In December we asked an unsuspecting member of the public, Kristel, 28, to try out Lingvist for 2 weeks and tell us how it improved her French. The results were breathtaking.
Squeezing Lingvist into her busy work schedule, Kristel—with a total study time of only 13 hours 55 minutes—had expanded her vocabulary to 1001 words.
Because Lingvist is derived from statistical analysis of real-world language, just this short burst was enough for Kristel to start enjoying a new world of French news, literature and music.
Kristel used the Lingvist Dashboard to keep track of her studies. This is how she progressed:
Her journey offers some helpful advice for new users and language learners, because we know that the first step can be the hardest.
On how to find motivation
“Regarding my fear of routine and self-motivation to actually commit to studying every day, I’ve found that on the scale of all the annoying things one has to do during free time (shop for food, cook, clean, laundry etc), Lingvist still remains among the least irritating options. And I mean it as the best of compliments! It’s the perfect excuse for procrastination. Whenever there is a choice between washing dishes or spending ‘quality time’ with Lingvist instead - the latter always wins. I tried to figure out why…and I think it’s (again) because of the clever learning method behind it. It doesn’t make you feel as if you have to work hard, but at the same time it still shows proof of personal development.”
On what you will learn
“The vocabulary was very diverse and included pretty much all of the possible types of words: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc. It seemed that in general the words were carefully selected by Lingvist according to which words are actually used the most in real life.”
On what’s hard about learning
“The main difficulty for me were verb tenses, long words and words that seemed to have very similar meanings. But what came as a surprise to me was the fact that after about 10 days, I started to guess the meanings of words and different possible grammar tenses rather intuitively. So there must be a smart formula or some sort of witchcraft behind Lingvist’s learning method.”
