What's your process as a Premium member?

As a Premium member, what is your learning process? What exactly do you do?

I look for content that is interesting to me on the web…news articles, books, youtube channels with correct subtitles, wikipedia articles in the target language. I import these into LingQ using the browser extension. If there is audio for these I upload it. Youtube audio gets imported automatically, but sometimes a website might have audiot to an article that needs to be handled a little more manually. Often you can just right click and download this audio. Then you can upload to link if it’s an mp3.

Once I have something imported into LingQ, I read it. Going through all the unknown words and looking them up, Highlighting phrases and checking the meaning. Often I’ll use sentence mode to get a one click meaning of a sentence. If the meaning doesn’t seem quite right I’ll use a different dictionary.

If it’s a short article I might use it to re-read several times. If it’s longer I’ll usually only read it once. The audio, likewise, if it’s short I’ll usually listen to it a few times and if longer, only once or twice.

Sometimes I’ll go into a lesson, and if I’ve read it through already, I’ll go in and hop from word to word as “review” and see if I can understand the meaning in context. This saves me from reading the whole thing again if I’m bored with the story. However, I think reading things you already know is very good practice to reinforce words and patterns.

I do not use SRS or the Vocabulary tab except maybe occasionally (like once a month) and usually only for a handful of words.

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What he said! ^^^

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Eric, how do you change the default sentence mode dictionary setting? I’ve removed all dictionaries except Deepl from Japanese, yet Google Translate persists as the translation in sentence mode.

several months ago, I was searching the same question and I read some posts here on the forum that said focussing on the amount of words read is more important than looking at lingqs/known words etc…

I started doing that as well. I’m learning two languages at the same time and want to get at least 2000 words read per language per day. Though to be honest, I wish I wasn’t doing two languages at the same time and could go 5000 or more per day.

I search for stuff that interests me, so in French I’m reading some science-fiction/fantasy novels and in Japanese I’m reading some light novels. I only make sure that the texts I read are not too difficult or too easy, which is usually not too difficult to figure out. Primarily I guess I look at unknown words and make sure there are enough of them in the text - mainly I want something more than 10% unknown but less than 20% . around 15% is ideal for me for reading at a pace that is not too slow that I lose interest.

I’m glad I followed the advice I read here back then. It took a while the first couple of weeks to notice improvement, but I feel the 90 day challenge is there for a reason: after 90 days, looking at my statistics and just my general feeling/comfort when I read - I see the extent of my improvement in the language clearly.

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I don’t believe there’s a way to change the default dictionary for sentence mode unless it’s a super secret hidden setting I haven’t found yet.

Google translate usually gets the gist of things correct. If it seems to be missing some “flavor” in terms of a somewhat word to word relationship then I might highlight the sentence or particular phrases or words and use deepl to double check. Or for certain colloquialisms I will use particular dictionaries that tend to have knowledge of this…dict.cc and pons for example (for German). Deepl often gets these colloquialisms too.

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Like some other members here, I primarily use LingQ as a foreign language book reading interface. Importing books and reading along here while listening along to Audible has been my primary language activity for quite a while now.

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Like t_harangi and ericb, I used LingQ to read all those types of content that interest me–mostly news articles, books, and speeches. I also use it to track my learning stats. Outside of LingQ, I keep track of the total number of hours I’ve spent working on Spanish. Anything other than listening to Spanish music gets counted.

I also use Netflix instead of Youtube for importing subtitles into LingQ. I should point out that I am mostly doing the latter after the fact, since the subtitle import feature is a recent addition to LingQ and my learning was mostly “done” by that point. Now I’m just playing catchup to make my stats more accurate and I know I’m still learning along the way. I wish I had access to this godsend earlier because more than half of my 800 hours of listening is from Netflix audio.

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I think LingQs optimal use is for reading and acquiring understanding, especially vocabulary through it. In the beginning I mainly read a lot, without really reviewing LingQs or anything like that, because I´d just learn the LingQs when they reappeared in texts. Eventually I felt I´d neglected other aspects of language learning. Now I use LingQ to listen a lot too. Sometimes I just listen, sometimes I both read and listen at the same time. It is probably a pretty good strategy to first focus on reading and then to start adding more listening in, because listening does not give you much unless you know most of the vocabulary you are listening to. Then again you could also just read at a higher level and then listen to simpler texts until your listening comprehension eventually catches up to your reading comprehension.

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rokkvi,
There are other tools that you can use for example using translation tool to make whatever you are reading comprehensible even in the beginning stage. To begin with, you say that reading extensively helps with listening. My question is, what about the negative effects of subvocalization? For me, reading in my target language without doing subvocalization is almost impossible. That’s why I read here on LingQ since I can read in sentence mode or have corresponding audio available. Do you have the same subvocalization problem in your target language? How are you 100% sure that you are not subvocalizing the wrong pronunciation of words?

I get what you are saying. It can be a problem and to some point it has been. I think the reason this didn´t seem like such big a problem for me was how I´d already spent a lot of time going back and fourth through Rosetta Stone levels 1-2 in French, so I had a fairly good idea of how many of the French words would sound. I did subvocalize a lot of words incorrectly, nonetheless and then I´d find out later on when listening and just correct that in my head. I have also often just pressed certain words to hear them being pronounced as I´ve been reading. Just some words here and there, sometimes randomly, sometimes just words I wasn´t sure about.

I´ve just started looking at Spanish and Italian a bit here on LingQ and when I do, I make sure to listen to everything I read, to avoid this exact problem and also just to learn more evenly.

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Just my thoughts, but I think there’s zero chance someone’s not going to subvocalize. I think, in fact, they should subvocalize, or even vocalize, at least early on as much as possible. That is speaking practice. I think through plenty of listening one will get better at mimicing the sounds they are hearing if they make it a point to improve that aspect.

People who are early speakers certainly are mispronouncing all the time, but if they listen a lot to native content or proper pronunciation they will get better themselves (again, if they are intent on improving their pronunciation).

Actually, it’s sometimes quite fun to come upon a new word in German and I’m not 100% sure how it’s supposed to be pronounced, but I will subvocalize it (or vocalize it) the way I think it will be pronounced, then play the audio, and I’ve nailed it.

For what it’s worth, I’m a fan of extensive reading and listening at the same time until I get to an advanced level. Once I’m good enough to read more or less unassisted is when I start extensive reading without the audio. By this point, what I hear in my head is pretty close to what I’d hear on the tape, AND I usually also will listen to a separate audiobook in the same language as part of my “listening only” time anyway.

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I subvocalize all the time so I now listen first to the audio and then read outload.

I am new to Lingq but I am now adding content from other platforms that I have used in the past. Podcasts, netflix, youtbe, and audio books. Right now I am gathering some of my older resources and now dumping them in one place. easy access is a blessing.

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Probably depends on the language somewhat, but at least for the ones I learn, the text-to-speech pronounces the words correctly so this is not a problem. I click on a word and hear the correct pronunciation.

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