Title says it all. I want to move to more extensive reading now that I’m getting better at German. I play around with this outside of LingQ and really like it. I’ve gotten over that problem of wanting to understand every sentence and look up every unknown word but it would be nice to do this using lingq because it would track the words I’ve read, it’s easier to look up phrases and words when I do want to and many other reasons.
The problem is, if you don’t look up a word and create a lingq, it’ll assume you know it and create a very faulty known word count over time. What do people do?
P.S. It would be interesting if there was a toggle whereby you can read through uploaded books but the blue words don’t get added to known words when you change page. They remain blue so that you can skim read things using the site. What are peoples thoughts on this?
To avoid lingq automatically assuming you know words, you can press “X” while on a word instead of marking it as known, which will ignore that word and un-highlight it.
One thing that had helped me is reading things that aren’t too extremely difficult. I find most YouTube videos imported into LingQ and most podcasts that don’t go too in depth into a discussion work really well. most of them have main words and verbs that get repeated and seen frequently. Of course new vocabulary will be introduced but not at a high rate. if there are a bunch of words you don’t know I don’t think it’s a huge deal as long as you can follow what’s going on. Hope that helps because it’s helped me.
I saw this thread and thought I would give you my two cents.
I believe that both intensive and extensive reading (and listening) are required in order to become proficient in any language.
Everything will depend on your target language: is it close to your mother tongue? What’s your current level? etc.
Lingq, I believe, is better suited for intensive reading since it encourages you to look up every word. I like to use it primarily for articles, short stories, graded readers; basically texts that are not overly long.
For extensive reading, I prefer to read on my tablet or e-reader. My target language is Korean and I love reading at length on Ridibooks or Kyobobook because they are made for Korean texts and the parsing is perfect. I aim to read texts of which I already understand 50% at least, so it is not too tedious.
With extensive reading, progress will be slower and harder to notice at first, but the volume of text you’ll consume will eventually make up for not looking every word you don’t know.
It was a little hard for me to put away the dictionary since I tend to be a perfectionist, but I believe this is the right thing to do over the longer term.
Reading a 400 page Korean novel on Lingq and checking up every word would probably take me over a year at the moment. This is neither realistic nor reasonable.
Thanks for all the replies here. I wasn’t aware initially of the setting to turn off “moving words to known”. That’s handy. I’ve been using the “x” to ignore words.