I am here because LingQ is providing efficiency in my language learning. Prior to joining I had already begun to make input a priority, was already reading/listening and working through texts in my target language. LingQ does tracking, flashcards and provides suitable material for me which gives great time efficiency.
But I am wondering about the LingQs themselves. Currently I am creating one for almost every word I encounter. I pretty much only exclude names. My reasoning is that yellow words are giving me at least some limited indication of exposure and ones which I start to see often will lighten as I increase the rating of how well I know them.
I am also being very stingy in promoting words - being my requirement for âknownâ is that I know it well enough to not stumble over it while reading (which means having a near immediate mental link between the written form, sound and meaning).
However it seems many others are possibly being a lot more selective in which words they LingQ, and possibly more generous than I in promoting the ratings on each word.
How are you LingQâing and why?
I am ever keen on squeezing out more efficiency in my learning because with very limited time, Korean really is going to take a lot of it.
If somebody asked me âHey, what does ___ mean?â and I couldnât answer, then I LingQ it.
This means thatâŚ
if I picked up the meaning through context, I LingQ it.
if I had only a vague understanding of the word, or understand it in one of its forms, but not this one, I LingQ it.
if I flat out didnât understand it, even in context, I LingQ it.
So I guess you could say Iâm very keen on making LingQâs. I found that with Spanish, even when I reached 10 and 15 thousand words, what really helped me progress was creating more LingQs. Because for me, when I see the words known, itâs a milestone of how much I know but the LingQâs represent the words I still have yet to learn, which is just as, if not more exciting.
Sounds like my line of thinking. The reason I am actually asking to see what others are doing is because the weekly goals donât line up with my actual progress. Aside from the last month when I was on holiday and my damn phone broke so I could not access LingQ (and I believe it was down during that period anyway), I have been exceeding the LingQâs in my goal with ease.
When I pull in some of the content external to LingQ which I have been reviewing, my LingQs created will balloon up considerably.
So the weekly targets set are like: 91 Lingqs, 49 Learned and 70 Known words. This I assume is some kind of indication between the correlation of words I am expected to mark (ie: creating LingQs), how many of them I should know and how many are learned. It indicates to me that perhaps the system is designed around me being more selective of what I am LingQing but also more generous in what I consider âlearnedâ.
Basically I donât want to be 6 months in and thinking âyou know what - Ive been doing it inefficiently this whole timeâ.
I donât think your personal lingq-ing policy affects learning efficiency very much.
Choose whatever motivates you and stick to it. I would personally change my criteria about what words I consider âknownâ depending on my goals and my level in the language.
In this moment Iâm being pretty lax about promoting words. Iâm following the standard advice of âbeing able to recognize the meaning in a similar contextâ to the letter.
This works for me because Iâm not doing any flashcarding and because I began learning Russian not so long ago and I used to find very hard to remember words for active use, so just recognizing most of them seemed a more realistic goal. Now, I find it much easier but Iâm still keeping my loose criterion.
If, for example, I were to take up a language in which I have a higher level (say, German) in order to improve it, Iâm sure Iâd adopt a very strict criterion to consider a word âknownâ.
So, flexibilityâs key. Your criterion for Korean seems reasonable to me: you are concentrating on fluent reading. Itâs a good goal to have and it seems to keep you motivated. At the end of the day, thatâs all that counts.
I am working my way quickly through the material I am studying. My object is to see how many words I currently ârecogniseâ. I have 300-400 words highlighted for which I am using the multiple choice feature to add to my ârecognitionâ count. I enjoy this feature. When a word has been ârecognisedâ and added to my word count, I may remember it later or I may not. If I encounter it again and | if I donât remember it, I will highlight it again. One I have worked my way through the material I am studying and have ârecognisedâ all the words, I plan to read and listen to it all again to see if my comprehension has improved. I am enjoying this method. If I had to stop and try to understand and âlearnâ every single word and every sentence the first time through, I would give up in frustration!
In the beginning when Lingqing I was very cautious with words that I didnât know and tried to learn every word so that I really knew it very good when it was marked with level 4 or âknownâ. Now, I donât care all that much because I think that if I see the word often enough Iâll learn it. I think that one shouldnât put too much pressure on learning specific words because after being exposed long enough, words just stick.
That being said, I do lingq everything I donât know. Sometimes I just canât pick up words when they are being written together and Iâll usually lingq them just to make my brain realise that sometimes words stick together.
Thank you (and the others in this thread!) for the reply!
I personally find my brain is a little lazy so the exposure has to be substantial for words to start to stick if I donât do a little flashcarding. The motions of looking up a word - whether by dictionary or by clicking on it in LingQ - become the ingrained response. In much the same way that I order food from a local restaurant frequently but Iâve still never remembered the number since itâs always just one google search away.
So I try hard to find ways to make the immediate connections between the word and its meaning. To this end Iâm actually doing more listening than reading. Each session on LingQ Iâll read the text trying not to look up the meaning of words, then do a second quick parse over it clicking on some LingQs to refresh my memory of them, then listen carefully to it a couple of times trying to pick out the words.
Whether this is optimal or not, I have no idea. Progress in language learning is decidedly hard to measure and also any measurement is also not necessarily strongly correlated to my eventual goal. So the only way forward is to keep at it for 6 months and then review past content and subjectively see whether I feel improved.
I find that the comments here very much coincide with my own approach to LingQing. I LingQ generously. No harm in LingQing. Once you feel there are too many yellow words on your page you can always mark them Known, which I tend to do in bunches. Having lots of yellow words that I already know doesnât really bother me but every so often I feel like cleaning them out. Happy LingQing.