Im focusing mainly on French until the end of the year, and next year I think im going to go for Swedish.
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I’m learning Ukrainian. I’m about 3 weeks into an intense studying spree. I’ve been almost entirely focused on reading news articles (and occasional short videos with subtitles). My reading comprehension has gotten much better, but it is still quite variable in news articles. For a given article I might know anywhere from 40% to 90% of the words, but it seems to average around 75% right now.
I haven’t really put much time into listening, but I’ve noticed that my listening has also steadily improved despite practicing less than 15 minutes a day (sometimes 0, 
oops). I just dislike listening, but it seems like pushing my reading speed and increasing my vocab helps listening comprehension anyways.
Short term goal is to close the comprehension gap in news sources (get 90-95% known words) and start to focus more on how grammar works in news articles. I find it very hard to actively think about grammar when I’m just trying to recall the meaning of words. I am also going to try to speak for an hour or so, once a week, to start activating my language.
Long term, I want to be able to read literature and watch movies, but this is very far off right now.
I hope to reach a comfortable level of fluency by the end of the year, but I will see how it progresses. If I am happy with my progress at the end of the year, I might start Russian again.
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I’m learning portuguese, and I’m improving really fast, mainly because I speak Spanish as a native language, and I have learned French and Italian to a good level (better than my LingQ stats show). I am focused on reading, and I found an incredible podcast in Portuguese called “Dragoes de garagem”, which I listen to on my way to university and the gym. I am dedicating about an hour a day of active learning, and about 30 minutes a day of passive learning. I’m liking the language a lot, and I’m getting used to it faster than I thought.
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I am in a state where I don’t really feel like doing anything other than listen to news/history podcasts on iTunes for example. But luckily, I have studied languages long enough that I can enjoy them with out to much effort.
I am also planning on putting a serious effort into Catalan once it gets launched. Regular life stress and the mini stories project also takes time away for me. In terms of Spanish while I really do want to get fluent in it, it is not my top priority anymore.
I can understand German really well as well as read it but I will have to put some serious effort to learn the adjectives declension tables, strong and weak declensions and stuff of that nature.
EDIT: there are a few languages that I would like to learn because why not, but that I have not really gotten into.
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English: I think I have reached a native-like competence (passive competency, that is. But that’s what I’m interested in with all my language learning). So I don’t really study it anymore, but I still have a lot of gaps in my knowledge of American and British culture, which I feel I would need to really enjoy movies and literature. Sooner or later I will make a real plan for that. I hope the forum here will help me with a few tips.
German: I’m “intermediate”, meaning that I can get the gist of everything even without looking up words, and I don’t have to make any conscious effort in decoding grammar structures. That said, I still have a long way to go before I can really enjoy German as I would like.
Russian: Beginner level. Before coming to LingQ last month I’ve learned to read and type cyrillic, gone through a basic grammar book, and crammed a couple thousand words with Anki. My real study begins now.
Chinese: I’m leisurely going through the New practical chinese reader. I can’t say I’m really studying the language. I still have doubts on whether this choice is right for my interests.
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Bulgarian. I have until next Summer, when I have travel plans, to get to a level where I can interact with people comfortably. Not going so well at the moment, owing to more work at the office than I am managing to get through.
After that it’s probably going to be Breton or Hindi, assuming that those are supported on LingQ by then.
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Mandarin Chinese. It all started in January as a silly experiment, but now I can actually recognise quite a number of characters and it makes me very excited. There were ups and downs, of course. Recently I found new motivation - namely Chinese pulp fiction (the kind of wuxia you can find on the internet).
That stuff is perfect for beginners! The action is sluggish, so I am not losing the plot. Everything gets repeated three times, so I can really learn those words well. The sentences are short., so I am able to guess the meaning even when I have to check all the words. Of course, the downside is that once in a while I am exposed to words like “a crossbow” or “a giant bird of prey”, but I don’t find it annoying.
If there’s anything like that in Swedish, you should definitely check this out.
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I’m learning German. Overall I think it’s going well. Using lingq has really helped increase my vocabulary both passive and active (even with almost no speaking…I’ll sometimes speak to myself to see if I can figure out a way to say something, or infrequentlly try to talk to my gf in German). I visited Germany over the summer with my gf, who is originally from Germany and still has family there.
I was a little disappointed that I still couldn’t follow much of her family’s conversation, but I usually had an overall idea of what they were talking about and was picking out many more words than on previous visits. Still not enough where I felt I could jump in to offer a point of view or even ask a question regarding most topics. However, my gf and her father assured me to some extent that her mother and grandmother often are speaking in the dialect of their area so it may be harder to understand overall. I was able to use German at the restaurants, supermarkets and hotels better and more comfortably than previous visits…
I think mostly the problem is still not enough vocabulary. I’m only at 6700 “lingq” words which is probably still not enough to converse on many topics beyond a superficial level both on a comprehension level and speaking level.
I’m definitely progressing though…my reading and listening comprehension is much better and many of the sources I use for articles I’m not having much trouble at all.
I also had taken about a 2 month hiatus from Germany earlier in the year to refresh my limited Spanish knowledge for a trip to Chile. I didn’t do much speaking since my gf’s father also knows Spanish fluently. I was able to understand quite a bit. For reference, I took three years of Spanish in high school and 1 semester in college, but otherwise hadn’t used it until December-January.
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I have been studying english here at linkQ for about 6 months. I can say that my level of comprehension is very good
in both reading and listening. But as far as speaking and writing, I think I am still far far far faaaaar away.
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Yeah you’ll probably need to hit like 30k in german before you know enough words to be able to freely communicate (given that your speaking is at high level also).
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I am learning, as I first started, Spanish and then French. I had studied Spanish a little bit in school and had a base, as I use this term very generously, in a Romance language. I think its been well. French is different. And I have just recently explored other Romance languages. I definitely think some are similar, like Spanish and Portuguese. I want to get into German eventually but it seems wildly different than anything I’m used to, and I feel like I would be starting from near scratch in that language.
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On LingQ:
I’m currently doing Swedish while also maintaining my Turkish and Serbian. Once I’m done with my 90 day streak for Swedish, I think I will focus on Romanian or Finnish.
Not on LingQ:
Maintaining/improving Albanian and Azerbaijani. Hopefully I can find someone to make the mini stories in Albanian, then I’ll do Albanian on here too 
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I’ve already learnt English, German and now I’m learning Italian. English and German were kinda easy for me and I started learning Italian because I had to work there the previous year. I am still learning it, it’s quite difficult for me but I think i’m doing progress. I also went to Italian language school http://fda-sanremo.com/ while I was there. They helped me a lot in understanding grammar and speaking.
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Swedish is a very fun language to learn so your next year should be fun as well^^
Right now I am learning Russian in order to communicate with the Ukrainians / Belarussians here in Poland (if they don’t speak Polish yet ofcourse).
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I’m at 985,674 Spanish words read with LingQ so far. I estimate in around a week or two, I should be at least at the 1 million word mark. I normally watch Spanish YouTube videos without subtitles. I sometimes go to a Spanish church, which is an all Spanish environment. I try to use Spanish as a tool instead of a study. Next year, I’m probably going to be taking an online business/marketing course in Spanish to continue to use Spanish as a tool to learn other things.
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Wow, that’s very ambitious of you!
Good of luck Sir!
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Any ć¦äż titles you can recommend? Where do you get them from? Are there any movies or texts you can import into Lingq?
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Among other things, I’ve been following a Spanish speaking YouTuber named Marta Emerson since early 2018. She just recently got over 100,000 subscribers, and she’s had an online marketing/business school for a while. The nice thing is it only cost $12/mo, and it has over 100 classes. She continues to add more classes. I believe I’ll get to interact with other Spanish speaking people in her online school that have similar interests as me in online business/marketing. This is her school: https://martaemerson.com/escuela-virtual/
I can understand around 90% or more of what Marta Emerson says. I can say this after watching probably around 60 or more of her videos since 2018. I’m also considering being part of her online group business coaching program, too. That is 50, 2 hour group coaching sessions via a video chat for just $180/year. https://martaemerson.com/mentoring/
Why I’m really excited about doing the online school is that I’m going to get to going into a deeper dive of topics that interest me. Yes, I can go on YouTube and find out about these topics in Spanish, but a course has structure, and because it’s outside of YouTube, Marta Emerson can really just focus on giving valuable content in a systematic way instead of also having to think about pleasing the YouTube algorithm.
Also, if I do the online school for a year, it’ll cost about the same as doing the 5 levels of Rosetta Stone–I’ll just be learning a whole lot more Spanish in the context of themes I already want to know more about.
I also want to take at least the free Spansih Wordpress course at https://miriadax.net Wordpress is what I use to make website.
I’m still thinking about what my Spanish New Year’s goal will be, but it is tentatively reading anywhere from 2,000-3,000 pages + doing at least 200 hours in doing any combination of courses I choose (online business/marketing, website development, Adobe software, the Bible, etc). I want to do my reading goal for next year in terms of pages instead of books because some of the books I like to read in Spanish might be 500-800 pages long. This way, it’s easier for me whatever length of books I want to complete my Spanish reading goal and also learn something as well.
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Hello Swedishfinngermanophile. I just looked at your word count in Spanish, which is impressive. What does being fluent in Spanish mean to you?
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That’s a good question and I realised as I read you comment that I need to evaluate it for myself. I guess for a long time my answer has always been B2 or a more vague answer as good as my English. Now that I look at it there are some difficulties with those “definitions”.
- How do I know I am B2 in any language for that matter?
- My English level is very advanced?
With regards to the first I tend to follow definitions “obsessively” to the letter, and with the second one I will probably never become as good in any language as I am in English. When I compare my English skills to some YouTubers that are around 35 or younger (I’m turning 30 next year). I’d say that for the most part my knowledge of phrasal verbs and expressions is greater than most people.
I guess one area where I have an advantage even among my peers and those younger than me is that I know lots of fancy words since I tend to read (used to at least) high literature. Knowing stuff like words with logy has to do with studying stuff because the logy part comes from Greek logos, is also something that helps me in that regard.
Conclusion
I’d say I am already fluent in Spanish and French; I will be fluent in German as soon as I improve my grammar. There are days when I might struggle and I do have to look up words at times but they tend to be very specific. Such as I recently talked to a family acquaintance and he asked what I like to drink besides wine and cider and I started to list a few cocktails and types of alcohols.
I had to look up the word for birch (abedul), when I said I don’t really like vodka other than a Ukrainian birch vodka that my mother bought be from Tallinn.
I am also maybe 80-85 % percent finished with my grammar book project for Spanish, French and Italian that I have mentioned in previous post. There have been a few times that I have had to look up a few things but to my delight I sort of already knew the answer so my grammar knowledge should be very on point.
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