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 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 49 of 116 16 April 2012 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Švejk Super Polyglot Newbie Canada lingq.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4402 days ago 29 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Japanese, French, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese Studies: Czech | Message 50 of 116 16 April 2012 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
In my mind B1, maybe, and B2 certainly, can be called fluency. Great going! We all have our own path, but as long as we enjoy the journey we will keep going till we get there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Švejk Super Polyglot Newbie Canada lingq.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4402 days ago 29 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Japanese, French, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese Studies: Czech | Message 51 of 116 16 April 2012 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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[/QUOTE]Funny, I think it's vice versa. Learning the vocabulary first and only then getting to the grammar only
works if a language is similar enough to one you speak. Learning Danish the natural way is quite difficult for me, for example.[/QUOTE] This has not been my experience. I have found in Chinese, Japanese and Russian that I just focused on acquiring words, and ingesting as much of the language as possible. In addition to seeing words and phrases in my normal input of interesting content, I worked with lots of examples of different patterns of structures of the language and largely avoided explanations and rules. This helped me notice these patterns in what I was reading. This worked best for me, even thought the languages were not similar to languages that I knew. I am doing the same with Czech now, but of course, Russian structure helps. We have to find the way that works best for each one of us. Exploring and comparing approaches is one of the pleasures of language learning, albeit a minor one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 52 of 116 17 April 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Steve, what was the source of these patterns? I am asking because I want to make sure we are not restricting 'grammar study' to mean memorizing rules or something of the sort. When reading a grammar book, I tend to only glance at the rules and focus on the examples, and some grammar workbooks seem to be more focused on pattern-based exercises than lengthy explanations. Edited by frenkeld on 17 April 2012 at 12:28am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Švejk Super Polyglot Newbie Canada lingq.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4402 days ago 29 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Japanese, French, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese Studies: Czech | Message 53 of 116 17 April 2012 at 3:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Sources of patterns. 1) I avoid questions in language books, but prefer to read the answers, which gives me a concentration of whatever pattern the questions wanted to test me on. 2) I have occasionally found good books with lots of examples and a minimum of explanations. I tried to type them here but note that Cyrillic letters and Czech words with accents do not work on this forum. 3) I always mark up books when reading, identifying patterns. Most of my examples, however, come from my reading at LingQ. Each saved word at LingQ will capture all the phrases that use that word in our library, and in the material that I have read on the site, so I can review these. I can also save phrases and Tag them for accusative, genitive, verbs of motion, conjunctions or whatever I want, and review them in a list. I often improve the "google translate" automatically generated translation, and then use this translated English version as the front of my Flash Cards, and go through them translating back into the target language. I will often do this with Tagged Lists to give me a concentration of the pattern that I want to study, 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 54 of 116 17 April 2012 at 3:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing this information.
Edited by frenkeld on 17 April 2012 at 9:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6739 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 55 of 116 17 April 2012 at 9:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Steve, another question. I now have an idea of what you do with patterns/grammar after you've had a lot of exposure, but what about the earlier stages of learning a language? To be concrete, what did you do when starting out in Russian? (Other languages would be interesting too, of course.)
P.S. I think Cyrillic letters do work in the forum, it surely must use unicode. Let me type the first few capital Russian letters and you can see how they come out on your machine: АБВГДЕ... They look ok on mine. Perhaps you just need to make sure the character encording of the browser when you are viewing this page is set to Unicode (UTF-8). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6112 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 56 of 116 17 April 2012 at 11:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am a longtime user of LingQ. I used it to really get grounded in French, and I in fact owe most of my foundation and even a fair amount of my more advanced knowledge in that language to the LingQ system. I find it baffling that people have such a problem with the user interface; it was much, much less intuitive when I first started with it back in early 2007 and even at that time it was quite serviceable and worked, despite being labeled as a "beta version".
A major criticism I seem to get from reading this thread lies in LingQ's learning philosophy. Well, fair enough, not everyone is going to be content to deal with ambiguity for a long time, since grammatical analysis is certainly not the focal point in their overall approach. However, LingQ does not claim to be exclusive: our good friend "Švejk" here has said many times in videos and on his blog and in the forum that you can and ought to supplement your studies with other things as you see fit. For some, LingQ will play a large role in how they learn languages, and for others, less so. But I think it has something to offer for just about everyone, at least in terms of its core functionality, that is, the ability to a) save words and phrases efficiently and systematically and, perhaps most importantly, b) access a growing repository of content that contains audio and matching transcripts on a variety of subjects and in a variety of different forms (articles, conversations, audiobooks etc.). This point cannot be emphasized enough in my opinion, for too many textbooks and readers lack corresponding audio, and almost no radio stations or podcasts provide matching transcripts. Having the two together, in one place, combined into a system designed entirely and specifically for their study has been of such convenience to me and others, that it has helped expedite the learning process to the nth degree. And for that I am very grateful. Furthermore, I tend to view LingQ as something of a bridging tool for that long, seemingly static plateau stage commonly termed the "intermediate level". In many ways it is rather like a highly efficient graded reader creator, with the benefit being that you can learn new words and expressions by saving and reviewing them from material that you yourself chose, not some editor and their publisher. I would add, also, that the Russian library in particular is fantastically rich and replete with all kinds of interesting material, and their Swedish library, in terms of conversational material is unrivalled in quality, truly, far and away the best I have ever seen for that language, anywhere. Their SwedishLingQ podcasts in particular are probably the only readily available source of natural, everyday conversational Swedish and any and all students of the language would be well-advised to avail themselves of them. Of course, LingQ is not perfect: as people have already mentioned, many of the languages have limited content and the functionality is not perfect for all non-Latin-based scripts. I personally don't particularly take to the "avatar" as it strikes me as a little bit childish, but I understand for some people (maybe younger users) it probably works and helps drive the incentive to keep building up your storehouse of saved words (or "LingQs"). As regards content creation, I think it is important to remember that it is in large part a community-based effort and will require time to grow. The script functionality is improving gradually too, although it is probably fair to say that LingQ is strongest with alphabetic script-based languages. I imagine these problems will be overcome eventually, and certainly having seen where LingQ began and where it is now, I have every confidence that they will. Edited by ChristopherB on 17 April 2012 at 12:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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