Have you gone from beginner to fluent/conversational using LingQ?

Have you started a new language on LingQ and became fluent? How long did it take? which methods did you find most effective? Tell me more about it I am interested to hear your stories.

Alex

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I have been wondering the same thing lately. It seems that a lot of people who have 30K-40K known words on LingQ already had prior experience with the language. I figure this by looking at their stats and see that their “LingQs learned” number is much lower than their known word count. Im curious to hear if anyone used to lingQ from scratch to fluency as well.

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I’ve gone from a beginner level (not from scratch, I had been learning before discovering Lingq) to conversational in Russian. It’s hard to tell how long it took because it’s been such a gradual process. I was able to “kind of” function after 2 years, I guess, although I was certainly not “fluent”. Now I’m in my fourth year and I feel pretty confident.
As for methods: I began reading/listening to Lingq lessons. When I got to a high enough level, I began importing more challenging texts, mostly novels and watching videos outside Lingq.

Important to note, for example russian is heavily inflected and tons of words sound similar to words in english, sometimes i see a diferent version of a word i previously lingqed and learnt, and mark it “learned” straight away, which may increase the known counter more than lingqs learned counter.

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I’m definitely not fluent in any of the languages I’ve studied on Lingq (yet! ), but I have to say I’ve progressed much further and faster, I believe, on Lingq than I would have with other means for self study. I’m learning German, now, on my own. I started off with Memrise, which did give me some decent basics, but to keep learning with Memrise (or any other SRS tool imo) gets to be prohibitive. You find yourself catching up on reviewing words over half the time. Heaven forbid if you take a day or two or more off and have to come back to review hundreds or thousands of words. That was such a drag. I just didn’t see it being feasible.

That’s around the time I found Lingq and started listening to youtube videos by Steve. It seemed plausible and more fun that through reading and listening you could gather much more vocabulary quicker and easier and with more fun. I’ve found that to be true. I started off by uploading the lessons for Assimil German and reading and listening to the entire book that way. Along the way I’ve imported articles and audio from Nachrichtenleicht and some audio and text from a few short books. I also have a subscription to Deutsch Perfekt magazine and try to read as much as I can from there as well, outside of Lingq.

I don’t spend a huge amount of time a day…perhaps at most 15-30 minutes of listening and 5-15 minutes of reading but my vocabulary has come a long way in a short time… My listening comprehension still feels poor…I think mostly because I still don’t have quite enough vocabulary or listening experience but it gets better every day. It would not improve much with tools like Memrise or SRS (Anki, etc). I read and listen to each thing I import into Lingq until I feel like I understand and hear everything. This may take 5-10 readings and 5-20+ listenings depending on how many new words there are. Every so often I’ll go back to some old things I’ve imported and sometimes there are words, I’ve forgotten…I move them back to “yellow” and start the process of learning those words again. I won’t specifically read that article/story over and over again until that single word sticks…I figure at some point you may need to move on to new content and hopefully encounter that word again in a different context where it may “stick” better that next time.

Anyway, sorry if this doesn’t give the perspective you are looking for from someone who has gone from the very beginnings to fluency on Lingq, but hopefully it gives some confidence that the tool does help quite a bit, especially if you prefer a less structured tool (although you can be as structured as you want).

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I’d say I reached a fluent level with French using LingQ (keep in mind I already know Spanish and Portuguese decently well). Besides using LingQ, I listened to a lot of French podcasts (Francais Authentique, Aux Frontieres Du Possible) in my free time/while doing other activities. I think it’s really important to supplement LingQ with listening as much as possible authentic audio. Obviously, doing this only builds your comprehension and vocab levels, so you have to do a lot of speaking at some point. I felt decently comfortable after 2-3 months of iTalki lessons 2-3 times/week.

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Good question!

Thank you for the responses. I think people tend to discover LingQ later on in their language learning through frustration at not being able to progress. i have only ever used lingQ so I start my languages from scratch. I am tackling French first and wonder if I should focus too much on individual stats however it helps me feel motivated to see progress

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Cool! I am actually learning french and im glad to hear you have been successful, i don’t know what it feels like to speak fluently in a second language so I hope I’m going to get there soon. I find with french the YouTube videos and authentic content people speak so fast I find it very Difficult to keep up and if I miss a word then I’m completely lost however I’m only on 740 words known so far

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I have been using LingQ since September, roughly 300 days, 400+ hours. I went from almost 0 Japanese to now being able to converse at a basic, day to day level.

In terms of JLPT, self assessed N4. Kanji will always be an uphill battle in my eyes.

By this time next year, i hope to be conversational, enough to function and talk about what I want freely.

I read and listen for about 1 hour a day and speak with my tutors 2 to 3 times a week. Outside of LingQ, I watch shows on Viki (then import them) and chat with Japanese friends.

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Hey Oceano you may already know, but case you don’t. Check out the site InnerFrench! Hugo has made some great podcasts. Each podcast has a transcript you can import into LingQ.
(Also he speaks slower in his older podcasts and a little bit quicker in his newer podcasts.)

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Yes, then you have a ways to go. I found that around 10k known words I could understand a lot of podcasts. Already knowing Spanish and Portuguese filled in the gaps. With this being your first foreign language, it will take longer. Just keep going, it will become clearer with time.

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You can change the playback speed on youtube. Maybe cut it to 90% and or lower and see if you can understand them better.

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lingq has helped me certainly improve my oral comprehension in french i’m still not “fluent” but i think i have improved a lot and i will eventually get to a level i desire although i must note i already had a basic knowlege of french when i started on linqg

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wow thats about as long as I have been working on French, well done for this! Japanese looks very challenging , I hope to learn it one day.

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yes i have subscribed to him and will look at his older stuff, thank you!

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That’s probably true but there’s another factor. I recently began learning Indonesian/Malay. I started on Lingq and I plan to use it as my main resource but not the only one! In the meantime I’ve gone through Assimil’s “Indonesian”, that I am now reviewing, I’m about to finish the Indonesian Duolingo tree and I’ve studied some basic vocabulary on Memrise. I also follow a couple of very interesting youtube channels about Malay, which are my main way to keep track of the Malay version of the language, versus the Indonesian which is my main focus. All of those resources are only helpful to get you up to speed, they’ll never get you all the way to a good level, as opposed to Lingq, buty they’re helpful and I enjoy using them for a while. Assimil’s probably the best of the bunch and, coincidentally, it’s the most Linqq-like.
The bottomline is that when you’re intent on learning a language, you use multiple resources… Steve himself has said as much in one of his videos. I find that a multi-angle approach at the beginning helps a lot but I certainly think that gettingto a real good level without Lingq would be a chore (I learned some languages without it back in the day. So finding learners that only use Lingq, as in your original question, may prove complicated.
However, from my perspective as a dedicated language learner who has actually used Lingq to acquire a comfortable level in a challenging language, I can assure you can do the same using Lingq as your primary resource. I’m sure you’ll want to add others over time, but not because it’s indispensable, it just helps and spices things out and if you’re really in love with a language and a culture you can’t stop yourself from learning more and more about it.

I learned Italian to fluent from scratch with Lingq, youtube and podcasts. The comprehensible input method works, and Lingq makes it easier. I would say that I’m almost fluent in German (about B1), using only Lingq and youtube. So yes, you can learn a language really good with lingq, but eventually you need to speak it a lot to complete the process.

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LingQ really propelled me to go from understanding hardly nothing to understanding almost everything. Although I’m gonna say that using LingQ alone didn’t really propel to become conversational/fluent. It was more of me exploring and using other resources to practice my target language. I have used Italki and the app Tandem to find partners and use my target language. I have to say that LingQ eased a lot of the effort when it comes to speaking with people and understanding what they are saying in the target language. LingQ prepared me for speaking/listening sessions like these. Although I have also used Youtube videos extensively/intensively to further hone my listening comprehension.

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Fluency in a language comes from exposure and practice. LingQ is extremely good as a tool to help you with exposure and building up passive vocabulary, but of course when it comes to speaking practice, the ball is always in your court no matter what study method or tool you may be using.

I started Spanish from scratch here on LingQ and currently have over 17K known words. My comprehension is getting very good, but I haven’t pushed myself to speak at all – I think it’s only a matter of time though.

The thing is, though, you can get fluent using any method – even Rosetta Stone :slight_smile: – if you just spend the time to get the exposure and then get ample speaking practice. LingQ just allows you to do the first part a lot more effectively by learning through materials that you enjoy.

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