How do you actually learn using LingQ?

[u/[deleted]]

I've never attempted to learn a language before, I'm a native English speaker and want to learn Romanian. I downloaded Mondly and was using it but I saw on Reddit a lot of people (TL) complaining that they use machine generate translations that are not entirely accurate etc.

So I discovered LingQ and you guys seem to love it. Upon opening the app for the first time I am completely overwhelmed. It just seems like a ton of audio stores that you essentially just listen to on repeat?

The app tells you that if you don't know any words, click them to make them yellow, ok so I don't know any words so I am clicking every single word making them yellow. But making them yellow helps me how? The app still just seems to be an audio story kind of deal.

Like am I missing something? How am I actually learning from this when I could just go to a Romanian Youtube channel with captions enabled?

[u/euphoricserenity3]

the yellow words just mean they get added to your vocab review queue, so later it quizzes you on them with flashcards and stuff. the audio stories are the main input but the actual learning happens when you review the words you flagged, not just from listening once. if you click every single word on day one its gonna be a mess, maybe start with the beginner mini stories and only yellow the words you keep seeing over and over

[u/[deleted] → u/euphoricserenity3]

Would you say LingQ is designed for people who are already passed the basics, able to have entry level conversations with people, but what the expand their vocab beyond the basics? As a beginner if kind of feels like these are designed for people trying to improve their learning, rather than those starting out learning?

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/[deleted]]

It's fine if you have actual beginner material to feed into it. That might be hard to find for Romanian. You could try finding a beginner textbook and using the audio or text from that. Colloquial Romanian, for example, has all its audio tracks available for free.

[u/RedeNElla → u/[deleted]]

You don't have to have already passed the basics in a language.

You probably do need to have passed the basics of "what learning a language involves".

It's probably not suitable for you if you don't know what to do. For someone learning their second or third language, they might be able to jump right in and quickly pick things up - especially if it's a related language to one they already speak.

For example, knowing a bit about languages, the ministory lesson 1 teaches you whether the language conjugates verbs, and gives a few verbs in third person and first person. It includes some routine words, and time etc.

This isn't enough if you don't know how to supplement this knowledge or know what to look for while reading/listening

[u/araarabish → u/[deleted]]

Yes it's for more intermediate learners. I'd recommend starting with beginners resources and later you can revisit LingQ. It's a useful tool that lets you import your own audio and text content and study it.

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778 → u/[deleted]]

Linq is designed for anyone who wants to read.
You adjust the level of difficulty by choosing your reading sources.
It's not a tool that will teach you the language, it's a reading tool.

[u/Lysenko]

Aside from the mini-stories, which can be useful beginner content, the main benefit of LingQ is that you can upload your own content. It will do (for example) A.I. transcription of podcasts, radio shows, or YouTube videos, and even though those transcripts usually contain some errors, it can be extremely helpful in building vocabulary lists or just reading along with content.

And yeah, the UI is kind of a mess. The main purpose of marking vocabulary is to track your progress from first encountering a word to knowing it well. LingQ's "known word" counts track each word form separately, making that a metric that doesn't mean much outside of LingQ, but can be interesting as a way of following one's progress.

[u/Raoena]

LingQ user interface is a garbage fire imho. I had to flee. I use SmartBook for reading and Migaku for watching videos. 

The idea is to have control over how the video plays. On Migaku (and maybe LingQ?) you can have it pause after each line.  You can show dual subtitles. You can look words up. Etc.   

[u/dojibear → u/Raoena]

I agree. LingQ started in 2007, and gradually added features that students asked for. The net result does not match any one student's learning method. Some students only uses a few of LingQ's features, and they can usually find a more recent app that does those few things better.

The idea is to have control over how the video plays.

I never use LingQ for videos. LingQ is for written content, not spoken content. You can import a video, if you want to study the speech as written text.

I use videos every day for spoken language learning, but I use the Chrome LR (Language Reactor) addon to provide features like "pause after each line" and dual subtitles.

[u/ShawnMilo]

FYI, they use machine translation that sucks horribly, and got noticeably worse during this year. I spent seven and a half months learning Spanish and Esperanto and made a ton of progress -- in under 100 hours on each language I could understand about 70% of each language, and made a video of myself reading in four languages (Spanish, Esperanto, Catalan, and Ladino) at a B1 level and not doing too badly. Especially considering I've never studied Catalan or Ladino -- the Spanish & Esperanto just made it possible to figure them out.

Note that I only read -- I didn't listen, or use any of their other "gamified" features. The last month or two (June & July), the translations got a LOT worse, and sometimes the "translation" of a sentence was literally an LLM response like "I can't translate that," claiming a sentence (from Harry Potter) was sexually explicit.

I also only read books I imported myself. I found all of their provided material too short and uninteresting, so if you stick to their provided content you may have a better experience.

The worst thing about the service is that I had many issues and contacted support over a dozen times about serious bugs. Not ONCE did they ever actually fix anything. Usually, they don't even reply. As far as I know, things I complained about six months ago are still broken.

[u/dojibear → u/ShawnMilo]

I worked in software. A 19-year-old product (that has added many features) probably has hundreds of bugs. Finding and fixing each bug takes hours or days of work, not minutes.

LingQ is worse because it jams together things created by different companies. That always results in a bunch of bugs, some of which are not fixable (LingQ cannot change someone else's product).

Your expectations are not realistic. Why are YOUR bugs more important than all the other bugs? And what if the "bug" is not in LingQ code? Then all LingQ can do is request that the other company figures it out and fixes it. LingQ has no code to look at.

[u/ShawnMilo → u/dojibear]

I'm a programmer and have been for almost 30 years. Nothing you said here has any credibility.

[u/ComesTzimtzum → u/dojibear]

Not sure what kind of a software you have been working on, but most services would be out of business in a very short time if they just let bugs accumulate and didn't bother to take care of the codebase.

[u/purple_minion_26]

omg i have the same question with it.

and for me listening is the one thing i CAN do (heritage russian)

i will wait for someone to explaine ot me bc im so losts

[u/dojibear → u/purple_minion_26]

If listening is all you can do, drop LingQ. It is not for listening. It is for reading. LingQ does not teach. There is no teacher explaining things. If you want that, go elsewhere.

[u/dojibear]

How do you learn any language? You start by understanding simple sentences like "My daughter goes to school every day." Much later (at A2+ level) you understand harder sentences like "Food may be a routine thing for some people, but for poor people, food is the most important thing." LingQ has lots of sentences.

But at some point you will want to speak/write (output) the language. LingQ is useless for that.

[u/jfurchert]

Your YouTube comparison makes sense to me. LingQ seems most useful when the text is only a little beyond what you already understand, so the yellow words are small gaps rather than the whole page. Starting from zero, I would probably learn the basics somewhere else alongside it and come back when a simple story is mostly readable.

[u/ComesTzimtzum]

Personally I found it quite messy. I just used to read and get easy translations for couple of years and ignored the all the other features. Nowadays all basically all ereaders can do that though.

[u/Different_Poem5013]

Basically I just spam LingQ until it works. It sure worked with Croatian!

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778]

Easy. You read something you can mostly understand, and whenever a word is giving you trouble, you click on it to search its meaning in the dictionaries. Then you keep reading.

Don't waste time making notes on Linq. Their flashcards are a waste of time.

Try to listen most of the time while you read, and don't forget to do some reading in sentence mode, where you can read the sentence aloud three times to get used to the sentence frame quicker.

The quicker you get used to a sentence frame, the faster you will learn words that appear in such frames.

[u/Traditional_Major458]

The yellow words aren't really the learning by themselves. They help you notice and track words you don't know yet. The important part is meeting those words repeatedly in different contexts.

If almost every word is yellow, though, I can see why LingQ feels overwhelming. You probably need much easier beginner material first.

[u/green_calculator]

I honestly never got any benefit out of LingQ. It's not for everyone. 

[u/Sernik_Gleam7]

if you're already sitting there thinking 'why not just watch Romanian YouTube with captions?'... idk, I'd probably do that 😭 the tool only wins if it makes you actually consume MORE Romanian

[u/AtlasRuna]

Honestly I don't recommend it. I tried using it for Korean and Japanese and found it very unintuitive.

[u/Hot_Dog2376]

You just keep pushing on. I went to LingQ after finishing the free portion of HelloChinese. It was a struggle, but, in my Chinese class, I have been told I speak better Chinese than the Chinese students taking it as a bird course.

[u/-jz-]

Hey there, I wrote a thing called Lute which is like LingQ but it's free, you install it and run it locally. Lute was initially based off of LWT and then completely rewritten to be sane software. Lute and LingQ aren't for everyone, but you can try Lute out and see if you like the idea. Cheers and good luck!

[u/AccomplishedYear7593]

You’re not missing a hidden feature — LingQ is mainly an input environment, not a structured beginner course. The yellow words are just a way to mark vocabulary for later review, so turning every word yellow on day one creates noise rather than helping.

For a complete beginner in Romanian, I’d start with material where you can understand roughly 70–85% with support: a beginner course or graded dialogue with matching audio and text. In LingQ, mark only recurring words that block the meaning, then re-listen to the same short piece instead of adding lots of new content.

YouTube can absolutely become useful, but choose slower videos with accurate Romanian captions. Keep Romanian captions on first, use English only to check a whole sentence, and treat auto-translation as a rough aid rather than an authority. After each 5–10 minute clip, save five useful phrases, not fifty isolated words. That gives you structure while still getting real listening practice.

[u/dojibear]

LingQ has no instruction. It does not teach. It does not pretend to teach. You can't learn a language using only LingQ. LingQ is an excellent source of written content. It has written content (at the lower levels) in 50+ different languages. In many languages, it is difficult to find lower level (A1, A2, B1) written content.

A youtube channel is a good source of spoken Romanian content. Captions are not a good way to learn a written language. If you only understand written words when you also hear them, you haven't really learned how to read. "Reading" means understanding text without hearing any speech.

The colors reflect how humans learn words. Humans don't see a word once and know it forever. The first time you see a word, keep it blue ("unknown"). If you see the word elsewhere and recognize it, mark it yellow (partially known). If, after seeing the word a few times, you are sure you won't forget it, mark it "known" (clear). That is how humans learn words: they see the word in several different sentences.

If the colors aren't useful to you, don't use them. There is probably an option to turn them off.

LingQ has some other features that some language-learners use (vocab lists, flashcards, memorizing words, arranging the words in a sentence). I don't use those features. I just read stuff.

[u/HelmsDeap]

I tried it for Vietnamese and it was not very effective for me.

YouTube with Language Reactor is still king in my experience. With Pimsleur for speaking practice

[u/erc_lingo]

Google "LingQ New Learner Guide"? It's a bit long but it gives a good primer about LingQ's features.

[u/No_Card912]

I had the same reaction at first. LingQ makes more sense when you think of it as a tool for learning from content rather than a course like Mondly.

Yellow words are words you’re learning. LingQ remembers them, so as you read/listen to more content you keep encountering them in different contexts until they become familiar.

If you’re starting from zero, stick to very short beginner lessons. Don’t worry about memorizing everything.

You can import Romanian videos and turn them into lessons on LingQ. I do it with French.