Should I learn foreign words somehow or just Reading and Listening on LingQ enough? How I can learn more effectively? Trying to retell the story that I’ve just read or make up my own sentences with new words?
My level is B1, reading for 1-2 hours a day seems not enough
For 2 months I remembered by hard 10-20 words and could use them. And maybe x2 words to recognize them in the text. But I need to know thousands words in year.
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Reading and listening on LingQ is enough. About 1.5 hours a day is about 500 hours in a year. You will learn many thousands of words in that time and probably be comfortably at B2, which is the longest, longest stage to be at.
For me personally, I only tried to learn specific words if I knew I was going to be speaking in a certain context (for example, vocabulary related to my job or a trip I was taking). I also might try to learn specific words if I realized, during my conversations generally, that I was “missing” certain words and could not therefore clearly express myself.
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Learning a language is like baking a pie. It takes time. You can try to cook it on 1500 degrees to make it happen faster but your pie will come out messy. Its best to just put in your 1-3 hours and enjoy the process because it is a long one. Or another example is getting in shape. Dont spend 6 hours a day in the gym for a month it doesn’t work like that. I wish you the best of luck in your Journey!
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Hi, Alu_V!
Depends a lot on your language learning goals and your time budget.
Anyway, we discussed many options in this thread a few days ago (simply replace “French” with “English” because the basic approaches / strategies are identical):
For example:
- Ultrareading while listening based on LingQ
- LingQ-to-Anki (flashcards)
- A listening first approach based on Netflix & Co (unfortunately, LingQ hasn’t been able to fix the Netflix bug for months. Therefore, a direct import of the Netflix transcripts into LingQ isn’t possible at the moment. But you can resort to Migaku, Language Reactor, Tamper Monkey, etc., instead)
etc.
You can also add self-talk, grammar exercises, writing summaries, etc. to the mix.
BTW, the best resources for improving your English with everyday dialogues is in my experience / opinion: www.esl.pod because they have published more than 1300 dialogues related to American English with a lot of explanations about the language usage.
In addition, they offer more than 800 cultural English lessons.
In short, highly recommended!
Moreover, you can use ESLpod in combination with LingQ and Anki!
Good luck
Peter
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“Reading and listening on LingQ is enough.”
Depends on the texts you digest.
If you don’t digest a lot of everyday dialogues (at a faster pace, with sloppy pronunciation and various accents, etc.), there’s a high probability that you will collapse in a conversation with native speakers in a few minutes (or even seconds).
We’ve discussed this point in more detail in the LingQ thread mentioned above (see esp. all the comments regarding RockinRoo’s contribution).
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“Dont spend 6 hours a day in the gym”
Ha ha ha, I know what you mean, Hagowingchun.
However, David Goggins would disagree -
Khatz from AJATT, by the way, as well 
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Khatz is fine cuz native’s do this, but David Goggins does stupid challenges lol. I like his energy but doesn’t apply to most people. His weight routine is only 90 minutes and although he is great at what he specifically does he is very weak etc in the weight room because of this extreme endurance.
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