Hello!

I'm Douglas from Brazil.
I'm new at LingQ and I liked this different method to learn a language.

But I'm a little bit confused with this method.
I would like to know which is the best way to study here?

I'm waiting for your help!


Thanks!

I'm curious about this too. I've been using this site for three days and am still a bit confused. In particular, I never know when I'm "done" with a lesson. When all the words are either marked as known or LingQ's? When I get bored of it? When I've listened to it and can understand it just from the audio?

Is it bad to have more than half of the words in a lesson marked as LingQ's/yellow? Should I try to get more of them into "known" before going to the next lesson? After three days of using this site, I have about 250 known words (mostly because I knew them from outside of this site, through classes / textbooks), and 250 LingQ's. Is that a bad ratio? Should I try to convert some of those 250 LingQ's into my 250 known words, or just keep going and adding to both?

I've seen enough of Steve's videos to know that there is no one best way to do this, but I'm still curious about what works best for others. How long do others stay with a lesson? How do they know when to go on to another one? I'm just curious about pace: should I try to race through 20 lessons a day, or go slower and only do one or two a day, or something in between?

Here is what I do.

As a beginner

When I start I use beginner content from our library. I save all the words that I don't know. I read the text a few times, and then listen a few or even more times. These beginner texts are short, so this is not a problem. I move on to the next lessons as soon as I understand even some of it. At the beginning it is difficult to understand when we listen, even if we have worked out the meaning from reading and creating LingQs.

The goal is not to memorize the new words, nor to understand the whole text. The goal is just get a small toe hold in the language so that you can move on to the next lesson to get more exposure to the language. There I repeat the process. Soon I will start doing a few beginner lessons from the same collection at the same time, one after the other. I also review the earlier lessons.

I go through my saved LingQs just as additional exposure, and exposure from a different angle, without context. I do not expect to learn them, nor to move them to known. I find that after I have read enough lessons with these yellow highlighted words in them, I just know them. At that time I move a bunch of them to known from the vocabulary page, or I just leave them. They seem to move to known on their own.

As I progress I tend to study longer texts, often imported from elsewhere. I listen less often, and will move on when I understand 60-70% of what I am listening to.

I do not think it is possible to convert new words to known words, no matter how many times you study them. Just keep reading and listening, and one by one they will fall into place.

Thank, Steve, that helps.

One more question though, if anyone has any suggestions: I'm studying Japanese, and often I know how a word is said (and the kana for it), but don't know the kanji. Should I mark it as "known" if I know how it is said, but not how to write it? For instance, I know that tea is o-cha, but I couldn't recognize the "tea" kanji in isolation. Should o-cha count as known or unknown for me?

Kuhero san,
It Happened yet with me. I usually mark as a unknown word, because afterwards very quickly you will recognize this word. The aim of this "machine" is always to have word for memorize: don't be worried with the quantity.

thank you

rinkuhero,

Marking words as known is just a matter of whether you want them to appear in yellow in your texts.I do it in a rather haphazard way. I also often retrieve words from the "known" area, when I discover that I no longer "know" them.

Thanks again. I compromised by marking words that I know how to say but do not know the kanji for as level 3 (light) yellow, and using level 1 (strong) yellow for when I don't know a word at all. Level 2 (medium) yellow I don't use that often, but it's for when I know the kanji but not the pronunciation.

Offhand suggestion to the site admins: it might be good if the user could optionally set which colors to use for highlights (e.g. set level 2 to orange, and level 3 to green), instead of using different shades of yellow for each, since it's hard to visually distinguish the yellows of level 1 and 2.

Hello ALL,
.
New guy here. I've often wondered this also. Is it better to go through one library lesson and then focus on reading and listening only that one until you have it almost mastered or is better to do three or four at the time, then spend several days going over these three or four. I enjoy going over several different lessons at a time but then I realize I have all these words and lingq's to learn. Are my jumping the gun by jumping too far ahead? Thanks for your responses.