LingQ Discussion, Part 3

Steve: We have many other features as well in the system, like the flash cards that you mentioned; like allowing you to see the list when you are writing so you might use it when you are writing; such as the ability to tag words as being future or words of politeness or any kind of tag that you want. So, there’s a lot of functionality in the new system that didn’t exist in the old system that will make this learning of words, which is such a tremendous struggle as the words appear less and less frequently; it’s just more and more difficult to remember them. So, we’ve brought in a lot of functionality to help you learn words, but still, as you always remind me, you know, it’s fine to have these apparently efficient methods of learning words, most people like to listen to and read real content. We still suggest to people that the main activity that’s going to help them the most is actually being with the language in an authentic context.

Mark: No question, no question. I think as you also always say or as we say at The Linguist, the biggest indicator of your ability in a language is your vocabulary level. Listening and reading are the best things to do but vocabulary review on its own is also very important in that sort of three-pronged process.

Steve: Right and it carries over into your expression. People are always concerned with this emphasis that we have on listening and reading. Well, what about my expression? I want to be able to speak; of course. So, we do offer and I think we will offer increased opportunity for people to speak with other learners or with native speaker tutors across our system. But, what we have found is when people express themselves, say in writing which is where we have a record of what they’re saying; in the spoken language it’s more difficult to remember just exactly what they said. It didn’t sound quite right but we’re not quite sure why at times. When we see it in writing and we keep statistics, we discover that in most cases 40 to 50 percent of the errors relate to vocabulary, not to the preposition or to the article or things of this nature. So that all of the work that we’ve done to make it more efficient to learn vocabulary will naturally make people speak better and write better; therefore, more correctly, more in tune with common usage. So, people say I want to speak grammatically correctly. Yeah maybe, but maybe you just want to speak in a way that, you know, conforms to common usage and vocabulary learning is just a very, very big part of that.

Mark: And, of course, in many cases even if the grammar is wrong but the vocabulary that you are using is right, everybody understands what you are saying. If your grammar is correct but the words don’t mean what you think they mean, nobody has any idea what you’re saying. So yeah, absolutely, we think vocabulary is king that’s why we built a lot of these features into the system. I am sure that those of you who try it will be very pleased with the result.

Steve: Now, the order in which you are introducing this is that the first stage is to allow our existing Linguist members to use the new system and that there you are going to get some feedback and we’ll kind of tidy up any little areas that we can improve. At what point, and I know I’ve had requests from our existing members, at what point can we get into the other languages?

Mark: Well, I mean as we’ve touched on already, we ourselves are using the system currently for other languages. Obviously, one of the big hurdles right now is content in those other languages, which we are now trying to put together, so before we launch in other languages, we do have to build up our content. We’ll probably start with a few languages in particular, probably French and Spanish. However, our system can essentially handle any language as long as we have the content. I think one of the things we’ve also mentioned already is the fact that we are going to be asking our learners to create content for us, so I think we will start to build up and find content create, find, however they get it in other languages so that we can start to load that into our system and our learners can access it. I can’t really remember where I was going with that.

Steve: Okay. No, I was going to ask you another question. One exciting area of content – availability -- and we are doing it right now because we are having a discussion in English and we know that some of the people listening to this discussion are learners of English, probably fairly advanced to be following this conversation, but how do you see yourself working with podcasts that are already out there or that will, you know, become available for other languages? How do you see our working with integrating with those podcasts?

Mark: I mean there are a lot of podcasts out there, many of which are excellent podcasts. I’m not particularly talking about language learning-related podcasts, I’m talking about regular podcasts that people are putting out talking about technology or current events or cooking, whatever the case may be. Some of those podcasts in various languages are excellent and we would love to have that content on our system. Of course, the big stumbling block with our podcasts is the transcripts because everything on our site will be there in audio and text. We’ll talk to podcasters and see what interest there is. In some cases, we may do the transcribing ourselves. In other cases, maybe the podcasters will be interested in providing transcription if it led to them earning some kind of return for their podcast or some publicity for sure. Any podcast that’s on our system will link back to the original podcaster himself, so it will spread the word about his podcast.

Steve: One thing, if we just move away from podcast, but just look at you mentioned the word publicity and people who want to get their message out. I was recently in Amsterdam and I was made aware that they have a problem there with people wanting to learn Dutch and there’s kind of a limited amount of material available, especially if a person’s native language is in English, so they are looking for ways to help people learn Dutch. I went to the Amsterdam Tourist Bureau and I said would you mind if we used your material? They have some very interesting material about Amsterdam and someone who wants to learn Dutch is probably interested in Amsterdam. If we can find a Dutch speaker to help us record some of this material you know, here’s a situation where you have an organization that wants to get a message out: visit Amsterdam, visit Italy, visit Japan, visit China, whatever it might be, visit my little community; people who have a message that they want to get out. In some cases they have podcasts with transcript. In some cases they may only have a podcast, in which case we have to worry about transcript. In some cases we may have some text that we can get people to voiceover for us and all of this will be usable content that we can integrate with our system. Is that correct?

Mark: Absolutely and that’s one of the things we’ve always been most excited about with our system is that, essentially, any content that’s out there can be used on our system as a learning resource and that’s what separates us so much from any other system out there where you are essentially always reading something written for the learner. One of our big things is you want real content. You want content that was written for a native speaker, the real language and that’s what we provide and have been providing on The Linguist and will provide in multiple languages on LingQ. In terms of when we will have those other languages, we hope to have a fully functioning LingQ System in English within, call it two months. As soon as we launch in English, I mean, if not at the same time very soon after, we will launch in other languages.