Hello, I wanted to write a post about my experience with languages and why I believe in Lingq method. I’ve been trying to learn German since 2011, yes… 8 years, no success. I had classes once a week for about 4 years, after that I did A1 and A2 courses and used various apps overtime. Then eventually, to be honest I kind of gave up, I fell into the same trap that many language learners fall, I stopped believing that I can do it. I also did Russian 4 years, classroom, textbooks, no success, although being native in Serbian should mean that Russian would not be so hard to learn. Back in the 90s, Serbian people probably remember that Mexican telenovelas were such a big thing, I was 5-6 and desperate to watch together with my family but I did not understand anything and my mom did not want to spend 45 minutes every evening reading subtitles for me, so she gave me this book for children and taught me how to read Serbian so I can read for myself. For the following 8 years I spent almost every evening watching various telenovelas and at age 14 I was able to watch Rubi DVD without subtitles, hell I spoke language of telenovelas. But all that stopped and I did not watch anything in Spanish for many, many years, about 13 years to be precise, then recently I watched La casa de papel and realized I still understand Spanish more than German and Russian together. In high school I had English for 3 years and I was watching stuff in English, English in school was sometimes grammar, sometimes texts and I am not sure how much I picked up there but I don’t think much. Recently I started tracking TV shows that I watch and realized I’ve seen more than 2300 episodes in English that I tracked, plus the ones I did not track, plus movies, youtube, music, interviews, books (especially my Twilight obsession back in 2009, not proud of it). I never tried to speak English back then, just did not need to. In 2014 I met this British guy who spoke to me and I just spoke back, very natural, just came out. I assume I accumulated vocabulary that got activated and I’ve been actively speaking since. Last year I discovered Lingq and me being me, I did not want to pay for an app so I ended up not using it. About 20 days ago I decided to give it a chance, got a subscription and started German, after only 20 days of actively using it, I feel huge improvement, my vocabulary grew, my comprehension is better, my confidence boomed so I started watching German shows and movies, I’m listening to DW Top Thema, reading articles, simple books, and even found people to chat with. So Lingq just opened my eyes to this method that I already had success with but failed to realize, it enabled me to incorporate German into my daily life and finally I feel that I am getting somewhere. Maybe this method is slower than others but it is effortless because it doesn’t feel like you are studying just kind of doing what you already like to do only in another language…
Great stuff!
Since your learning German, there’s a TON of content you can import into LingQ from YouTube.
The Best Way to Learn German Using Video Content - LingQ Blog
Resources that can be imported into LingQ:
mdr.de – Radio, Fernsehen, Nachrichten für Mitteldeutschland | MDR.DE
Alle Videos und Livestreams des BR | ARD Mediathek
https://www1.wdr.de
https://www.zdf.de/
You’ll have to browse around and find videos that have closed captions, for example:
Alle Videos und Livestreams des BR | ARD Mediathek
Good luck
Thank you for posting your experience. It was very encouraging! I’ve studied a handful of languages over the years, but I never got far with any of them and I’ve been feeling frustrated. I joined LingQ recently and I’m hoping that this time I’ll succeed. Your post renews my hope that is is possible.
Happy Language Learning!
And what is also important for me : lingq is showing me my progress: the pages are becoming more white and the counter is going up. It’s very likely that I would have stopped learning polish without that… and it would be absolutely impossible for me to willingly memorise these terrible, terrible slavic case endings. 
I sometimes make mistake with cases in Serbian and a lot of people too, so I get your pain… 
I started using Lingq a few days ago after using textbooks, Pimsleur, duolingo, Living Arts, and RussianPod101 (which was the best of all of them). I’ve had various degrees of failure with all of them.
The Duo memes are maliciously funny, except they aren’t far from reality (You wont see your family again if you break your streak) I gave up when I had to translate “The bear eats everything” to English for the 40th time. There was a youbue video from a learner who had a 1200 day streak and got through the French (I am assume he studied for 200 hours total). To put his skills to the test, he watched a scene from the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan film, “You got mail”. The learner really struggled to understand what was going on. He barely understood what was happening and he took too many ques from body language. It feels like Duolingo oversold themselves and I think the guy was a bit dejected and felt he just wasted alot of time. Poor kid! Screw you Duo!
There are quite a few features that Lingq offers like importing text to work with. It is awesome we get to work with content we enjoy working with. From what I also see, the community is FAR better than any language community I have seen so far. People helping people makes a huge difference in the learning process.
In my experience so far, I am getting better results in the last couple of days that I have with any of the other systems. When Steve said he wants to maximize learning efficiency, I can see it first hand.
Hi! Thank you for sharing great experience of English leaning! Recently, I feel stuck in my English learning… I do not see any improvement, especially in speaking. I feel terrible when I talk like a child, very slow and using only basic words and still make a lot of grammatical mistakes. I tried TV shows in the US several years ago, but I am not a TV person, and I felt more frustrated when people in the shows spoke so fast and left me alone without any idea on the scene. About LingQ system, I did not think that it gave me great practices for speaking but based on your experience, it might train me to be a better speaker. I will stick to this system for a while before I judge that it won’t work. Thanks!
I really don’t understand people who keep on studying so long on duolingo. Do they really think they’ll master the language if they keep on doing the same exercises? Duolingo can be helpful to get you acquainted with a language. I’ve gone through the whole trees of Ukrainian and Indonesian and I’m doing the Norwegian one right now. You do it once and you get a basic familiarity with the language, they’re analogous to Assimil or Lingq mini-stories. I tend to spend a maximum of three months on Duolingo and I combine it with Lingq beginning lessons and, if it’s a language I’m really interested in, Assimil. At the end you know some vocabulary and understand the basic functioning of the language. It’s a good start but duolingo will take you to an A2-level at most, and that’s provided that you do more reading and listening on the side.You’ll never get beyond that and you certainly will never be able to understand a movie or engage in any conversation that goes beyond a few platitudes.
That’s what makes LingQ different, there are many products that can help you start up but if your goal is mastery your options are pretty limited. Essentially, you either struggle on your own. Reading books, looking up lots of words in the dictionary, try to understand videos on your own, etc. or you leverage the power of Lingq to help you get through the terrible desert that is the intermediate level in a language.