Anybody doing LingQ?

[flameproof]

Anybody doing LingQ?

What you think about it? I signed up for the free trial, but haven't tried anything yet.

[c_redman]

Their Chinese capabilities are very crude at this point. I saw in one of their newsletters that the Chinese module wasn't intended to be used, but they accidentally made it accessible and then decided to leave it as a beta test. For a beta test, I can't find any status page nor a bug/suggestion form. I don't know much, other than just trying to test the limits of it.

The application doesn't do any word segmenting. So any text you work with will need to be already broken into words, so that its vocabulary tools will work the same as it does for other languages. Of course, Chinese word identification is a challenge for any software application, so I'm not too surprised it's not implemented. If you do have a text that has spaces between the words, it makes the experience somewhat artificial, as real Chinese is just a long string of unbroken characters.

They have an optimistic approach to tagging unknown words: Anything you haven't flagged as unknown when you sign off on the item is assumed to be known. This is a good approach if you are at an advanced level and have a low percentage of unknowns. But as a lower level learner, I would tend toward adding half the words (literally) in the text to my flashcards, in my brick wall approach to learning vocabulary. It's tedious enough to do this that I only played around a little with the system before giving up. I have other programs that can generate vocabulary lists from a text. Unfortunately there is no easy way to import it into their database. Oh, and there are only fields for the definition and an example phrase, no pinyin.

I do like their idea of maintaining study material in personal collections, and tracking study time for listening and reading. I have all my web texts saved into folders, and I rely on memory to know what I have already seen. However, I have been studying long enough that I've gotten used to my own favorite flashcard software and dictionaries, so I will stick with that.

[wrbt]

Lingq still has some problems with vocabulary. Usually you hit a word and you get lucky it comes up, other times you have to either:

1) paste it into a better dictionary like nciku then copy their definition into the slot for the word, although you sometimes end up with it no hilighting.

2) start stripping off characters to until you get something reasonable you can infer definition from

It also occasionally comes up with Japanese definitions first and you must scroll to get to Chinese. I understand something looking up characters is going to sometimes match both languages but since we're in the Chinese section maybe show Chinese first?

That said their Chinese content has been expanding rapidly as there's a guy named Wolf who along with his homies have been churning out 10-12 minute conversation chunks like some Sino-Dean-Koontz they've got like 32-33 of them now. The sound quality can be shyte at times but for listening/conversation practice it seems like pretty good stuff with plenty of idioms and colloquialisms you won't get in textbooks.

To me lingq isn't great as a sole source for learning Chinese but as a supplement to one of the greatest weaknesses many (most?) learners face (conversational listening comprehension) it's a solid supplement.

I realize the Silver Haired Stallion who runs the site can speak 10 languages and would tell me that no you don't need any structure just drink from a firehose of material but I don't really find much use in the other tools that track statistics or to save words between dialogs since I believe if it's used frequently enough it'll eventually stick.

Maybe someone who's a beginner can offer a view on whether the site is adequate for learning the basics too.

[Lugubert]

I realize the Silver Haired Stallion who runs the site can speak 10 languages and would tell me that no you don't need any structure just drink from a firehose of material but I don't really find much use in the other tools that track statistics or to save words between dialogs since I believe if it's used frequently enough it'll eventually stick.

Thousands of problems here. What does "speak 10 languages" vene mean? I could probably order a beer in 20 or more languages, but i don't translate professionally from more than any 7. On another aspect, I think that my linguistic abilities, concentrated so far on Indo-European languages, are dwarfed by a friend of mine who rather fluently makes herself understood in seven languages in three (3!) very different language families. I'm still a better translator in any of my language pairs than she'll be ever be.

The theory that you can as an adult learn languages "like children do" seems to be thoroughly defeated. Some young children learn languages, one or more, into which they're immersed at an early age, But nowing ways how to say, "Do'n't", "Give me ball", "Want cookie", won't you qualifiy as a speaker of any langugage, much less several of them.

During the admittedly not too many years (ca. 30) that I have labelled myself a professional translator, I have understood that age old classroom sweating, when you're supposed to something to go rather automatically for by you r conditioned heart, is much more clever than usehfulto lo these methodr any other langagel