#AskSteve

Sign up for LingQ free: https://goo.gl/fGcsuH Writing is a great way to practice your target language. You can use words and phrases you've come across in LingQ lessons and there's less pressure than with speaking. On LingQ you can submit writing for native speakers to correct for you. You'll get a writing report highlighting what you need to work on. This report can be imported as a lesson on LingQ so you can LingQ the words and phrases you struggle with.

Sign up for LingQ free: https://goo.gl/WjKwvc I don't have time to learn a language! It'a a common complaint. That's why we created the LingQ app and playlist. You can add audio to your playlist on the web and listen to it on the app when you're out and about. Everything is synced, so all listening time is logged and added to your statistics. No more excuses, get learning that new language!

Sign up for LingQ free: https://goo.gl/nL9VPi You can find all kinds of content in your target language on the LingQ Lessons page. This quick tutorial shows you how to set your language level, search the library, save lessons and view your most recent lessons.

Visit LingQ: https://goo.gl/WY37DF My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Lesson 11👇 I want to talk about something that makes LingQ excellent: the ability it gives learners to learn from content they find interesting. As I’ve said before, it’s very important that we have interesting and comprehensible input (reading and listening) if we are to successfully learn a language. Whether you want to read simplified news or advanced literature in your target language, you can with the LingQ importing feature, and the LingQ browser extension makes it even easier to turn content you find online into a lesson. Extensions are available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Once you’ve installed the extension, you can simply click the LingQ logo in your browser at any time and the content from that page will be turned into a lesson. If you really want to challenge yourself, you can try reading a book in your target language. You can import the ebook and audiobook and read along while you listen. It’s a great way to expose yourself to lots of new words and phrases. Today’s Tasks ✅Import something that looks interesting in your target language. If you can’t think of anything you would like to import, try importing a news story from the lesson feed. ✅Meet your targets for the day.

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Day 7 👇 Today I want to focus on your language goals and what you can do to motivate yourself to achieve them. Why did you start this language learning journey? Do you want to be able to hold your own in a conversation with a native speaker on any topic? Are you more interested in learning the basics so you can get around on a trip? Maybe you’re an intermediate learner who wants to become advanced, or a beginner who would like to get to the stage where you can read the newspaper in your target language. Your goal could be big or small, it’s just important to have one in mind. Visualize yourself achieving these goals. You might even want to post your goal on the LingQ forum of Facebook page. You’ll find other language learners there to give you advice and support, and making your goal public will keep you accountable. Another way to keep yourself accountable is by tracking your results, that’s why all achievements are tracked on LingQ: known words, LingQs, LingQs learned, hours of listening and speaking and words of reading and writing. That way you can see how close you are to reaching your goals at any time. The most important achievement is known words as they are what raise you up to the next level of proficiency. The more words you know in your target language, the bigger your avatar gets. There are the different level milestones for different languages. The tens of thousands of words needed to be considered advanced might seem impossible now, but you’ll get there if you put a little effort in each day. You can see your targets on the Lesson page or on your profile. You can check how you did yesterday, over the past seven days, the past month all the way up until how hard you’ve worked throughout your whole time as a LingQ member. If you’re at all competitive, you might want to see how your statistics compare to those of other LingQ members. You can do this by going to a particular member’s profile. You can also sign up for a LingQ challenge. That way you can see the statistics of the other challengers on the challenge page. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your targets for the day. ✅Take a look at the challenges page and join a challenge!

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Day 3 👇 Hi there, In yesterday’s email I went over the importance of choosing your lessons so you’re learning from interesting and engaging content. Today I’m going to talk about what we need most in language learning. I’ll give you a clue, you’re reading them right now…. words. The more words you know the more likely you are to understand, and the better you understand the better you will do when you eventually speak. But how should you go about learning those words? In school most of us memorized lists of words for tests. The problem with that method is the words usually weren’t presented to us in interesting ways. If the same list of words were to appear in say a story you found funny or engaging, you would have more chance of remembering them. *** A lot of language learning tools provide only a limited amount of vocabulary, but with LingQ you learn as much vocabulary as you can, the sky’s the limit! You will have noticed by now that all words are blue when you start studying on LingQ. This is because the system doesn’t know if you know the words or if you’re learning them. You need to teach the system so it can help you reach your goals. As you go through a lesson, click “I know this word” for the words you know and the blue highlight disappears. If you don’t know the word, you want to create a “LingQ” with it and turn it from blue to yellow. This lets the system know you are learning that word. You can make a LingQ by hitting enter, the right arrow key, or the letter “h” when the word is highlighted. These yellow LingQs are then added to your words for review list, which you can study using flashcards, multiple choice, cloze test and dictation. Make lots and lots of LingQs! Make LingQs with all of the blue words you don’t know. You can’t make too many. If they matter they will appear most frequently in your lessons. Less frequent words will still show up, and you’ll eventually learn them. Rare words will probably not show up in future lessons and that’s fine. You’ll see these words and phrases in context in future lessons, so no need to try to learn them all with activities–that would take forever! These yellow LingQs are then added to your words for review list, which you can study using the vocabulary activities I mention above. These activities can be accessed by clicking the yellow “Review LingQs” button in the top right corner in any lesson or on the Lessons page, where it's called “Vocabulary/LingQs”. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your targets for the day and double the number of LingQs (26 instead of 13). ✅Try reviewing some LingQs with the review activities. Finished with the LingQ 101 course? Remember to check out the LingQ mini-stories course for more great content!

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Day 4 👇 Words are a good measure of where you are in your language learning journey. I want to explain now why phrases are important. Words come together to form phrases. These little chunks of the language are the key units that you need to become familiar with for better comprehension, and to eventually be able to speak better. Start looking for them. Look at what phrases other learners have saved. Save some yourself and start learning them, just the same way as you saved and reviewed words. You really can’t make enough LingQs. LingQ words and LingQ phrases. Review them if you want, or if you create so many LingQs that you can’t review them all, don’t worry. You will see them again and again in your reading, and hear them again and again in you listening. You will notice them, and then naturally learn them. As you can see in the video, I don’t just save phrases on LingQ, I add tags to them. This way I can get a list of all examples I’ve come across of a certain language feature. This is very helpful when I’m struggling to understand something. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your targets for the day. At least half of your LingQ for the day should be phrases.

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Lesson 12👇 Writing isn’t something I particularly enjoy doing when learning a language. I write well in French, Mandarin and Japanese as I was studying those languages formally, but the languages I have learned since then I learned for fun, and so writing was never a big part of my learning. That said, whenever I have spent time writing in a target language, I have seen the benefits. For many, writing is a gateway to speaking. You are expressing yourself in the new language, but there isn’t the real-time pressure of speaking. You can take your time to craft a response. Writing can be submitted for correction on LingQ. All you need to do is click the Exchange dropdown on the Lessons page and select Exchange Home. There you’ll see a text box. Add your writing, click the writing correction box and post your writing, it’s as easy as that. Don’t worry if you can only write a few sentences. The process of expressing yourself, even simply, in writing in your target language helps you to notice patterns and solidifies structures in your brain. Use the opportunity to try out phrases you’ve learned and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. After submitting your writing, you will get a writing report on what you need to work and any grammar issues will be explained. This is a much more effective way to start thinking about grammar than trying to memorize rules from a textbook. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your targets for the day. ✅Post a piece of writing for correction on the Exchange Home page.

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Lesson 14👇 We've come to the end of the course. I’ve shared what my over five decades of language learning have taught me, and hopefully you feel prepared to carry on the rest of your wonderful and fulfilling language journey alone. Well, not really alone, you have me and the rest of the LingQ community with you! There are lots of ways that the LingQ community of enthusiastic language learners help each other: sharing interesting content on the forums, tutoring, creating and checking translations, and more. It’s up to you how active you are. Many members prefer to just stay connected by reading forum conversations. This community is going to keep you motivated and inspired to keep on going with your language learning. When you first start learning a language you make huge strides. You may even notice improvements from one week to the next. During the rest of the journey, where you will work to learn more than the 2000 or so most common words, that sense of achievement is more elusive. Language learning is like an upside down hockey stick, and once you get past the initial intense study period, the blade, things slow down and the long road to fluency is stretched out before you, the long shaft of the hockey stick. Hey, I’m Canadian, hockey has to make an appearance! Don’t let the long journey ahead put you off, you will get there. Just keep doing the things you enjoy and make sure you consistently find time to spend with your language and you’ll achieve your goal! Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your daily targets. ✅Mourn the end of an awesome course 😉

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Lesson 10👇 Today I’m going to show you more about how the LingQ reader works so you can really take advantage of this powerful tool. There’s so much you can do in the LingQ reader. Here’s a breakdown of some features that will help accelerate your learning: Ask a Tutor If you have a question about any aspect of the language you’re learning, or one relating to a lesson you’re in, you can ask a tutor. Simply click the “Ask a Tutor” dropdown in the bottom right of the lesson panel, add your question and you will be notified when a tutor gets back to you. Settings Personalizing the settings will make for a more enjoyable and productive experience in the LingQ reader. You can change all kinds of things, from the text-to-speech voice to how much text you see in each page (beginners might find the “Sentence” mode useful). It’s a good idea to pay close attention to the options in the settings panel. Do you want to review your LingQs before you go on to the next page? Should all blue words become LingQs when you move pages? It all depends on your learning preference. Keyboard Shortcuts Another way to personalize your LingQ reader experience is to take advantage of the keyboard shortcuts. Click the question mark in the bottom right of the screen to access them. Have a look around when you’re in the reader today. There are more features to discover, and the more time-saving options you take advantage of the more effective your language learning will be. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet you targets for the day. ✅Personalize your LingQ reader settings. ✅Post a question in “Ask a Tutor”.

Sign up for the 30-day email course here: https://www.thelinguist.com/ How to Learn A Language: Lesson 13👇 As an input-based learner, I like to leave speaking until I have had enough experience with the language. I need to have listened enough and learned enough vocabulary to give myself the chance of having a conversation as opposed to just being able to blurt out some phrases. After all, a conversation should be a two-way exchange. You should be able to understand your partner and have something to say in response. This is just my preference. Of course, it’s completely up to you when you start to speak your target language. Some like to start speaking straight away, and I say if that’s what you would like, that’s what you should do. Language learning should be about doing things you enjoy. The difficulties learners run into when they start to speak a new language can be discouraging. I find that having some “crutch” phrases to say when I get stuck helps. Phrases like “let me think” or “how do you say it?” in English. Even with those phrases, speaking is difficult, and in order to speak well you need to speak a lot. That’s why we added the ability to have speaking lesson with tutors on LingQ. Click the Exchange dropdown on the Lessons page, select Speak and you will see a list of available tutors. To organize a lesson with one of the tutors simply click View Schedule and click as many 15-minute time slots as you would like. After you’ve spoken with a tutor you will get a conversation report. This report can be imported as a lesson on LingQ and you can study the words and phrases you had issues with. Don’t be discouraged if there are many. Remember, making mistakes is a normal and important part of this learning process. Today’s Tasks ✅Meet your targets for the day. ✅Set up a lesson with a tutor on the Speak page!