I've been using lingq.com for about two months to learn Japanese, and I think it's lightyears beyond any of the other tools I've used, which include Duolingo, Anki, japaneselevelup, and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study. I think the fundamental reason is that rather than doing some second-order activity like studying flashcards, lingq has you spending most of your time listening and reading.
Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq.
There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone.
By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there.
lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported.
lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful.
There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance.
I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.
Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq.
There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone.
By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there.
lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported.
lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful.
There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance.
I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.