Just curious, To what degree of language ability will you gain after completing LingQ 60 mini stories?

I’ve just completed 30 mini stories in Hungarian, I am very happy that I am now getting some familiarity with this language.

I am just curious, to what degree of language ability will you gain after completing 60 mini stories?
Will you be able to read child books? elementary school textbooks? or scientific fictions?
Or will you be ready to learn from movies?

I plan to watch movies and read fictions after completing LingQ 60 mini stories.
But I don’t know if LingQ 60 mini stories are enough to make me have ability to understand movies and fictions?

I know there are many people here are good at learning language
Can you share your thoughts or experience?
Thank you very much

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It’s not nearly enough. I’m not 100% sure the numbers are correct since for some reason the German course is only showing the first 26 stories, but it says 1887 total unique words. This kind of sounds right because I was thinking it was around 2000-ish LingQ words. I think it’s probably around an A2-ish level.

It’s not nearly enough for children’s books (above a certain age), elementary school textbooks, or science fiction, or movies. The first two could mostly be because the vocabulary itself is different. i.e. you might have the right NUMBER of words, but all the “wrong” words as the mini-stories aren’t set up with child like themes and words.

For young adult reading of any genre (thinking 10 and above-ish), not even close. Think Harry Potter for example. You will not be able to read this after the mini-stories. There’s just way too many words that will be unknown. Same with movies.

Now, that’s not to say you can’t import the text for these and work through them using LingQ or some other reader and or easy way to look up the meaning of words and phrases, but even here it will be a bit of a slog. I think I started the first Harry Potter book when I had about 10-12,000 words (10,000 more than the mini-stories if my numbers above are correct). That was still a bit of a slog even at that stage. At 20,000 words I’m at currently, I do a lot better with a similar level book (Percy Jackson, first book), but I still have to look up a decent amount. It’ just a lot easier. Movies…mmm, kind of. I can get a fair amount of the gist of the movie from the scenes and reading the subtitles, but there’s a fair amount of words I don’t know and I need to pay very close attention to keep up with the subtitles.

Hopefully, that didn’t discourage you. Keep working at it and you will get there.

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I think it also depends on how distant your target language is. For French I felt ready to go for intermediate content right after having finished the MS but I already knew Spanish, English and Portuguese. In this case I just had to acquire the high frequency words that weren’t similar to words in the languages I already knew.

For Polish it was very different. Not only had I to dwell a lot more on the MS course to understand the stories well but I also just got a fraction of what I really needed to be prepared for intermediate content.

That children literature is easy is also a popular myth in language learning. After the MS I was ready for the Inner French podcast (A2/B1) but by far not for children stories.

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Like eric said, the volume of words is only a couple of thousand or so. That’s not nearly enough to cover movies or news articles.

It’s been a while since I listened to mini stories, but from what I remember, it was a lot of drilling basic sentences in repetition. Not a lot of slang/colloquialism, but I was able to pick up some attention to detail on sentence structure and vocabulary.

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If children’s books in Hungarian are anything like English ones, you might have hard time reading them. What you want is graded readers. Books designed to teach reading to native kids. Those should be more accessible because they often have a very limited vocabulary.

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If you are also listening to the mini-stories then in my experience you will probably be just about starting to understand classroom language. “Classroom” language (my term) is a version of a language which is slowly spoken, clearly enunciated, uses simple vocabulary (think of a first or second grader) and does not use any slang.

In my experience you will start to be able to understand TV shows at about the middle of intermediate 2.

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“That children literature is easy is also a popular myth in language learning.”

Maybe. I read a lot of literature for children in Russian right now and I find it easier than the adult stuff I have tried to read. Partly it is because I am reading translations into Russian though I still find it easier than adult books that are also translations. The main reason is not that the language is easier, though I feel it is a bit. The main reason is that the chapters are short and the books are short, making it easier to keep going. It’s demotivating to take three nights to finish a single chapter or several months to read a single book.

I think it very, very much depends on you language level you had before you started, in that language or related languages and whether you just went through them once or repeatedly. I would have rather low expectations of how far they will take you. Learning a new language is loads of work. The mini-stories should just be the first stepping stone of many.

I would ask the question how are you using the Mini Stories? Are you listening to them once, reading them once and moving on? If so, you are not going to get very far when you are “done”.

The Mini Stories are meant to be reviewed often in tandem with more compelling new content. If you listen to them often, use them for SRS review of the sentences, I can see them being useful for a long time. (B1 and even beyond.)

To be honest a super low level, There isnt enough vocab in them to be that advanced in the language. But if you were to flashcard every word and phrase in all of them id say you could have a very pleasant beginning conversation with people.

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You will have come across basic features of the language. You need to get to the upper side of 15,000 -20,000 words to read most things with any ease. The importance of knowing the most frequently used words, many of which will naturally occur in the mini-stories can’t be understated - they accelerate you to a point where you can the determine meanings of individual words from their context in sentences and you may like me find that if your own brain works out what a word must mean, it somehow sticks much better than if you use a dictionary. I find the magic figure for me is around 8,000 words before i can then work out most other words from context, but others may have a different experience depending on what other languages they already know.