Any Yabla Users?

[siouxchief]

Hi all,

I'm using Yabla currently and if you use it you realise there is no specific route through their system and it's essentially graded videos.

I am currently at French Beginner level which is 2 stars out of 5 in difficulty. For anyone that has used it what was your approach? Wait until you understand 95% of most 2 star videos that you try before going onto 3 star difficulty videos?

Thanks

[Speakeasy]

I am no longer a subscriber to the Yabla service, not because I did not appreciate it, but because I derived what benefit I could from working with the materials and then progressed to unsupported native materials. In my opinion, Yabla, and its competitor, FluentU, provide a great transition. In August 2017, in response to neoflight78’s similarly-worded question concerning FluentU, I commented as follows:

"I just conducted a quick search of this forum and of the HTLAL and I noticed that most of the comments on FluentU and Yabla were recorded in logs, challenges, et cetera. Virtually without exception, the comments were quite positive and many members reported using these services at the Intermediate and Advanced levels. My own experiences with Yabla mirror these comments.

I subscribed to Yabla German for a six-month period a couple of years ago and I was quite satisfied with the quantity, quality and variety of the videos. Although I found the grading of the videos somewhat inconsistent, this posed no genuine problem in actual use. My approach to using these materials varied. Initially, I treated the videos as Assimil-like dialogues to be practiced/shadowed intensively and repeatedly. As I became increasingly familiar with a particular video, or small collection of them, I began to suspect that I had gone as far as I could and that my approach incurred the risk of my simply memorizing the materials without further benefit. Subsequently, I switched to an alternating pattern of concentrated practice as just mentioned and binge watching. All-in-all, I was quite satisfied. However, as for everything else in life, I reached a saturation point and moved on to other materials.

FluentU was not available at the time I was working through the Yabla videos. When I visited their site some time later, it seemed to me that the services offered by both companies were quite similar. I will admit that the FluentU website is more polished than the Yabla website; however, their respective potential for assisting the independent-learn seems to be next-to-identical."

[siouxchief]

Thank you that's very useful and like you I do find it a very useful tool. I'll continue on to see if I feel like I've saturated its use maybe.

I am doing a little mini goal I created so maybe I'll shoot for that. I take the French transcripts, copy the words into excel, remove duplicates and count them. I'll continue learning these videos until I hit 3,000 unique words studied and reassess then maybe. I'm currently at 1,400.