Today, I want to talk about how I use LingQ.
I often get asked questions.
Please show us how you use LingQ.
There's a lot of functionality at LingQ.
I can't cover them all.
So I'm only going to cover a few aspects of how I use LingQ.
I'm prepared to do more of these.
I would also be happy to review anyone's profile on what they've been
doing at LingQ, how much they've been listening and reading and practicing.
And we could, uh, you know, comment on maybe some recommendations that
I might have all with the goal of enabling people to derive more
and more benefit from Lincolns.
First of all, as I've been saying for 15, 20 years, language learning
is all about motivation, time spent with the language and our ability to
notice What happens in the language?
And the three are of course, very closely interrelated.
The more motivated you are, the more time you spend, the more motivated you are.
And the more time you spend, the more you start to notice things in the language,
because you care, whether that be pronunciation or structure or so forth.
So.
Three things that are very much interrelated.
So let me talk a bit about those three elements and how they
influence what I do on LingQ.
So first of all, when it comes to motivation, of course, I'm
motivated to learn a language.
I'm motivated to communicate with people, but I know that the motivation
that keeps me going, particularly after the initial period, the initial period,
I'm very motivated to communicate.
Find out what's in this language.
How do they say things to try to understand some of the words that
initially are just sound to me.
So the initial few months in the language, I'm quite highly motivated,
but soon thereafter, you get this period that language learners refer to as the
doldrums or the plateau, where we have the feeling that we're not progressing
in the language for the simple reason that we've learned a lot of the high
frequency words, and now we're having to learn more and more low frequency words.
Words, and that means an awful lot of work without having the sense that you're,
you know, improving in the language.
So this is where a big part of my motivation comes from the
interesting things that I'm learning.
In fact, LingQ is kind of my learning center.
When I settle in to review, for example, I'm doing these podcasts, very
interesting podcasts in Persian by Abbas.
Sayyidin called Parseh and he introduces so many interesting things.
He's now talking about how the, uh, you know, Napoleon's invasion of Egypt
contributed to the discovery, obviously of the Rosetta stone, which contributed
to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, which had been a mystery for 2000 years.
The hieroglyphics themselves are 4000 years old.
And it's a fascinating story.
And of course that then induced me to buy a book on the subject, which just
arrived, by the way, Napoleon in Egypt.
But one of the things that was interesting was the realization.
And I, I, cause I've only imperfectly understood it because I've only listened
to it, but I think someone in Germany realized how foreign words are represented
in a, not hieroglyphics, but a.
Uh, pictorial system like Chinese characters and that gave him a clue as
to what the symbols in hieroglyphics did.
I don't know the details cause I haven't gotten there yet, but it's an
indication again, of how you listen to something, your interest is piqued.
Now I want to go and read it.
And by reading it and listening to it and I'm saving words and
I'm ingesting the language.
Of course, that's why I got so interested in the history of Iran.
Because we had Sarah who did a series of 26 episodes of the history of
Iran in somewhat simplified English.
Also, just to continue in that vein, Abbas did a series on DNA and, uh,
the relationship between ourselves and various, uh, you know, primates and stuff
like that, and with that, I got interested in the subject and Neanderthals.
So I bought this book, which I've also been listening to in the car.
All I want to say is that my involvement with LingQ is not just Sort of
mechanically learning languages.
It becomes a center of learning for me where I explore things.
And I think we can all do this.
For example, how did I find Parsa's podcast?
I simply Googled.
And at that point I couldn't write it in Persian.
So I just went to Google translate.
I am looking for podcasts on history, on things of interest to me, and up
come a lot of different podcasts.
And these exist in every language.
So first of all, LingQ is not only where I learn languages, it's my learning space.
I feel comfortable when I sit down with my iPad in the evening after
having listened to things that I didn't fully understand or only partially
or partly understood and then I sit there and I learn so many things and a
whole world of Interesting information opens up for me and it's not part of
motivation, but it's part of attitude.
I'm patient.
I know that it's going to take a long time to notice an improvement at
this stage in my learning of Persian.
And so I'm quite comfortable and patient in letting the language come into me
and learning about things that are of interest to me and discovering all kinds
of things that I didn't know about.
So.
That's the first thing I wanted to say about how I use LingQ.
LingQ triggers many things, learning of the language and
learning of many other things.
So the second thing then, and we talked about time.
So again, how I use LingQ and how do I deal with this issue that many people are.
Busy, I am busy.
I have other things to do besides learning languages.
One of the go to functions for me is play course audio, which I'll show
you, which to my mind, unfortunately is only available on the mobile version.
We can achieve the same thing on the web by creating playlists.
Otherwise, every time we study something, it's added to a playlist.
So I have a large playlist, but I find it easier to go to a particular course
and say, okay, play this playlist.
And it goes from, you know, if there's.
10 different stories in that, for example, uh, the Pirate State
Podcast, I will go through all of them because if I'm driving in the
car, I don't want to have to restart.
I find it very handy and it enables me, it ensures that I'm going to start
engaging with the language in the morning or when I'm out and about doing things.
Because the trouble with time often is not that we don't have time for
language learning, but it's that we find excuses why we won't spend the time.
Um, with language learning.
So part of spending the time is making it easier to spend the time.
And by far, the easiest thing to do is to listen.
And as I said earlier, listening triggers all these other activities.
So what do we mean by the ability to notice?
I once had a conversation with Steven Krashen and he felt that there is no
such thing as this ability to notice.
And to some extent he's right, because I think it's something that develops
naturally if we're motivated and if we do enough, Listening and reading,
if we have enough input, we start to notice more and more things that,
so we do have to develop naturally or otherwise this ability to notice.
One of the things I like to do is in studying a lesson, because
we need to acquire more words.
And I prefer to review my words either just before or just
after reading a page on LingQ.
So I don't do great long list of words, which we could do at LingQ.
I could go Anki.
We have an SRS approach at LingQ.
I find that it's difficult for me.
to maintain my focus when I do those things.
And we know from research that if we learn words in a variety of different
contexts, that that is how we acquire these words, by seeing them in different
contexts, that develops our ability to infer meaning and so forth and so on.
So I stay very close to the context.
So you'll see here that I have an option of reviewing my words In different
ways, I can review all the words in the lesson, but I prefer not to do that.
I prefer to focus, which improves my ability to notice.
So I focus in on the new vocabulary items in this page, which may not be new.
They're yellow.
In other words, they're words that I don't yet know.
So if I take a step back, the words that I review are words that I've seen before.
Before I can actually go to review these yellow words, I have to convert.
If there's one or two or three blue words on the page.
I have to convert them to yellow.
So I'm at a stage midway along the plateau where I know a lot of words
and yet there's still a lot of lower frequency words that I either haven't
met before, or more often words that I have met before, saved to link to
my database, but still don't know.
And they could be eight, 10, 12 per page, depending on the situation.
So I like to do those either before or after.
Or immediately after reviewing the page.
So that's one technique that I use that I think improves my ability to notice.
Another thing that improves my ability to notice, because we need frequency,
but not frequency on a list, frequency that's related to interesting content.
So if the podcast that I'm listening to or reading talks about, uh, Napoleon's
visit to Egypt and the Rosetta Stone, then a lot of vocabulary will repeat.
And obviously the podcaster has a preferred vocabulary.
Which will also repeat.
So all of this, because I see these words again and again, it
improves my ability to notice them.
Now there are a number of other techniques that I won't go into here,
but variety, I think has a lot to do with improving our ability to notice.
So I could listen in karaoke view.
I could go.
Into sentence view, which I do quite often, focusing in on that sentence.
I can listen to that sentence.
If the text is timestamped, I can see the translation, which helps because
very often we translate the individual words and we don't fully understand the
meaning, all of these things help me to.
Notice, I sometimes go through the, you know, the matching pairs exercise
and reconstituting the sentence, which I have talked about before.
So all of these things are exercises that help you to notice, although they slow
me down in terms of acquiring more and more input through listening and reading.
And so we have to vary these things.
And I think variety is another thing that I strive for at LingQ.
So patience, curiosity, variety.
These are the kinds of things that keep me going at LingQ.
Because ultimately the key thing is to keep at it, to keep going.
So just a brief overview of some of the things that I do at LingQ.
I'm happy to go into more detail on other aspects of LingQ functionality,
maybe that you are having trouble with or don't understand how it works at LingQ.
And if you want to send along your profile, a snapshot of the last seven
days or six months or whatever LingQ, I'd be quite happy to review them, we
could even one day think about doing a live stream with Some of our users
and talk about how they use Link and we can share our experience with Link.
So thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
