Learning Russian with LingQ: Lower Intermediate

I joined LingQ last year in order to learn Russian. I had spent two years trying to teach myself, using a textbook and whatever lessons I could find on the internet. I learned about grammar, and could read (but not pronounce)a few hundred words. I couldn't understand any spoken Russian, and struggled to read it.

The lessons in the LingQ library have been brilliant. I've worked my way through about 100 of them so far, created thousands of LingQs, and learned about a third of them. I've worked hard on it. Now I can get the general idea of what a lesson or a podcast is about on the first hearing, although I need to chew my way through it with a dictionary to understand it properly. I still read Russian only slowly, although I can pronounce it quite well.

I do have conversations with the Russian tutors from time to time. The time I spent learning grammar rules have had very little impact on my ability to speak. If I had spent that time on listening to LingQ lessons instead, I would probably be fluent by now. As it is, I keep having to drop back into English to say "how do I say....?"

I hope that, in another six months and 50 more LingQ lessons, I'll be able to listen to audio books. Then I will create my own lessons from the ebook versions and work through them. Until then, there's plenty in the LingQ library to choose from. And strangely enough, I find that you pick up grammar rules without really trying if you hear enough examples.

LingQ: because foreigners DON'T understand you if you shout!

Why I use LingQ to learn languages

Steve suggests we create some videos for LingQ's YouTube group LingQ Plaza http://www.youtube.com/group/lingqplaza. I have never done a video before, so I'll write some words here and use the best ones for a script.

I joined LingQ in July 2008. I had been trying to learn Russian and was getting frustrated. I had spent a lot of time reading books, but none of it helped me to actually understand a piece of Russian! I found I was spending more and more time trawling the internet, looking for sites which could help me.

But I'm a tricky customer to please. I don't want to pay any money, for anything. I want well-thought out guidance from people who really understand about language learning. I don't want to be bored, at all, ever. So I don't like sites which tell me to read dull news articles or the classics. I don't do poetry. I do vampire stories, rock music (DDT rule!) and articles about the paranormal. I don't like sites that try to sell me sex in any form (I really can't use any more Russian mail-order brides) and I don't want to be encouraged to download illegal files.

I happened upon LingQ. It was exactly what I was looking for, audio files with transcripts, a lot of them, with on-line dictionaries so you can look up the words you don't understand and save them in your own on-line vocabulary list. I also really liked the fact that the system kept track of how many words you had learned and how many words you knew, so for the first time I had some indicator of my progress. Best of all, I liked that I could use my own material (Dracula!) to create my own LingQ lessons.

I like the people too. I was impressed right from the start that a lot of LingQ members are linguists. These are people who seriously love language learning, and have put a lot of thought into how best to do it. I have learned more about the learning process from hanging out in the forum than I ever learned in a class.

I hate spending money. But I do have a paying account on LingQ now, it's worth it because I get feedback on my progess from a lot of friendly and helpful tutors. It's a lot of fun. And I haven't been bored, not ever. And I haven't read any poetry either.

LingQ: because it keeps you off the streets and out in the big wide world.