I have been studying with the Steve's book "The Linguist" and it has been very pleasure and productive. Although, I would like to begin to study with something more, let's say, literary. I tried with a book called Sailing Alone Around the World, available in the LingQ's lessons, but I think that it's a little bit difficult. First because the reading is with the English accent and I'm habituated with the American accent. Second because the vocabulary is a little bit difficult for me.


My question is, in your point of view, studying with a apparently difficult material is a good idea or it's best to learn perfectly first a content that is more easy, but less interesting?

I studied first Italian and now I have I very good level, sufficient to read the best Italian literature, but I haven't had this kind of problem with that language because I lived in Italy and my progress was natural. Now I'm not sure about what's the best way to learn a language without go to the country of that language.

Thank you for your help.

I prefer difficult, fun material over boring, easy material. I don't know how it affects learning, but if I was placed in the country speaking the language I am learning everything would be difficult to understand, but I would be very interested in understanding it. If the material is boring my thoughts starts to drift and I wouldn't learn much anyway. Of course if I can't understand a word the difficult material isn't any use either.

Since you can write quite good in English I think it wouldn't be any problem for you to take on some difficult material, especially if your difficulties are because of the material being British instead of American, as I guess yo want to be able to understand both?

I think a mixture of difficult and easy is a good idea. But I prefer difficult content, or at least interesting content.

The problem is that interesting content is often too difficult the first time. The major challenge for me at LingQ is to survive that period when all you have is scraps of understanding and no synthetic knowledge of difficult but interesting texts. But it does pass.

For my languages, Dutch is all native level material; it's not difficult for me now. Actually, I only find small spots of difficulty here and there, which is ok because the vocabulary challenge is always there.

For French, I couldn't even begin with native materials. I've imported some to see what it's like and it's just not worth my time trying to use them. 85% new or so? Yeah, that's a bit too much for me. I just get confused and distraught. Not the good kind of pushing outside the comfort zone but where I can't keep up, understand nothing and learn really nothing from it. I'd rather watch shows for that sort of listening, which feels like it's entirely passive. Even going through them I'd add less than 5% to known (mostly cognates with English).

I'd rather work with other materials, for the moment, until I bring it down to something like 30%. Of course, if I already spoke Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. I'd be much further ahead and could meet this challenge. If I already knew say...12 languages...I'd probably have far less of a problem with it too. :)

I like to do some easy content to "warm me up", them jump into extremely difficult content (on an interesting topic of course). When I reach my frustration limit or burn out I hop back to the easier content which relaxes me and makes me feel good about my accomplishements. This then gives me the ambition I need to attack the hard stuff again. Its pretty much like high intensity interval training for your brain.

I find that the biggest problem with going to far too difficult content when I'm far too early into a language, is that I can't lingq the words with any sort of skills. I end up with a lot of terrible hints. (not simply wrong tenses and such but words which make no sense at all because I don't understand most of the context either, I don't realise it.

So, extremely difficult content wouldn't keep me content. At least not for my reading and listening here at LingQ. I don't have a problem listening to native level materials at any level.

If I were to start a totally new language I'd prefer easy content. If the language is close to another one I've studied (Spanish - Portuguese, German - Dutch), the level could probably be a bit higher. I heard it's not unusual to know every character of a sentence in Mandarin and still have no idea what it means...:/