Other ways to improve?

Lingq is my main and as of now, my only source of language learning and content. Though I use music, and the occasional tv show, youtube, I still miss my old teach yourself books. Just the physical sensation of holding something that I can take anywhere with me. This is just an example, does anyone else have any other materials they use for language learning? Because to me, Lingq is all one could potentially need, outside of speaking at least. I come from the days of Anki, Assimil, teach yourself, and youtube. And while I never truly progressed as far as I wanted, nor could I progress quicker with one of those methods than Lingq, I still feel they have some use for me. Anyone with any ideas? What works for you? Solely lingq? A mix of other materials?
Thank you

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I believe as a general rule of thumb no matter how good something is it’s always good to mix up things once in a while. I have for some while now felt the same way you do about lingq. For me some of my fondest early memories of studying languages independently is when I spent one summer reading grammar articles on sites like About.com (later rebranded as thoughtco), etc.

Another thing that I want to go back to soon is find out verb conjugations on my own. When I studied Spanish and French in the early days I would literary every once in a while half an hour or so just looking at verb conjugation tables. It was repetitive which I found soothing and while grammar is not everyone’s cup of tea. The point is that I think it’s good to do some seemingly boring repetitive stuff every once in a while as long as you on some level like it.

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The SRS on this site doesn’t meet my needs (smallest interval is one day), and I think I could learn vocab much quicker with my version of SRS to supplement LingQ.

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I think the “Sentence mode” can be improved. 1. The ability to hide the original text and view only “Google Translate” and keep as it is now (Original text and both). 2 Sound stopped and loop in sentence mode. 3 A writing box to compare what you write with the original text. All these must be accompanied by hotkeys, of course.
In this way, this site can be complete, to improve also learning by writing.

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I use far more material from outside of Lingq, but I import it if any way possible. That way I have the best of both worlds. For example I used Assimil German, and while I read all the notes, reviews, summaries in the book itself, I important all the lessons including audio into Lingq (they newer versions have the audio with subtitles that I exported to upload). I’ve also copied and pasted from ebooks. In some cases there’s a limit to copy on those, which I then have used an OCR tool to put into Lingq.

I’ve also used google translate to “scan” in short articles from magazines or physical books.

I’ve imported articles from online newspapers and magazines. I’ve imported from youtube and netflix.

If you watch any of Steve’s videos he’s generally said that he usually buys a teach yourself or assimil to begin with. He may do less of it now with the mini-stories, but it still seems like he’ll show a book or two that he’s bought every time he’s into a new language. I think there’s no reason to give up “old school” material. If nothing else just to change things up a bit and look at the language in a slightly different way. But as much as I can I try to bring that old school stuff into Lingq so I can utilize the greatness of being able to click on a word or phrase or group of sentences to get the meaning, rather than try to look up in a dictionary. Again, it sometimes takes a bit of work to get some of this stuff into Lingq, but it’s super helpful if possible.

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I am learning Russian.
I also use songs to learn (import them to LingQ and listen to them over and over again. On one song by Oxxxymiron (russian rapper) I already have a listening count of over 300 times (the guy raps really fast and the lyrics contain nearly 600 words in a 3 minutes song)
Then I watch russian movies and Television series, preferably with english or german subtitles. Plus the Russian Television series „kitchen“.

Often I watch easy russian videos, like videos about dogs without subtitles. I watch them on my tablet, mobile phone in hand and I use the yandex app (russian version of google translate) to repeat phrases. The app lets me save words and phrase to a vocabulary with flashcards.

Really useful app, translates from several languages to others. And is probably he best for Russian, since, it comes from Russia.

For the „oldschool“ approach with real books I found a couple of bilingual books. They have the original russian text on the left page, translated german text on the right page.

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I use YouTube, Blogs, News, Music, and Netflix - but I put them all into LingQ so I can save time and keep things organized. I have a couple books but I find them not as helpful nor interesting.

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I really like learning languages with netflix (LLN), which is a browser extension. It looks like it was heavily influenced by lingq, but somewhat more suitable for netflix content.

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