Anyone here use/used LingQ or any other alternatives?

General
21

I have used Lingq for three years and continue to use it daily. I use Readlang a lot too.

Lingq provides the following features I don’t want to part with:

  • Transcribing audio when desired
  • Playlists of audio downloaded to my iPhone (my no. 1 use for Lingq) that I can listen to anytime anywhere with or without an internet connection
  • A visual summary of words in any lesson added to any one of my lesson queues showing counts for words marked as “currently learning” (aka “lingq’d”) and unknown (words I have yet to mark as learned or currently learning)

Love using Readlang for reading
Why use Readlang? I like the reading environment better when I’m on my desktop computer in a browser. And I LOVE just perusing the web and finding interesting things to read using Readlang to go anywhere I happen to go.

And sometimes I just prefer to study my own uploaded texts in the Readlang environment.

Reading lessons on my iPhone: Lingq
If I really do want to read the transcript of some text in Lingq, I usually do so on my phone. The phone app is quite good - much better than the browser version.

Creating and managing lessons: advantage Lingq
Managing a lot of lessons, organizing them into “courses” (by author, theme, or whatever) is robust, easy, and useful in Lingq - not so much with Readlang per my experience so far.

Lingq Miscellaneous

  • Lingq also will translate an entire lesson, and there are utilities for managing and downloading lessons available from third parties.

  • Lingq has a huge library of built-in lessons for many languages, certainly my target language: Russian

  • Lingq provides fast and efficient ways to import content to create lessons.

Creating your own lessons
The huge advantage of creating my own lessons is I can pursue my own interests. This helps me stay passionate about my language learning.

22

Been using lingq for immersive reading lately. Think Im going to start using Readlang for Spanish and keep LingQ for chinese.

One of the big reasons readlang doesnt meet my needs for chinese is sentence mode. Being able to go sentence by sentence and have my unknown words highlighted showing their pinyin along with the definitions below. That in addition to having the audio synched to the text so i can read through a sentence then play the audio from the audiobook is a game changer. 10 books into the 30 book Journey To The West graded reader series and this method has done wonders for my reading ability!

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Oh also being able to hear the pronunciation of a word when you tap on it. Thats a nice thing that LingQ has.

24

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

I’ve read it all and there are a few things I’m not clear on so have some questions:

I’m trying to understand this since I’m not a user of LingQ. Do you mean that it let’s you upload a lot of audio without transcribing and then you can decide to transcribe sections as desired? Or something else?

How do you find the Readlang experience on the phone? I think it works pretty well if you bookmark it to your homescreen so that it opens full screen like an app. Then again, it doesn’t work offline so that could be a downside depending on your situation.

How do “lessons” differ from Readlang’s “texts”. Does Readlang fall short here in comparison? If so, in what ways?

Readlang has this too (for the languages that the vast majority of users are studing) if you enable Speaking Mode

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  • Transcribing Audio when desired: when creating a lesson manually (Lingq actually calls it importing a lesson), i.e. not using their browser plugin, for example, you can attach audio to the new lesson. The lesson needs text, but you can click on “Generate automatic transcript” which will create a transcript of the audio for the text of the lesson. I constantly create personal and private lessons for myself with native-speaker audio I have captured for listening and reading.

  • Readlang on the iPhone: reading is quite good, but reading a lesson in Lingq offers more usable features such as (1) sentence mode where I have the option to hear that one sentence read from the audio I uploaded (2) playing the whole audio while the text of is synchronized and scrolls by. And in general the reader offers a more feature rich UI of the Lingq experience - including and not insignificantly color coding all words to track known, learning, and new words.

  • Reader Note: the Lingq reader and the Readlang reader both offer different advantages. I like having both to choose from based on my perference at any given moment.

  • Lessons in Lingq vs Readlang “texts”: a Lingq lesson text is “text,” so the fundamental difference is just the UI. However, a lesson belongs to a “course” in Lingq, so Lingq can manage your progression through the course - and it can read the whole course to you either automatically generating audio or playing the audio the user uploaded.

26

Hi Steve, I really love Readlang, and I’ve been using LingQ on and off for quite a few years. I’ve studied Japanese, Russian, and Spanish on LingQ. Of course, I don’t just use LingQ - for the beginner stages of languages, I’ve also used Assimil and Pimsleur.

In my view, LingQ is more focused on listening and reading, while Readlang leans more toward reading. For reading specifically, I feel Readlang offers a better experience than LingQ. On one hand, I think Readlang’s interface design is really attractive - much better than most software I use daily. On the other hand, Readlang’s AI features can explain the meanings of words and phrases in detail, which is especially helpful when encountering obscure or complex sentences.

There are some shortcomings though - since you can’t customize the AI prompts, the answers often contain a lot of unnecessary information. For verb conjugations or specific usage questions, you need to ask the AI again, but it’s still pretty good overall.

The mobile experience isn’t great though - I tend to prefer LingQ on mobile. I’m currently using both apps because Readlang’s translation quality isn’t that great, especially when translating to Chinese. There are many translation errors, so when using the Readlang browser extension, I often need to rely on other translation plugins too. For this reason, on mobile I have to use the AI feature, but opening the AI sidebar makes the screen feel crowded and clunky.

From a graded reading perspective, one advantage of LingQ is that it shows you how many unknown words are in the learning materials, helping learners evaluate materials more accurately. Then there’s the listening aspect, though I don’t consider this a weakness of Readlang since it’s not their main focus.

LingQ has a big advantage for beginners (A1-B1) because of its rich learning materials. They have a special section called “Mini Stories” - simple daily stories available in all languages with native speaker recordings and the same story told from different perspectives, mainly to help learners get comfortable with conjugations.

Worth mentioning is LingQ’s Librarian mechanism, a reward system for people who contribute quality content. Thanks to this, LingQ has many interesting learning materials with native audio, like Grimm’s Fairy Tales in Spanish and Hyaku Monogatari in Japanese. Combined with LingQ’s sentence mode (which shows just one sentence at a time and lets you replay it repeatedly), this is really helpful for beginners.

I haven’t used Readlang’s audio/video import feature, so I can only comment on LingQ in this regard. LingQ uses Whisper AI for transcription during imports, which might be the convenience other users mentioned.

To sum up, what I like about Readlang is that it feels more like a language reading app, convenient for novels, literature, articles, and Wikipedia. LingQ feels more like a language learning app focused on listening and reading. When I’m reading Tolkien or Borges novels, I prefer using Readlang. When I’m starting a new language, I prefer LingQ.

By the way, an ex-employee of LingQ has developed a new app called Lingua Verbum. Besides having all of LingQ’s features, it also adds AI functionality and preserves the original formatting and images of ebooks. However, it’s too expensive for me - I can’t afford it. Plus, for reading, Readlang already meets most of my needs.

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27

Thanks again for all the feedback.

Just in case you weren’t aware, Readlang does offer audio import with auto transcription which uses OpenAI’s Whisper model. Upload .mp3 files just as you would .txt files via the upload page.

Limitations:

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Will check this out. I’m pretty open minded. $12 a month with no discounted annual option seems a bit above average. If it is a polished version of Lingq with more rapid attention to bugs, I would consider it.

29

Also I’d like to add that readlang let’s you create your own stories and content with the create story feature. That way you can create content for complete beginners or more advanced learners. Lingq offers no explanations feature, so if you’re not familiar with that term or word in your L1 you’ll have to waste more time looking it up. Another huge downside especially for those whose first language isn’t English or a very popular language is that the translations of the other users are terrible or there isn’t any at all.

30

Really disagree with this.

After using LingQ for several hours a day over the past month and trying readlang again one of the things that stands out to is how much better LingQs translations are. I honestly can’t think of an instance where the context dependent translation didn’t immediately make it clear what the word meant.

Sure readlang has the context explanations but I find that to be a poor trade off for accurate translations (Noticed several that made no sense within an hour or so of usage)

31

I totally missed speaking mode. Is there a way to change the voice? The Spanish default uses pronunciation from Spain.

BTW one thing I don’t like about the readlang interface on mobile is how the text moves around whenever you do anything. Maybe it’s a me a thing but I much prefer popups than shifting around the entire page to make space for a definition

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I guess it’s personal preference. In my experience on Lingq the translations work well when you use English as L1. I’ve tried it with Italian and Spanish as L1 and it was severely lacking for me. One other thing Lingq uses gpt4 mini for the context translations and readlang uses the more powerful gpt4 if you have premium plus, so I don’t understand how it could be better.

I don’t think Lingq is bad, infact I used it for nearly 3 years before I found readlang. I just think readlang is superior in my opinion.

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Yeah Im sure its use case dependent. For native spanish content translating to english I can confidently say theres a significant gap between readlang and lingq atm (In regards to context appropriate translations specifically)

Theres definitely more to it than AI model. Bc of the way LingQ post processes lessons with AI upon import, I suspect theyre giving you the corresponding word / phrase of an L1 sentence translation. That would explain why I never get translations that dont make any sense in context but I do encounter them in readlang w/ the gpt mini tier. I can still figure out the right meaning by opening up the explanation window, but that breaks up the immersion more than Id like.

34

Biggest advantage readlang has on lingq is the practice. LingQs practice is terrible. I really wish I could import my saved words / sentences and practice them on readlang!

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If you happen to have some examples where the context translation is failing for you I’d love to see them. Especially if the context translation is failing but the explanation is correct. In my experience they tend to be aligned almost all the time.

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I agree that LingQ is better for finding material. There’s a lot more of it, and it’s much better organised. But a lot of it, for example podcasts, is available elsewhere. I basically use it as a place to get ideas for finding materials.

I want to have just one word list, and in just one place, so I import everything into Readlang, which I use as much for listening and watching videos as reading texts. It is in fact my basic learning platform.

I’ve recently started Swedish with Duolingo. All the Duolingo material goes into Readlang. Not only can I use the vocab look-up feature, I can get instant grammar explanations using the follow-up question feature.

And to go with the Duolingo material, I am currently also importing LingQ’s Mini Stories, which are available in the free version (for private use only, obviously). Not only can I then add any unknown words into my Readlang list, I can also listen to the story via Readlang’s Read aloud feature. Using Microsoft’s Edge browser, I would say that the AI voice in Swedish is at least as good, if not actually more expressive than the reader on LingQ.

Incidentally, you can do something similar to the Mini Stories different perspectives on Readlang, using the AI story generator. As an experiment, I asked it to give me exactly the same story about the first day at a new school in simple Swedish, in the Present tense, and in the Past tense. I repeated the exercise with a story about daily routines, using present and future. And in both cases it did exactly what I asked for.

Another way to use the Readlang story generator is to ask it to generate a story based on a given set of vocabulary. I have exported all my words from Readlang into Google sheets, and am working through each list, twenty words at a time. The stories may not be the greatest, but personally I prefer this method to using flashcards.

As regards video transcripts, if the video itself doesn’t have a decent script (or none at all) I use Turboscribe to generate the text, load it into Readlang, add the video reference and the time stamps (where available), and Bob’s your uncle.

The more I use Readlang, the more possibilities I find, and the more it becomes the central pillar of my language learning adventure.

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37

I can think of a couple instances where it showed the wrong / inappropriate definition on screen and then in the context window was like “This word means wrong definition or right definition”

38

I recently switched from Lingq to Readlang as their interface took just sooooo long to load. I’m only reading books and the interface is way cleaner here. I like that that i have a my texts in a proper list (than in a weird Netflix-style matrix), that the import is way faster and that I can easily delete texts. I also like the story bot feature, especially at the A2/B1 stage, where real books are still to difficult.

What I miss is the word count - it was really nice to see how many new words I will learn with a new book which a) really gave me motivation and b) helped me to choose which book to read next, i.e. gave me an tool to sort of guess the difficulty. Seeing my ‘known-words’-count go up also gave a me a lot of motivation, some days I read way more than planned just to get the next ‘X words completed’-badge.
I also miss the interactive part where I could write small texts in my learning language and get them corrected by other users (and vice versa).

39

I actually am a long time LingQ-user and right now I’m trying Readlang as an alternative. The pricing is better compared to LingQ. I’m learning Chinese now. When you learn Chinese on LingQ they group the characters into words already and sometimes that sepration is wrong in the given context. So for example it will show you two characters as one word - but in the given text those two characters don’t mean that word. I don’t have that issue with Readlang, which is good. However, it seems to me that all of the texts in the library on Readlang are in simplified Chinese, while I am learning traditional Chinese. I haven’t tried the story-bot yet, but I assume the text produced there would also be in simplified characters. That’s a disadvantage compared to LingQ. Maybe it would be better to add Chinese with traditional characters as its own language.

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40

Sorry about this, but I’ve just realized what was going wrong for you. It turns out there was a bug so that if you’d never toggled the context translations setting the translations were being provided by Google Translate instead of ChatGPT even though the setting appears enabled by default on the settings page. I’ve just fixed this so from now if you’re a premium user and have never toggled this setting they will now be provided by ChatGPT.

This has probably affected a lot of users :man_facepalming:

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