What type of compelling content do you consume?

Hey All,

I was curious as to what other members here on lingQ use for compelling content beyond the typical newspapers, news, and literature/books in the target language. What do you all like to import / learn from? For me personally, I find websites for my hobbies in my target language via the internet (Video games, philosophy etc) and then consume both my hobbies and my language learning all in one. This really helps to make the language learning process even more enjoyable. I would be curious what everyone strategy and methods are!

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I have a couple of French history books written by real historians and they make for perfect lessons as each chapter is self contained and I can focus only the parts of history I am interested in. Nearly everything I read in LingQ is now imported as there really isnā€™t much left that interests me enough to read it multiple times. However, I use the mini stories and Assimil for all my mobile listening practice.

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I would be interested to know why Assimil, if you wouldnā€™t mind taking the time to explain.

Because it was available here, simple as that.

Stuff containing as much i+1 as possible for my current level but which also tells some kind of story.

I made a list of content I have found over the years in different languages. Check it out.

I watch Mandarin Chinese childrenā€™s shows, but these arenā€™t your regular friendly and fun childrenā€™s shows, they oftentimes have twist endings which are dark and sad.

I am a generally positive guy who doesnā€™t like watching dark/sad content, but it is just so damn funny to watch these twisted childrenā€™s shows, because I canā€™t imagine anything like them being acceptable over here in North America.

For example, hereā€™s an episode where a villager literally threatens a monkey into making him money by killing a chicken in front of the monkey to show the monkey who is boss:

I would have never expected to find this kind of content compelling but it is just so funny in a dark way, I canā€™t help but learn from them lol.

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What you consider compelling content changes over time, with your level and interests.
I have just begun a new phase in my main target language (Russian) using two new content sources:
On the one hand, I have begun to read ā€œWar and Peaceā€ in Lingq, itā€™s a tremendous challenge and I expect it to take me very long. Iā€™m mixing it with other ā€œlighterā€ materials.
On the other hand, Iā€™m watching ā€œGame of Thronesā€ in Russian (LOL). I found the series moderately appealing but Iā€™d felt very bad wasting so much time with it but watching it in Russian turns that rather silly activity into a very useful learning experience: thereā€™s a lot of interesting vocabulary and itā€™s addictive enough to keep you interested.

Just a heads up 3ears - learn a Language with interactive transcripts ā† You can import Russian content from here.