sorry, I’m sure this will have been discussed before, but I like to be able to have some back and forth on topics so I thought I’d start a fresh post
i just want to ask people’s opinions on the mini stories, how useful do you find them? How many times do you read through them / listen to them? Are they worth spending a lot of time on?
im doing Spanish, around A2 level, I’ve read through half of the 60 available, currently I understand 90% + of the words in each of the stories I’m reading. Should I keep pushing through these ? i would also say that my listening isn’t as advanced as my reading, I can’t listen to all those lessons and understand everything at full speed.
I just don’t know if it’s worth sticking with them or trying to work through something at a higher level
My experience when I did Spanish myself was that I only needed SRS to get a foothold. Once I had about 2,000 words I was like a kid in Spanish. I could speak broken spanish and understand very simple stuff. I had to memorize grammar to get further. Then I just watched a ton of mexican telenovelas over about a year and a half. For the last six months I had a language exchange partner at my local library that I practised with. I got to more or less fluency by the end of 18 months. This was before lingq or any kind of app existed.
I did more or less the same thing with French at the beginning (brute forced vocabulary words in anki) and watched a bunch of youtube. I made no attempt to learn grammar. I probably got a boost from my spanish because latin based language. But as I got deeper in I discovered the french grammar has some quirks and spanish didn’t carry me. Then I discovered lingQ at about month 4-5 of my 6 month quest.
LingQ rocketed my grammar up without me having to do anything. It is essentially painless grammar acquistion.
Between months 4 to months 6 I went from understanding essentially kindergarten French on youtube to being able to understand most of the top podcasters in French on youtube. I credit lingQ with leveling me up. I got to 45 out of 60 before I hit the end of my six months.
I’m still doing maybe one a week now on French of the stories along with watching one particular podcaster a couple times a week because I’ve switched to Russian but I plan to finish all of the stories then keep going on the next levels of lingQ for french over the next couple years.
Let me explain this with a real example. I have been visiting a bakery here in Germany for the last three years. The employees have been speaking the same 5 sentences to me in German even though my replies to their questions have changed over the years. Seems to me I am trying to improve their German.
Just treat ministories as an appetizer and you have to move on with new content as soon as possible - it does not necessarily have to be a huge novel - some different content aimed at A2/B1 and then work your way up. Finally, dealing with content aimed at native speakers - some modern novels. It is not a good idea to get into old literature right away. The vocabulary used in such literature is kind of old.
