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BoltC
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2024-10-11 22:22:46

BoltC on Nostr: I've been learning Japanese on and off for well over a decade at this point. I ...

I've been learning Japanese on and off for well over a decade at this point. I primarily brute forced my way to a reasonable level of competence using a spaced repetition system called Anki. It's essentially a fancy electronic flash card system. Anki requires a high level of grind and a high pain threshold to keep it up for extended periods of time. I've started and stopped many times over the years. I had never tried LingQ, which is surprising given how long it has been around. I looked into it when I saw this post by jack (npub1sg6…f63m).

The key to language learning is huge amounts of input - primarily listening to and watching native content. This is contrary to the way many people learn languages - we often focus on speaking and writing over listening and reading. As an aside, this is one of the reasons I believe children learn languages quickly - if you throw them into a school they are surrounded by the language for hours each day.

LingQ has designed their system around input. While it isn't perfect (especially for Japanese), it solves many pain points for me that makes it a valuable language learning system. What I especially like is that I can import content into the platform - I've tried youtube videos (shout out to yuyuの日本語podcast) and ebooks and it's great. It'll even generate AI audio for the ebooks.

I can follow along page by page or sentence by sentence, tapping/clicking on words that I don't know that get automatically added to my list of words I'm learning. I can then study those words in a similar fashion as I used to use Anki.

The primary negative is that it isn't cheap. But compared to paying for language classes or online tutors, it's not crazy. I've only been using it for a week and I'm hooked. If I'm still using it a month from now, that's a good sign and I'll probably spring for a longer subscription.

If you have used LingQ, let me know if you have any tips and tricks.

def the best language system i’ve found: https://www.lingq.com/
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