I am a fan of online learning for languages. Without the Internet I could not have advanced so quickly in Romanian and Czech, for example.
But online learning can have its problems. For three or four days last week, LingQ was so slow that it became difficult to use. We had not done anything different at LingQ. We contacted our service provider and they claimed that they had not done anything different either. We posted a notice apologizing to our users at LingQ and had our tech people in Vancouver, and the people we work with elsewhere in the world, look at all the things that might have caused the problem. Then all of a sudden, yesterday, we were back to normal. According to our service provider there was a routing problem in the network somewhere upstream from them.
I love using LingQ, as well as the iLingQ app on my iPhone and mini iPad. But sometimes all this technology can be a little finicky. The power of online learning and the complexity of the technology which supports it is amazing. Sometimes we take these benefits for granted and when problems arise it is easy to get quite annoyed. I have to remind myself how much better off I am, and how much faster I’m learning than if I were in a traditional classroom.
For the last three or four days when LingQ was quite sluggish, I spent more time on my iPhone and iPad. This meant more reading on the iPhone and iPad, and more reviewing of flashcards. I also spent more time with good old paper resources, like books. I am happy, though, that I can get back to online learning with LingQ. I have only got two weeks until I go to Romania.
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