Postby ddich » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:58 am
This might be a bit pointless or irrelevant and too long, but I'll just add my own experience with LingQ.
I first found it years ago when I was looking for ways to learn languages, and thought it was brilliant. Small conversations with audio and all the parts that I liked about it were free. What more could I want. I did pay for it for few months mainly just to support the project, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth it. It's not a lot of money, but I would've expected a bit more LingQ created lessons and a bit more structure in their system.
I also found it extremely difficult to find lessons. Years ago it was like a huge database of lessons and they were all in a completely random order, and a lot of them didn't have a description of the lesson in English. How on earth was anybody supposed to find where to start? If I want to start learning Chinese, and the description (that is 3 sentences long) of Lesson 1a, level 1 is in Chinese, I'm not going to understand it. Then when I did find a lesson, it had a horrible audio quality and/or didn't even have an English translation of the text.
I just went back there a few days ago because I might (or might not) start learning Norwegian next and I remembered they had some Norwegian lessons. I opened one of the beginner lessons (was easier to find this time), pressed play, the audio kept going after the text stopped on the page, I clicked that green arrow guessing that was to turn the page and...*poof* I, apparently, knew 86 Norwegian words now. Why they would do that I do not know.
I also checked their Japanese lessons because I might (or might not) start learning Japanese next and that, at least at the beginning, didn't seem too bad, but I do wish they had proper translations of the lessons. Having to translate sentences one word at a time seems like such a waste of time to me, when they could've just spent 3 minutes writing them down.
All in all, if they had more LingQ created lessons, more frequent updates from LingQ and not just users, proper translations, better structure so it would be easy to know where to start and where to go next I might subscribe to it. Currently I just don't think it's worth it. Also, I think the website is a mess, always has been.
And as a side note as well, I once found myself in the middle of an argument with Steve Kaufmann on their forums. And why? Obviously you're just hearing my side of it, but basically I said I like spaghetti and was then promptly told I was wrong. Of course the subject was language learning and not spaghetti, but I could not believe it. They had a discussion going about Benny's claim to become fluent in 3 months. I thought they were being a bit harsh towards him, so I, very gently, defended him (not because I'm a Benny fan, but because they were being harsh...like Manchester Utd. fan vs. Liverpool fan kinda harsh). This then started it all and apparently I was wrong to have different opinions to theirs. Well job well done, they did get rid of me from their forums.
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