Speed LingQing - My Language Learning Plateau Technique - Steve Kaufmann

Once you’re past the first “discovery” period in a language, you hit the plateau. You feel you’re not progressing. You need to vary things up, in order to keep going. One approach is speed LingQing.

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Steve, Have you recently recorded any speaking sessions in Persian?
Btw, my subconscious mind has approved your pronunciation of Farsi. Sounds native. :slight_smile: You also pronounced other Farsi words really well.
Some of these Farsi words are the same in my native language Urdu so I know that your pronunciation has gotten better over the months.

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I am not sold on “Speed Lingqing” as a term, but am certain on its efficacy. This is essentially what I did after I was comfortable reading and listening at the same time. If the word is important it will come back, many times, and if I still don’t understand it I can get a better definition then.

This is actually what I use the ‘3’ status for now – words that I know I have seen several times, but am still not understanding and need a more precise definition or explanation.

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Though this is not the main topic, I wonder how Steve checks the pronunciation of the words(only through his tutor?), since Farsi has such a writing without representing many vowels (like Hebrew and Arabic) and Google doesn’t support audio/transcription. I began to study Farsi but quit for the moment and didn’t try it here because of that difficulty. The mini-stories have audio but it’s impossible to check the pronunciation of words.

I’ve done “speed Lingqing” for a few years now. I started doing it in my early intermediate stage, where I was starting to get into more longer lessons, but wanted to “re-read”. Often I found this really tedious, so I just decided I’d start jumping to yellow words and read them in context and see if I understood them. That way I’d get the “repeats” but focused on the words I didn’t know yet.
BTW, when I watched the video, he doesn’t really mention it until the end (sort of), but imo the best way is to jump to the yellow words, but don’t click on them. Read the sentence and surrounding sentences if necessary for context and try to guess the word. If you get it, mark it as known. If not, THEN click it to see. This way you get the opportunity to guess at the word within context which I think is much better than just clicking away at the word right off the bat. I think it may be less meaningful to just click the word right away as it appears he’s showing in the video, although that can certainly have its place too.
I do like the idea of using this for podcast transcripts that are fairly long, and if one doesn’t have time to do a full read, this would also be a good way at just skimming to pick up the words one doesn’t know. I hadn’t really thought about that usage yet but may try to do some of this as often I don’t have time to read through some of the podcasts I listen too, while also working on reading of books.

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Zoran: any chance you can suggest Steve to interview this guy on TPRS and learning languages? Might be very interesting to him and the Lingq community.

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That video of him learning acquiring Arabic is what got me “started” in 2020. I had no idea what to do given I was not going to get someone to read to me, but was like 1 hour a day for a year and a half is 500 hours, and, well, here we are.

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Yes, it’s a very inspiring video!

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