Hey guys, we hear you about the 20 LingQs limit being very limited and maybe not giving you a decent opportunity to determine if LingQ Premium would be worth it. You can get 100 additional LingQs by either signing up with a referral code or getting a friend to sign up with your referral code. Please try that.

Is it possible, is there a way, to have a sentence repeat continuously until you are satisfied that you are catching all the words? Regards and thanks.

Listening mini stories is a bit difficult. I am not concentrating on the story when I walk. Or is it not necessary because the brain is still listening

20 LingQ limit for free accounts, but I paid for one month to see how it is. I liked it, so I paid for one year. I tried Babbel for over a year, memories, Duolingo and drops. Sadly, I have a lifetime subscription to Babbel, but maybe I go back when I learned a lot of vocabulary on Lingq.

same I was skeptical of Duolingo coming from memories but realised the duo lingo league tables helps to distract from pain of learning great for competitive ppl.  I was attracted to this for videos and TV shows. seems to require more conscious learning.  still early days so ill try a little harder but I feel Duolingo will be my staple. 

I credit Lingq for establishing my first foothold in learning Korean. Some basic features have made a considerable impact on both my learning style and efficiency. Firstly, electing a lesson based on the percentage of unknown words enhances the readability of the text. Secondly, the simplicity of looking up definitions with linked online dictionaries saves tons of time. The highlighted or lingqed words are the last and least noticeable, which help me retain the less familiar vocabulary with greater efficiency as I follow along in the reading. All these may mean little to a beginner in using Lingq, but it makes a world of difference as we can talk about reading books, watching TV series, and Youtube channels of particular interest, etc., in a much shorter time frame than we expected. I have constantly reminded myself that personal time and effort are an essential part of the equation besides excellent tools.

You can't do much with a free account, but I can attest that reading and listening to content in LIngQ is so much superior to Duolingo that there is no comparison. Reading and listening to self-selected content is vastly superior to translating millions of sentences and having cartoon characters treat you like you are a pre-schooler.

I'm on Lingq 38 days. I was learning Spanish with Babbel over one year and I thought I will never learn Spanish. Almost nothing stuck in my brain. Now with Lingq I can read easy stories. Babbel helped me a little bit with grammar, though.

I've learned Japanese from scratch on LingQ. It was harder than, say, Russian, because the Japanese writing system is truly frightening. But other than that, it's the same as learning any other language. You find content that interests you, at a level that you almost understand, and you keep reading.

I import Agatha Christie novels into LingQ and read them. My main problem is that it is hard to find DRM free translations in Japanese. If anyone can recommend a source of Japanese novels in PDF form, I would be very interested ;-)

You do need the premium version though. The free version isn't worth the money, so to speak.

I've talked about this before, but I came into LingQ understanding what I wanted was an audio-reader software that made tracking words easier. I had essentially re-invented this concept in calibre, highlighting 5 words/page I didn't know and looking them up in wiktionary/glosbe/etc. After reading a book doing this I thought, someone has to have had this idea before and found LingQ.

For the core functionality of LingQ to click for you, you need to buy into the idea of extensive reading, and tools that make extensive reading more accessible sooner.

As a complete beginner looking to start Japanese, you may benefit more from other tools first as others have suggested. There are of course Mini Stories and you could get mountains of short story content from ChatGPT now (at your own peril), so it is certainly possible to learn only using LingQ, but it may be more efficient to use a more structured approached.

In particular with Japanese you have the mountain to climb of 3 writing systems, and one being logograms. SRS is your friend here -- Memrise and Anki.

Some other suggestions (i learned chinese but hey, kinda similar)

Like peter said, LingQ is great but you need a bit of a base to start with LingQ if you are learning chinese / japanese vs a related language

Get some basic grammar down, read a bunch of graded readers (https://dokushoclub.com/2022/02/12/graded-readers/) while cramming kanji with an SRS tool (some people like wanikani or remembering the kanji or mnemonics with anki)

the mini stories aren't really that great for japanese / chinese beginners since they throw a bunch of random characters that aren't necessarily N5/N4 beginner level

But while getting a good N5/N4 base down, LingQ can still be used! There are some great beginner resources that people have uploaded - search for "comprehensible input" and go through a lot of those while learning the kanji / basic grammar. The vocab will come from reading a lot (like a lot....like way more than you think...) - the trick is to get in the habit of reading a little more every day and keep up your streak!

after you get a base you can start the fun part, by uploading your own content! Get webtoepub google chrome extension and you can import a lot to stories from https://syosetu.com/ or find your own epubs to upload

Believe me, reading webnovels (especially with LingQ's TTS!) is a super fun way to learn a language - you'll stall out very quickly with duolingo

Hi grizzlyfoxcat,

Here a few suggestions for your challenges / issues:

1) Ask Zoran (the LingQ support) to raise the threshold to 100 or 200 LingQs.

However, this may not be sufficient for Japanese. In this case, you could use ReadLang (https://readlang.com/) for a while to learn the ropes about (Audio-)Reader based second language acquisition.

If I remember correctly, Japanese is implemented as a beta version in ReadLang. Unfortunately, I don't know how user-friendly this beta version is. I've used ReadLang only with Spanish and Portuguese.

2) The more interesting question is if you should use LingQ for Japanese as an (absolute) beginner.

I've been learning Japanese for about 2.5 years and I'd say no. Starting with LingQ immediately and from scratch is great for close second languages (in my case - as a native speaker of German - other Germanic or Romance languages), but Asian languages with pitch accents (like Japanese) or tones (such as Mandarin, Vietnamese, etc.) are different L2 beasts (at least from an Indo-European native speaker perspective).

After testing countless apps and approaches with Japanese (Duolingo, Assimil, Anki decks, Memrise, Skritter, Michel Thomas,JapanesePod101, LingQ, etc.), I'd say you'll  probably be happier with AudioReader software such as LingQ if you lay a solid foundation first.

Here is my list of recommendations for Japanese as a beginner:

• Pimsleur as a grammar light, speaking first approach (https://teamjapanese.com/pimsleur-japanese-review/)
• The Memrise Japanese courses 0-7 (esp. the paid version with videos from natives is excellent) https://app.memrise.com/de/courses/english/japanese-4/
• Skritter for Japanese (https://skritter.com/) - just reading in kana and kanji is way too passive for my taste, but writing these characters yourself is highly effective.
• The foundational and advanced Michel Thomas courses are great for understanding the basic grammar patterns in Japanese, which gives a huge motivational boost. In my opinion, these are "must have" courses.

After those courses, I'd start either with Assimil or LingQ's Mini Stories (in fact, I'm using both right now :-)), then I'd continue with a few hundreds "Learn Japanese with Noriko" lessons that are already imported into LingQ (https://www.lingq.com/en/learn-japanese-online/courses/887822/) and use Roger Lake's / Noriko Ura's Audio Lessons and Readers (https://www.japaneseaudiolessons.com/how-to-read-japanese-and-learn-kanji/).

The rest is straightforward for me (at least from a reading while listening point of view):

• reading longer non-fiction texts / light novels in LingQ
• importing Netflix shows into LingQ
• and finally, a few thousand hours later, just reading / listening to what I want in Japanese.

Notabene: Further grammar resources for Japanese I'd recommend are

• Tae Kim's grammar guide https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/ (there are also free decks available on Memrise:  https://app.memrise.com/course/62166/a-guide-to-japanese-grammar-tae-kim/)
• Cure Dolly videos: https://www.youtube.com/@organicjapanesewithcuredol49
• Bunpo: https://www.alllanguageresources.com/learn-japanese-bunpo/

Good luck,

Peter

PS - 

I'd add 

deepl.com

and

ChatGPT for Japanese to the tool zoo mentioned above. 

See, for example:

https://medium.com/illumination/i-used-chatgpt-to-teach-me-japanese-fast-here-is-what-i-learned-in-20-minutes-c26895cc2941

I first stumbled upon LingQ about 15 years ago. I'd seen a video of Steve's and thought I'd give it a go - the free version anyway.

I really just didn't get it. Ran out of LingQs almost immediately, and thought it was a complete waste of time. Any time I saw one of Steve's videos pop up on YouTube I thought "I'm not watching that, it's just the guy who likes to plug that weird, annoying app that serves no clear purpose".

I'm not sure what changed. I did eventually watch Steve's videos and something chimed with what my language learning experience had been up to that point. Maybe because I was no longer a poor student I didn't baulk at the idea of paying for a subscription for something. Either way, I gave it a go just over a year ago and can confirm it is very useful. I use it to top up my French and Spanish which are already quite good, and I started Italian from scratch and am now on my second novel in Italian. I plan to dedicate more time to Greek in the coming year, and wouldn't think of not having LingQ as my go to tool for doing that.

So, in short it's a fantastic tool. Very effective. But the limitations of the free version are pretty much the main reason why LingQ didn't have over a decades worth of business from this customer

Ya this 20 LingQ limit is probably why I can never get my students to purchase even a monthly subscription to try it more. For me and many, LingQ is valuable, but it's hard to know if it's worth it for you without letting you try it more. I know the first time I tried LingQ, I immediately closed the site because I already hit the paywall limit in 2 seconds and didn't know how LingQ gave me any value. I can't imagine how many users have been lost with this odd strategy. Completely shooting themselves in the foot. Raising it to 1000 LingQs or 100 Known words or something would do LingQ wonders to experiment with. The only reason I came back was when I was struggling in the beginner stage forever, and I thought, "man, if only there was some tool that does (what LingQ does)" and found lingq again with my google search terms, came back and THEN it dawned on me how useful it is and I signed up. From there I saw all the other excellent features. It is odd how we humans don't blink to pay $10-20 for a single language lesson, a single meal, a single drink, but then we have this gut reaction and scoff at even being forced to pay for a $1 subscription if we don't get to try an app/website for more than 7 Days. But LingQ is very stubborn to change and this is just the introduction to that. So, welcome to LingQ! A great tool with lots of odd quirks!

It's monthly so you don't get sucked into a big annual purchase and you can still try it out. But it is a big drawback that there isn't a good free option to really try it first or like DuoLingo where you can actually do the whole course for free. Most people like LingQ after they've learned the basics somewhere else. But some people like it even as beginners. It doesn't hold your hand at all. There is some beginner content and the app dictionary will probably give good definitions for it as opposed to looking up words from randomly imported content - it fails a lot but it facilitates using Google Translate or other web dictionaries.

If you enjoy reading and really want to try I say go for it.

I don't know about other users but I don't use any of the provided learning content on LingQ (or anywhere even.. I hate content designed for learners). I import my own books and articles to read. I'm a bit of an experienced language learner though.

A lot of Japanese learners like the Genki text books. I would recommend that if you're a complete beginner and feeling lost.

This is one of those scenarios that I think pops up all of the time. I really don't understand why LingQ hasn't changed the LingQ limit for people that just want to try the site out. A 20 LingQ limit is just not enough for someone to really get to know how LingQ works and if it's worth their time and money. The LingQ limit should be around 1,000 lingQ. That way people can finish quite a few lessons and start to notice themselves learning new words, and really get a taste of what lingQ is all about.  

After trying to learn Hungarian for months, trying a dozen apps, buying lots of books and a language course, I came across LingQ. I quickly realized that it was exactly what I was looking for because I had previously read alot about the Birkenbihl learning method. I wanted to get away from the dull vocabulary using flashcards and wanted to find something that was really fun.

In my opinion, the free version of LingQ is not enough to get to know the platform. I recommend buying at least one month and using it intensively during that time to decide whether you want to pay longer or even buy an annual subscription.

I don't think you can say that LingQ is THE solution for language learning, but it supports very well and is more fun than many other solutions. But you should always decide that for yourself.

With Duolingo, I clicked what I needed to to get to the next screen.

With LingQ, I've read 1,000,000 words in my target language with audio and English subtitles. I can use a version of the Comprehensible Input approach to lanugage earning where you read what's very interesting and in a way you comprehend it (normally graded readers, but in my case, subtitles). Modern research supports this far more than traditional methods might indicate.

Basically Lingq is just a reader "with benefits'.

I don't think it should be the only thing what you're doing with your target language.

It doesn't really help with grammar studies, and listening mostly TTS content is not a good idea (although you can also work with videos on Lingq).

If you're just a beginner and have little experience with foreign languages, you'd probably be better with some more structured course, before engaging into extensive reading. Lingq doesn't really "gets you by the hand" as some other apps. 

But as a reader Linq is very good. It lets you upload your own content, allows you to look for any word and mark it easily, as well as keeps your word database for you, so you can know have you ever met this word before.

Yeah, you can't do much with the free version. It's really just enough to figure out how the program works. I think it lets you import a lesson which is worth trying out.

IMHO, LingQ is much better for learning vocabulary *in context* compared to Duolingo. It's probably drier and less fun, though.