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 progress 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.
