LingQ appreciation thread

Hey LingQers,

I have been thinking lately about things and people that I am grateful for, and oftentimes, LingQ and the team behind LingQ comes to mind.

I am immensely grateful for this amazing platform that they’ve created. My Chinese skills would be so much worse without LingQ and all of the great features that come with it. I’m also very thankful to be a part of this lovely, welcoming community!

I’m a software developer and I know how infrequent appreciation is shown for my products, because as the saying goes “you know everything’s working when you hear nothing” ;). I thought I’d create this thread to show the LingQ team how grateful we are for them and what they’ve created.

So, what do you appreciate/love about LingQ?

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As luck would have it, today is my 29th birthday since I am one year away from a huge milestone, I have reflected on many things and at the time of writing I am tipsy so if what i am writing is somewhat more incoherent I am sorry. You can expect me to post more heartfelt, detailed and somewhat pretentious post about what I have achieved and what part language learning has had in my life.

Anyway, I am extremely grateful for lingq, when I truly think about it I have had truly two passions in life language learning and football. I forged my strongest childhood friendship because of football. Football for the longest time was a huge passion, something that influenced my life and defined me for a long time in both positive ways and bad ways.

I am a Swedish-Finn who grew up in a unilingual middle-class family (Swedish-speaking) with Russian heritage. My surname is the only real connection to my Russian heritage that I have, despite growing up in Finland I have always felt myself more European. While football has become way more popular than when I grew up, icehockey was the most popular sport when I grew up.

April 2009 is a watershed moment for me it was “the day that football died” Barcelona (my favourite team) played Chelsea in the semi-final of CL. They won by a controversial goal and would go on and win the tournament. About one year later I would catch up with my childhood friend after about a 6 years hiatus.

After I lost interest in football I started gaining interest in linguistics, my mom always touted that language learning was good, and as I had to learn three languages form a young age, language has been a huge part of my identity.
Around Christmas 2013 I found, Steve Kaufmann’s channel and after about a month of watching his YouTube videos I signup in 2014.

I have always been very ambitious but lacked confidence, learning languages (overcoming difficulties with subjunctive, cases, etc.) has help me a lots and largely thanks to Lingq I might reach highes by my 30th birthday that I would have found unachievable only 6 month ago.

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You know Edwin I think you hit the nail on the head. Without LingQ I wouldn’t even be close to the level I am in my languages if it wasn’t for LingQ. LingQ has allowed my language learning desires to grow. Honestly If it wasn’t for LingQ I may not been interested in languages at all. Which is a crazy thought considering I spend so many of my waking hours either on LingQ or doing Language related activities.

Thank you LingQ team for helping me pursue my passion.

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Happy belated birthday my friend, thanks for writing such a lovely piece. Btw, I couldn’t smell the booze when sniffing your post, but my brother has always said I have a bad sense of smell :wink:

I’ve thought about your post more and it made me realise: the magical thing about language learning is that it is ENDLESS. Because we can intake so much content from so many different sources, covering a vast array of topics, we will literally never run out of new things to enjoy.

Although I am not into sports too much, I strongly believe that language learning has many more “doorways” so to say compared to a sport, or compared to many other activities for that matter.

Another thing that’s so great about LingQ is the ability to import from so many different places with seemingly no cap on how many things you can import. I’ve literally programmatically imported dozens of GBs worth of content to LingQ, some of which I wish I could delete to save LingQ some storage space now lol. It’s amazing what this platform enables you to do!

I am quite enjoying being present in the moment and enjoying learning my first second language. I do plan on learning French a few years down the road once my Mandarin is solid as Iraq, and I know I’ll be doing it on LingQ :wink:

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LingQ took me to a level where I could easily get around in Taiwan, listen and understand people around me and their stories, and even make good friends, all in Mandarin. All this being a mostly enjoyable process while not even realizing how much time went into it. In fact, I´m quite lazy, and even on the laziest of days I can still use LingQ and see some improvement, which I´m sure is not a feature of many other learning tools.

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Thank you for this thread. I feel like we often only address the LingQ team when we are having a problem with the site or the app, so it is important to also thank them for LingQ’s existence and for all the work the team does to keep improving things. I certainly would have given up on language learning long ago if it wasn’t for LingQ! I plan to be a around here for a long time to come.

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I remember 10 years ago when I first started learning czech language I thought ANKI and flashcard system was the most genius thing invented for language learning. I still think it is great, but after discovering lingq and implementing the “language learning philosophy” of Steve Kaufmann explained in youtube videos his book etc. Im amazed and really appreciate the how joyful the language learning journey has become! =)=) When one fully grasp the philosophy and effectiveness of lingQ and the fact that language simply diffuse into your brain like osmosis after seeing words and sentences 10-15-20 times I felt really relieved when I realized this through the lingQ philosophy… "we don’t need to “struggle” nor study strenuous, but simply study relaxed and comfortable 30 minutes/1h(or more a day) and eventually the language soaks in=)=) Genius!

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Just today I was thinking about how wonderfully useful LingQ is for me. I don’t use it for listening (because I do that on movies and tv) but I do use most of the other features and after years am still finding new ones. I’m reading the Neapolitan Quartet by Ferrante now with LingQ at my side, helpful in every possible way.

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I’m a fan. Use it every day. Glad to have an effective way to manage what I read in European Portuguese.

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Thank you all for your kind words! That inspires us to keep working to make LingQ better and better!

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Ps. If any of you wouldn’t mind, copying and pasting your comments here as reviews on whichever mobile App Store you use, it would be much appreciated. All the 5 star reviews and positive comments help us rank better and hopefully might get those platforms to actually promote us a little bit. Thanks in advance!

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I upgraded my existing review on iOS store. I really think LingQ is the best single tool for language learners who are serious about what they are doing.

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I already gave my 5 star review probably a few months ago.

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I could talk for a while on this theme, but one feature of LingQ that I’ve really come to appreciate is the ability to the words AND audio of chapters of a book I’m reading through the import a lesson feature. I’m able to do all of this on my phone, so it’s super convenient, and the ability to listen as well as read chapters is helping my overall comprehension of Spanish. Since I’m able to import what I want, this feature is really appealing to me. I’ve used LingQ to import whole books via pdf, but since using the import a lesson feature, it’s more beneficial to me to import one chapter at a time.

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My LingQ Review:

It’s a great way to read content in another language, especially if you’re learning a language that uses a different set of characters (Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, etc).

I can easily look up words and phrases (looking up phrases and saving their meaning is surprisingly not common with other apps I’ve tried). What this does is a) keeps me in motion b) encourages me to read more and more.

LingQ to me is like an MP3 player. You get your music from wherever (music in this case, can be language learning content) and LingQ stores it all for you in a nice and neat way so you can shuffle your lessons, create playlists, review, and so on.

Importing content from the web is easy and the great thing about LingQ… as long as the content on the web continues to grow, so does LingQ’s library :wink: Noticing more sites like Animelon popping up, which is great. As Google’s translation continues to improve (and YouTube’s closed caption), so does LingQ. Another great thing about LingQ is that it gets better when the community gets bigger (sharing tips, sharing content, etc).

Also, I’ve recently been using tutors which helps a lot.

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I did a year in germany as an exchange student and owe all my accomplishments to lingq. I didn’t any thing past 1-10 in german before I got there. After finding lingq 2 month into the journey, i spent roughly 4 hours a day reading in order to understand what my host family was saying to me. So just a huge thanks overall.

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