Thursday, January 15, 2009

Tutoring on LingQ

When I saw this post on Steve Kaufmann's The Linguist, calling for tutors on LingQ, I jumped at the opportunity. I've been enjoying the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" tutoring on sites like Livemocha and Live-8, so I wanted to give it a go on Steve's system as well. Tutors on LingQ get points and can cash out those points at $15/hour or use them on LingQ, and my points will surely be used to further my own language-learning goals. (Steve used LingQ to learn Russian. Perhaps I should finally make an attempt to take Russian off of my list of unfinished business...)

While LingQ will certainly be up for a more thorough review by me after working with it some more, I can say right now that there's one feature I absolutely love. On LingQ, you copy and paste any text you want into it. When you highlight a word in that text and click a button, LingQ will look up the word for you automatically using Babylon's dictionaries or other free resources like Wikipedia, and then you can quickly make a flashcard (or what's called a "LingQ" in LingQ) by simply cutting and pasting. What a blessing that system is. For years, I've been taking my arbitrary texts (whether news articles, lyrics, or what have you) highlighting all the words I didn't know, looking up all the words, and then making flashcards. LingQ makes this exercise so much easier. The only downside is that you're limited to 300 flashcards on a free account, but if you can shell out (a pretty darn reasonable) $10/month, you'll have unlimited flashcards.

To get back to my own LingQ tutoring, I'll be holding my first session next Monday on a topic everyone seems to be wagging their tongues about: this big, bad economic crisis. So, if you're studying English, feel free to get on there and look me up!

Update Jan 15 2009 8:43PM: My username on LingQ is VincentPace (thanks Edwin!).

Related: Livemocha review: Love the native speakers, the method not so much
Posted by Vincent at 4:54 PM
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4 comments:

  1. What is your LingQ username?
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  2. Boy, that would be pretty helpful to look me up, huh? My LingQ username is VincentPace. Sorry about that!
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  3. Welcome to LingQ Vincent! It looks like you will be a very useful addition to the community and I look forward to talking to you some more.

    The discussion you posted looks interesting, a very sensible pitch. The time you have chosen isn't good for Europe or the Far East. If you don't get takers please don't be put off, just repost it at different times - assuming there you can find otherdiscussion times that fit with your lifestyle :-). With a little trial and error you will discover which times you are most in demand for and can plan your timetable accordingly.

    If you would like to talk about tutor-type things, feel free to e-mail me. My address is on my profile page.

    All the best, and I love your blog!
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  4. Thanks so much for your praise of the blog!

    I figured I've give that time a go and see what I got, since it's after the kids go to bed and there's not likely to be any other interruptions, like the phone ringing. I was hoping I might snag some housewives or students from Asia (Europe is pretty much a no-go at that time), or maybe someone from Latin America, but we'll see. If it draws a blank, I'll probably give a late-morning time a go.
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