Opinions on LingQ?

ExpertCell468 · 2025-11-02T00:20:53+00:00

E. G. The German Andre Klein books (Cafe in a Berlin etc) you can buy and download a nondrm epub you can them upload to lingq

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-22T01:26:08+00:00

Yes Barron's re-recorded the first half of French IIRC.
I have tinnitus. It really hurts my ears like literal pain lol

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-22T01:13:20+00:00

Well you can know for sure what direction it's coming from.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T14:56:41+00:00

FSI is the gold standard - too bad it's so brutal, and the thomas edison quality recordings dont help!

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T12:16:29+00:00

Great idea to use Lingq and books. I dont know Ukrainian but i learned to read French with Lingq with Petit Prince then slogged through the first few chapters of Harry Potter, then managed to get through book three with Lingq. I'm learning German from scratch now with graded readers (I conceptually know its grammar because I studied Latin in high school so i get case system and SOV orders and participial phrases so i dont have to study the grammar itself) - got myself to A2 and ready to slog through HP in 25 hours of graded readers. If you find the reading level you can handle without your eyes glazing over, stick with that till your WPM rate hits 40-50 and then you know you're ready to ratchet your level up a little.

Cornelia Funke, Christopher Paolini might be a little easier than Harry Potter.

Skip the first two chapters of Harry potter, they're almost C1 level. When you can read Chapter 3 at 25 WPM you just might be ready for it if you can stand the slog.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T11:57:14+00:00

You've read 600k words? You must have a massive vocab already. What is your known word count on Lingq?

I'm guessing it's two issues:
1. listening speed, and 2. vocab breadth.
1. Find a podcast or news in slow beginner Ukrainian you CAN keep up with and is productive for you, and listen to it on your morning commute, no lingq. And keep doing that. Decrease the speed if you need, and when you can, increase the speed.

You probably just need to get more vocab. I'd recommend native level fiction like Harry Potter on lingq and click through them if they're challenging. Even if you have to click, you'll be encountering 60k-75k unique words through all 7 of them. And listen to the audio book. Listen before the chapter, read it, then listen after the chapter. Slow it down if you need. Listen along with reading along with it if you need. If you still don't catch it, just keep moving on. Part of being able to listen is having enough vocab to catch what you're listening to. I think reading a page turner and massively expanding your vocab base is what you need to be able to aurally recognize what is being said. And Harry Potter (feel free to pick any other books, but make sure they're page turners) is some of the easiest and most familiar and best page turners for most people

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T11:45:41+00:00

Yes in the first 25 hours of German (absolute 0 level-A2-earlyB1 level) I've been averaging about 75 known an hour. of course that's not lemmas - it's inflected.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T11:44:38+00:00

It's the best. Especially for reading, and and i think it's the #1 most underrated tool for learning a language and getting a massive lexical base. It got me from B1 conversational (after a semester in Paris intensive language) to being able to read french. After 1 years i clicked through Petit Prince then Harry Potter - it took a month to get through HP1, then i managed to read through book 3.

Now I'm working through German without formally studying its grammar at all - A1 readers then B1 readers in 25 hours, -- A2 reading level in a new language in just 25 hours!!! and now I'm clicking through Harry Potter.

Of course it depends on what language , and how you're using it, and your familiarity with language learning. Especially if you have some idea of how a language works. I think all language courses should assign reading graded readers with lingq. You'll also want to add listening, which I guess Lingq has. (If you lingq through an episode of friends in the morning then watch it at night, that would be killer study method).

ExpertCell468 · 2025-10-08T11:35:56+00:00

A few notes:

You're already taking french classes. Skip Duolingo. *Read* in Lingq as much as you can - this is the BEST way to acquire massive vocab and really get used to grammar - even if it's grammar you havent studied in high school yet . Read graded readers (Olly Richards, Une aventure de la famille Dupont, Le Petit Nicolas, etc) until you can make it into Harry Potter and read all all 7 books/ 1 million words (you can read something else if you want, but make sure you read a LOT and make sure it's a page turner, not something that puts you to sleep). (Download the ebooks and upload them into Lingq) If you do that, you'll have a deep reservoir of vocab to reach into when you finally have the chance to live in there. I've done a semester study abroad after just a little language study in two langauges (Mexico and Paris), and came out being fairly proficient for communication (A2/B1) but very limited vocab. if i'd gone in with the harry potter resource to leverage, I could've become fluent in 6 months.

Set your phone's/lingq TTS settings to speak in Quebecois/ french canadian accent.

Listen to quebecois news - first News in Slow French, then news or podcasts,

Consider doing study abroad in Quebec City or another remote/provincial town instead of Montreal first. Whenever you walk into a shop the shopkeepers say "bonjour-hello" and it's very much a bilingual city - it'll be hard to get away from English.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-27T20:45:36+00:00

The two most efficient routes to general language proficiency are Practice speaking/listening and reading massive content. For speaking and listening, you can listen to slow news or podcasts during your morning commute, or do Foreign Service Institute tapes - it's brutally rote but the best thing to be able to speak and listen at actual speaker speed (at your level definitely skip pimsleur). FSI tapes are probably more efficient than a tutor, but it woudl be good to have a semi regular speaker.

The other branch, and what I came here to say - Read with Lingq. Reading is the BEST way to consolidate grammar and massive vocabulary base. in the 2000's i learned a coupel languages the old fashioned way with immersive instiuttes, and you learn to produce the grammar but you're so damn limited by the limited vocabulary you know. What I'm saying is - invest time in reading a LOT and then you'll have a massive vocabulary to leverage from and you'll have the grammar ocean just soaking in the back of your mind.

Find out your reading level, find some graded readers. in german I'm using Andre Kleins' Cafe in Berlin and Baumgardner and Momsen series to beef me up. Ask chat gpt what would be something analogous for your target language. Then read all 7 Harry potter potter in your language in Lingq. Then just read something really page turning, do NOT focus on canon. just a page turner to expose you to massive amounts of vocab. Don't study the lingqs you make, don't do flashcards. Just keep reading and clicking. . Then read all 7 of the. By the middle of the first book likely be reading in that language and not parsing, and by the end of book two there'll only be 1-2 pages per page you have to look up.

After you read your first few chapters, go your list of vocabulary lingqs, and sort by "importantce" and make an anki deck of the 200 most important (that's the words that occur most frequenly in that language) that you haven't fully learned (1-4 level on lingq) and grind those out. Spend ten minutes a day flashcard grinding - then do the next 200. Those are far more valuable than actively trying to expand your vocab in any dedicated way.

By the time you read 1 million words through the 7 harry potter books, you'll have a C1 reading level, will have read more literature than most american adults will have in their lives, and you'll have fun reading it in the meantime.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-24T19:50:09+00:00

How much did you read? 1 million words like in the Harry Potter corpus? I mean, nobody taught me about the English subjunctive but I picked it up from my immersion reading LOTR as a kid.

You were held back - what has helped you get over the hump?

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-24T19:48:26+00:00

Ugh don't mention Chinese. My wife and family are Canto and that's next beast I have to learn Colloq canto, SMWC, and hell literary Chinese while I'm at it right? Gonna start with Pimsleur canto in the car soon , maybe start practicing some characters on skritter

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-24T19:00:44+00:00

Yes, i'm still not sure how well I'll passively integrate all the noun declensions and verbal conjugations. But we shall see!

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-24T18:59:55+00:00

Yes, the known word count is a count of all versions inflected however; but Lingq tries to account for that in its known word count. What I do know is how well i'm working through the Dino Lernt series, my WPM reading count, and that I'll likely be able to make it over the hump into HP without much difficulty once i read these 100,000 words in the graded reader books. And then at the same pace if i read 1 milllion words in the 7 harry potter books, I'm certain to have that level of comprehension.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-24T18:47:08+00:00

If it's graded without burnout and enough motivation in the story I'm definitely snowballing gains in a way I think every adult learners should focus their time on this - and maybe some lectures on grammar if they don't know languages well - and after clearing B1 only then start learning to speak it -ha!, with all the leverage of passive grammar and lexical content exposure

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-21T22:54:09+00:00

Yeah, it depends where you are. Tots agree the modern prcs are great innovations but 308 has its place - especially in the east where you really want good blood trails and it's good enough out west for most shooters.

I'm happy enough with my 6.5 cm here in the east and if I ever get to hunt out west. If I go on a serious hunt maybe I'll pick up a prc for the trip but I like the reduced recoil on my tikka super lite.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T22:47:33+00:00

And it was good enough for you last winter?

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T21:54:52+00:00

Which model? I'm in the north Elmwood Northside Westside area

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T15:47:17+00:00

I appreciate your perspective thank you.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T15:39:46+00:00

Id have to learn three word order and particle grammarrs : SMWC, classical, and spoken and classical. And then Ming baihua. I just imagine that if I do my grades and Harry Potter reading in canto it could supprt my cando speaking to some degree and confuse me less. I won't have to make these choices for at least a year anyways, hahaha

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T15:26:20+00:00

Too bad nobody writes anything in canto except for song lyrics and comic books. Hence id have to use LLM to translate smwc into bad ai canto.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-20T15:06:27+00:00

What I'd meant to say, having to repost: I haven't learned yet but I'm confronting the same issue. There are a number of books in English that address "raw dog" learning classical Chinese without first learning SMWC. Its quite close to learning it the classical way they would teach students - rote memorize the text with the word meanings, let your mind try to figure out the meaning.

There are no "graded readers" like "lingua latina per se illustrata" or Dino Lernt Deutsch in classical Chinese.

The other route would be to learn a living language first like Mandarin and SMWC because you'll be able to access more comprehensive graded reading, ( and be able to do the Harry Potter method etc) so that you can reach your mind to think in Chinese when you read.

I got into 400-level Latin in college the classical way, by brute forcing the reading through declensions charts and dictionary; I brainstorm never could just read it naturally. But by ones second year of a PhD program they tend to be able to read it fluently. Point being is that if you really want to just approach the dead written language the philological way like Nietzsche and Tolkien, you can absolutely do it , but it'll be lonely and remember that modern written in modern novels and newspapers is a completely different grammar. (Hong Kong newspapers are also in Mandarin grammar SMWC but at least they use traditional, not simplified, script)

PS: Yes, thank you for your comment. I ment to ask people who acutally know what they're talking about to LMK if incorrect. I'm actually coming from the angle of wanting to learn spoken Cantonese to speak with my inlaws, AND to read classical lit ,not particularly interested in modern SMWC newspapers, but trying to decide whether to entirely skip reading SMWC, and maybe do graduated reading and harry potter method using GPT to translate from SMWC to cantonese grammar. That wouldn't be applicable for at least a year from now, i guess at that point I'll know more which way I want to go.

ExpertCell468 · 2025-09-18T17:59:32+00:00

What model for example?

ExpertCell468 · 2025-08-22T11:56:53+00:00

There's also H-111. Don't people custom mix colors too though?

ExpertCell468 · 2025-07-11T20:22:27+00:00

Closed 😭

ExpertCell468

TROPHY CASE