I’m seeing some reviews online about LingQ, and it sounds pretty good if you’re decently above a beginner’s level. Has anyone here used it or is using it? The latest feedback I’m seeing online is mostly from a few years ago.
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I’m curious too. I’ve done their “try for free” thing two or three times now but never end up signing up. The things that hold me back is the lack of curated content (they have the mini-stories but those are fairly limited and from what I understand mostly LinkQ is about finding your own content to import), and every time I read a review specifically of the Mandarin version, character to word segmentation being weird/wrong/wonky. I’m not sure I’m advanced enough to know if it’s LingQ being weird or me not understanding so that scares me a lot.
I do really really like DuChinse a lot which fits into basically the same niche. I’ve been signed up to that for bit over 6 months with zero regrets. Stories are interesting, all of them are also fully voiced (both male+female reader which I swap between) so you can just read, just listen, or read+listed combined. It does not let you import anything, so it won’t be something you can rely on all the way to full fluency C1 level like LingQ, but as someone who sits in that HSK3-4 area (at least in the old HSK levels), Du-Chinese is brilliant.
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I’ve been paying for an annual subscription for DuChinese for YEARS. Like literally probably 4 years at this point. Great app for sure, I just don’t use it nearly enough 
I need to set a regular reminder or SOMETHING to go back to her.
I think I’m definitely more in the B2/C1 area of reading. So, I feel a little strained for topics to read. They definitely have a lot, maybe I’m just being too picky.
LingQ seems cool in that you can basically reference any videos off of YouTube and it’ll kind of help suggest other viewing and reading material based off of your knowledge bank (it’ll tell you what percentage of words you know in the video so far, and it’s a good way to choose whether or not to watch it).
Maybe I’ll give it a go and report back.
I think my overall fatal flaw is not using my subscriptions.
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I used LingQ for 1-2 months for spanish and french.
LingQ is just a reader tool, it’s got practically no content so you need to import your own (just like mentioned above).
Its kind of cool to be able to see which characters/words are new to you or not, and watch the “known” counter grow, but once the novelty wears off you realise this feature doesn’t really matter (especially if you study characters via HanziHero, flashcards etc where you do have a list of known characters) and the most useful features are just the popup dictionary (available in pleco or any e-reader for that matter) and ability to analyze how much new vocabulary is in a text - your comprehention rate when searching for easy materials to read comfortably (you import texts, and as Lingq knows what vocab you know, it shows you the percentage of new/known vocab) - you can use AI to write a simple script that could do it for you in a few minutes.
I have not used it for chinese so maybe there are some aspects that I am missing.
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If you do sign up and use it for a bit please do - would love to hear about more experiences, especially from someone who’s also used DuChinese a bunch!
There are a bunch of posts online from people saying “I loved it for [random European language], but it’s not great for Mandarin”. Something about how it detects words within long strings of characters without spaces is apparently pretty iffy, and then messes up all your linq’s so it adds the wrong thing to your list etc. The combined with their apparently awful cancellation process keeps me away from signing up.
But much like akitak9821, if I’m being honest with myself I’d be better offer just using DuChinese more than constantly wondering if some magical other new toy tool is better! With HH + DuChinese + Youtube with a mouse over dictionary I’m not really sure anything else could possible add much.
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I try to read one du chinese chapter right before bed every night, theyre about the right length to put me to sleep!
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Thanks Allah, there is a very good and Free google extension which you can watch YouTube videos with, with real-time subtitles, translation for each individual word when hovering over it and their definition in case of clicking the one you want. it’s called ‘Language Reactor’.
after adding it, you must enter YouTube through its website on the Chrome browser on your laptop/PC.
Still if you want some article with bare texts telling a story or something, on the Language Reactor settings on the bottom-left of the video line, turn on ‘Show subtitles list view’. it’ll open a large section on the left displaying the subtitles as an article with paragraphs.
it even has a system which you can see the subtitle words in accordance to their level.
and their premium includes saving especial word you find hard and i think prioritizing some word for you and etc.
it’s very helpful and kind to be free, especially for someone like me who lives in Iran with such Sanctions, not being able to use PayPal and each single Dollar worth about 100,000 Toman in our currency.
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Here’s my report on LingQ!
So, basically, if you don’t have the subscription, you can still use it, but it’s annoyingly limited. IMO they might as well let you not use the app at all if you don’t have a subscription, it’d be better than whatever the heck is going on with their free tier lol.
It’s great that you can actually connect to a few streaming apps. At the very least, you can connect to YouTube and Netflix. You can even import your own txt files!
However, I’d probably still choose DuChinese or TCB over LingQ any day. I use LingQ’s 2 week(?) trial, and it was good, but I think the UI/UX involves a little too many steps for it to be comfortable to use.
And on the other note about other languages vs Chinese, I think there’s a good amount of content for Mandarin today since it seems to have exploded in popularity this year (thank you, TikTok “ban”). I’d imagine there’ll only be more and more content in Chinese over time.
Bonus: it’s so hard finding any content for Cantonese. I’m aware that it’s not the most popular language for language learners, but I’m just shocked that there’s so little content on both YouTube and Netflix that could be imported (or even found in general).
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