- LingQ Guide from Hulk#5672Efficient lookups
- You can save time looking things up both because of community definitions which suffice in many cases for major languages like Spanish, and once you look something up it is saved for a given word (type), which reduces the amount of future lookups. LingQ also has some dictionaries that it will pull up with the click of a button, both monolingual and bilingual.
- Helps you notice
- Steve Kauffman finds that being a good noticer is one of the most important skills as a language learner. This is also a big reason that Matt advocated meditation so much. The more you notice, the faster you can acquire the language from your immersion. Having new words highlighted in blue helps you avoid skipping over words that you may have assumed you knew otherwise. Highlighting lingqs raises your awareness of words that you are in the process of learning and can get you to pay extra attention to the context and collocations.
- Motivation
- Lingq tracks a compelling stat (words known). This stat will vary for languages based on the amount of inflection in a given language but comparing to your past self or to other learners of the same language can be a source of motivation.
- Efficient LingQ Usage
- Importing
- I’m only going to comment on using LingQ as an e-reader. LingQ has an extension that allows you to import content very easily. You can import content like news, subtitles from Netflix and random articles. You can also import many different file types, provided that they have been stripped of DRM. For this reason, even if you don’t pirate books, I would suggest buying the book elsewhere and using https://1lib.us/ to download DRM-free books. Epubs seem to be the best format to import.
- Full list of supported file types: EPUB, PDF, DOCX, TXT, MOBI, SRT, ASS, VTT, TTML
- Dictionary Settings and Lookups
- I would recommend using English as the dictionary language in LingQ. This means that the community definitions will be English. This should be done for three reasons:
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- You can still access TL dictionaries/definitions via popup
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- There will be higher quality definitions available because the user base will be mostly English speakers and dictionary resources for the vast majority of languages are higher quality and more extensive in English.
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- It saves time to only use a monolingual (TL) definition when needed. You want to spend as little time doing lookups as possible so you can maximize reading immersion time. Dictionary immersion time is just simply lower quality. Another issue is that there are many components to word meaning, of which the definition is only one. Furthermore, definitions will always be somewhat vague, regardless of whether it is in the TL or not. I would recommend using a monolingual definition in two cases: the word's usage in the context does not appear in the English/NL resources or the English/NL translation is unsatisfyingly vague and you want to see if a more clear nuance is mentioned in the TL definition. This way you can still use TL definitions when they actually provide value outside of simply input. Get more input from what you are reading and less input from the dictionary.
- Reader Settings
- I would strongly recommend using “Paging moves to known” as this will save you a tremendous amount of time manually setting words to known. All non-lingqed and non-ignored words will be automatically converted to known as you flip the page. I could see “Auto grammar tagging” being useful for some languages and for beginners, but in general it’s unnecessary. Some languages have decent text-to-speech with several accents, so that can be convenient to check for pronunciation if you cba to search Forvo.
- Hotkeys
- Just be aware that hotkeys are available which could save you a lot of time, particularly with ignoring words. LingQ will automatically select the first unknown word on a page and when you mark it known or ignore, it will automatically jump to the next word. Thus, if you have multiple words next to each other that you wish to ignore, tap “x” repeatedly
- Lingqing
- I take the approach of lingqing only those words that I couldn’t understand from the context alone, or words that I want a fuller understanding of. I used to lingq words that I didn’t know actively but it does not seem to help, as LingQ trains passive vocabulary acquisition. I don’t think using the step system (that marks different gradients of how known a word is) is helpful. I only mark a word either fully unknown (which happens by default after you lingq it) or fully known (level 4). The reason for this is there is no downside to marking a word known that you actually didn’t know that well or happened to forget. You are always going to be forgetting words and if you happen to forget a word that you need to know, it will show up again and cause you to misunderstand a sentence. In such cases, you simply click on that word again (which will conveniently pull up your previous definition) and mark it unknown. Spending time down-stepping and up-stepping just takes away time that could be spent reading.
- SRS
- Under no circumstances should you use LingQ’s garbage SRS system. It sucks and will also change the known-status steps of your words.
- Fortunately, LingQ has convenient lists of lingqed words that you can filter by status and by book or show. Unfortunately, LingQ only saves a few words before and after the lingqed word for context. You could simply use this limited snapshot, but it is often not enough, and I think there is a better way. I favor asynchronous card creation in general, but especially for reading. When you are reading a book, or the subtitles of a show, many of your lingqs will come up over and over again, to the point that by the time you finish the book/show, you will have already acquired those words. As a result, I suggest that you wait to finish a book/show, and then go back to find the sentences for lingqed words. Since they are highlighted, it’s very easy to hop from lingq to lingq as you scroll through your lessons. You can then find enticing words, open the LingQ full text option, ctrl+f, and copy the whole sentence into an excel doc for easy import into Anki.
- attenius#0619 comments on using fantranslations:
- Yeah, it really depends on the quality of the translation. Some of them have like 3-5 people working on them together and come out in really natural-sounding Russian, some have like 3-5 people with each working on a different part and sound like machine translation.
- There are also English expressions that were directly translated and are absolutely part of modern Russian now too though lol, and sometimes it's hard to separate them out (eg everything is in order = vsyo v poryadkye; used in modern Russian as "everything's cool/are you okay?" very frequently). Usually if something sounds Englishy I just take mental note of it and wait to hear it from another source.
- Overall it's not something that worries me a ton, though. I'm not even 20% of the way to the level I want; still mostly concerned with basic grammar and vocab, still plenty of time still to pick up the most appropriate styles of expression
- Bree#4444’s Guide to Immersion Tiktok
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- Create a target language only TikTok account
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- Set your app language to your TL
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- Calibrate the algorithm - scroll mercilessly past things that don't interest you. Watch things 2x and :heart: things that you do like and want to focus on, while following those creators. If you're having an issue finding content you like, search for # in your TL like: #Mexico #Espanol #Colombia etc. Then scroll through that content and like and FOLLOW creators that you like.