I had a comparable experience in reading a particular book in English at the moment. My divergent thoughts have hindered my smooth following of the text and led me to a wandering reverie. Do the subject matter and the writing style have much to do with it? Thanks.

The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/en/web/reader/89698

P.S. The unknown words are at 2%, and no unfamiliar grammatical structures. I was okay with reading Pride and Prejudice and Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, although some sentences are worth extra time to ponder subtlety between lines.

Others have suggested possible reasons, including not knowing enough grammar which explains how the words relate to one another to make sense. I have used LingQ to study Spanish (which I knew well before I started), Russian (in which I knew grammatical basics before starting), and Polish. I have frequently encountered suggested translations on LingQ that are grammatically incorrect. (When I encounter these I change them.) This is especially true regarding Russian case endings but also occurs in Spanish regarding verb conjugations. Often, people don't translate how a word is actually declined (in Russian) or conjugated (in Spanish) which then does not convey its true meaning in that specific context. Also keep in mind that words can have different meanings in different contexts and if something doesn't make sense to you in a given context with the translation you already know, then go to a dictionary for other meanings of the same word. Another reason may stem from HOW your are studying here on LingQ. The program encourages the learner to highlight individual words that are not known since that number increases when you change it to "known." However, what I have discovered is that, unless I already understand the context (i.e., the grammatical construction in which a new word appears), it is more effective to highlight a new phrase. When you learn this phrase, it will not increase your word count, but you will have learned a grammatical pattern or idiomatic expression.

I think you have not yet formed a "language center" for the particular language.

I find that when I'm at the stage when I'm translating the words from my T2 into English my brain is usually fast enough to do this if I'm reading. LingQ is especially good to help with this.

When it comes to listening, however, my brain cannot recognize the word, translate it into English and still have enough buffer to be able to pay attention to the rest of the sentence and process it word by word.

I have the experience of three foreign languages. Essentially what I found was that eventually (as I gradually became fluent) I would no longer need to translate each word into English: I heard the word and I just *knew* what it meant. The meaning, not the translation. When that started to happen, I was started to be able to pay attention to the rest of the phrase without getting lost on a single word and losing the rest.

Prior to that happening I found one of the stages was I could recognize all the words in a spoken phrase but not be able to grasp the meaning. If I stopped mid-phrase to think about the meaning I lost the rest of the sentence. Again, I think what I was doing was attempting to process the meaning via my English language center instead of the slowly forming T2 language center.

For Spanish (which I have at a high degree of fluency) it feels to me like I have a different way of processing. There are words and phrases in my Spanish language center which have no correlation to English but I know what they mean nevertheless.

For Spanish I was where we are describing after about six months of memorizing and doing language CDs etc. It took about a year of effort including watching a couple hours of telenovelas per day and spending at least 2-3 hours a week trying to communicate in Spanish with Spanish speakers who could not speak any English until I formed a Spanish-with-no-translation-via-English language center in my brain.

Anyhow, although this doesn't provide any advice on how to get there from here other than to keep immersing yourself, I hope it makes sense at least from an anecdotal point of view.

I can relate with you on a slightly different case. Before, I was able to understand all the words in a sentence (japanese in this case) but not understand why the sentence flowed this way.

Obviously if you know all the words in a sentence (whether after or before looking them up) then by default you should be able to understand the literal meaning of the sentence. If you're confused by the literal meaning because it doesn't match the context then you probably stumbled across an idiom. Pop this sentence into ChatGPT and see what it says about the real meaning of the sentence.

But there might be something more fundamental going on: you don't know why these specific words were chosen to express that idea and why the flow was the way it was. This is due to not understanding how the speakers of that language fundamentally think in that language. You can tackle this by understanding grammar as well as not translating everything you read back to "natural english". Rather take the language exactly as it presents itself instead of equating it all the time to how "you would say it".

This is the exact problem that I have been having in German. But over the years I have noticed this becoming less and less of a problem. The only thing I have been doing is just reading and listening and making sure i'm lingqing phrases as much as I can. I think over time this will iron it self out through more and more exposure in the language.  

You're not alone! I've experienced (and continue to experience) this situation. In my case, it's happening because my target language is structured significantly different than my native language. It happens with both reading and listening.

This is another skill that's required beyond just knowing all the words. You don't know the grammar, or haven't been exposed to that sentence or phrase enough to intuit the meaning from it. In both cases the answer is more time and more exposure. Right now you're not quite at the necessary level to understand it, but eventually you'll develop a mental model of what that phrase means. You can speed this up by doing some targeted research as well. Keep working at it and I guarantee you'll get it!

Study grammar and common usage patterns.

Create flashcards with sentences where you know all words, but don't understand the meaning.

Also, a lot of phrases have special meaning which are not obvious from words alone, you would need to create flashcards for them as well (e.g. "raining cats and dogs").

This can get better on its own, as you get more immersion, but actively trying to understand the logic behind the meaning helps speed this process up a lot.

I call this a fog in language and  it is slowly going away with large amounts of extensive reading.

Hi, ericktolu! 

"Basically all of the words in a given video or audio but they just don’t make sense, [...]

this happens both at reading and listening [...]"

Could you please give us more "concrete" info about what is happening here (esp. "text examples" and the resources you're using at the moment!) ? 

In fact, there could be many reasons for your experience: 

• The audio / video could be too fast for you.
• You don't know / understand the topic.
• It's fiction.
• There's too much slang involved.
• It's a fast-paced conversation with sloppy pronunciation, etc. between native speakers
• You may know the individual words, but not the "collocations" (i.e. the highly conventionalized word groups) that native speakers usually use (I'm talking of tens of thousands of them). 
• Wrong expectation (you may think that you're much better than you really are when it comes to digesting "authentic" material in English).
• You try to "rush" the language acquisition process (see your replies to Steve) without trusting the process.

etc.

Your experience will only be " weird" if we can rule out most of those conventional stumbling blocks. As long as that's not the case, there's probably nothing "weird" about it.

It usually boils down to the wrong learning strategy and study routine....

Besides,it's better to relax a lttle bit because it's impossible to analyze the situation when you're in panic mode.

Other than that, as long as no one dies because of your "weird" experience, all should be well :-)

I guess that what happens when you just learn a dictionary using Anki or something like that, but has not trained enough actual reading or listening. Basically, it means you have no "feel" of the language. 

I've never been in a such situation, but the answer is obvious, you need to "use" the language more. Maybe grammar study could help a bit, if you're totally bad with it, but I'm not sure about that. 

In fact I often find myself in an opposite situation, when I don't understand half of the words, but somehow get the sentence meaning. Lingq mostly encourages you to look every word you encounter, but in fact learning to "guess" words is a valuable skill. It should be trained by doing fast reading without such convenient tools. And when you stop to rely on your words knowledge, you're forced to think about the language structure more.

Try to read the whole sentence before looking for every word. Think about it. What words do you think could be crucial for your understanding?  Look for them first. Try to understand the sentence again. Then look for other words.