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(This is the closest DALL-E 3 could get to the Duolingo owl flying away from the LingQ logo…)
(Ĉar ĉi tiu estas mallonga noto, ĝi ne havas esperantan skribaĵon. Pardonu min!)
As I talked about in a previous post, I recently quit using Duolingo as a language learning method. In short, I found its push towards punishing mistakes, even on the web interface, stressful and distracting, and monetization-creep made it all the more obvious to me that its effect in my life was not to improve my language skills, but to make me feel like my language skills were improving.
I have been subscribed to LingQ for a while, and previously spoke about my workaround to get it to handle classical Chinese, and I do remain critical of it—in particular constant struggles with the interface (it won’t tell me how many coins I actually have!) and its lack of support for more complex text formatting (if it just included basic Markdown support for headings, that would be a huge change!)—it has become my main source of consistent language learning. Right now, I am focusing on Japanese, which has been a perennial fight of mine to learn since my teenage years. Why I am so concerned with learning Japanese is a blog post for another time (and no, its not because of anime).
After quitting Duolingo, I used LingQ irregularly, and not consistently. However I now have an 8 day streak on the platform, which kindly tells me that I have read 4,500 words in the past week, and listened to 30 minutes of audio. This is not a particularly huge amount of input consumed, but the way in which I did it—without the stress and faff of Duolingo—meant that I already feel a lot “sharper” with my Japanese. I was able to focus on content that personally interested me (although understanding full podcasts on astrology is currently above my skillset), while getting a much broader range of Japanese. The rather quaint Nihongo Kaiwa videos are on LingQ with transcripts, and repeated listening has solidified 「どうぞ、どうぞ！」 as something that I can now hear, rather than just read.
This new language learning flow has been reinforced and made much more stable by my new Obsidian vault, created specifically for Japanese.
There are countless YouTube videos on how to use Obsidian, so I will save the general overview, but it is essentially a GUI for creating something like a personal Wiki, using accessible plaintext files (therefore future proofing your notes!), inspired by the Zettelkasten method of note-keeping, where each note connects to other relevant notes.
My breakthroughs have been, firstly, using a kanban board plugin to create visual to-do lists of my language learning progress:
I have one of these for tracking the progress of all of my current Japanese projects (above), and several other boards for individual projects, such as tracking how many episodes into TV shows I am, and where I am in various textbooks. I simply drag the cards across to the right as I get further in the project, giving a very satisfying sense of intrinsic motivation. These are, like all things in Obsidian, actually just Markdown files which are then jazzed up using a GUI plugin, allowing me to even (theoretically) edit these kanban boards using nothing but Vim.
Secondly, I am using the community Spaced Repetition plugin to make flashcards. I am not that fond of flashcards, preferring the comprehensible input approach where I look at vocabulary in context repeatedly. However, this Obsidian system has one huge advantage over other flashcard software systems, that makes the method much more appealing: you can make the flashcards in context inside notes about the things themselves. Below, is my Obsidian page for 占い (“Divination”), which features text from Wikipedia, and flashcards—both in the same place!
This makes flashcards an organic, natural process, wherein I generate them as I encounter content that is already interesting to me. These are then reviewed using a dedicated GUI in the plugin, very similar to That Other One Spaced Repetition Flashcard Software.
This is a brief note, but I wanted to follow up on my previous post about Duolingo, and document for fellow internet language-learning travellers my current Obsidian workflow.
