Whenever I use LingQ, I notice that my reading activity is way higher than my listening. I don’t input any extra time I spend off LingQ, I just note down when I read or listen to something on LingQ. So why is my reading way over my target, but the listening is way under? I guess we’re meant to be entering the listening we do offsite? The only way we could also get a high listening score is if we either listened to the same content many times (which doesn’t seem to make sense at an advanced level) while only reading it once, or if we listened to many things that didn’t read.
Anyway, just kind of curious what the logic behind that is.
" I guess we’re meant to be entering the listening we do offsite?" Yes, this is the case. If you want to keep track of your activities all over all you have to add the external listening manually. I did this usually at the beginning, but long time ago I’ve recognized that it didn’t bother me. So I stopped adding these times.
I entered the listening time during one month of French study. If my calculations were correct, there were about 80 hours of input that month. I probably only had that much input because I liked to see that number on the bar go up. Since then, I have gotten lazy and have stopped entering in data.
I would raise the reading goal to make it agree with our own experience as well as with Krashen’s ideas. It wouldn’t make much difference in the practice of those writing here because we are reading a lot more than our LingQ goal calls for anyway, but it would be more logical. My words of reading exceed the goal by so much that it’s laughable - and that’s just counting what I do here at LingQ.
For me the number of hours read is the best guide to my understanding of the written word and the number of hours listened is the best guide to my finally understanding the spoken language. So I do track my outside reading and listening. I will now coin a new word of measurement for reading: a proust. One proust = 1,200,000 words read. When I get to one proust, I am getting very comfortable with the written word (in the modern European languages that I know). At that point I feel like I can cut the cord and leave LingQ behind for my reading. The listening, of course, is a different story altogether. It seems to be in the hands of the Fates, for I have found no reliable guide for the number of necessary hours that works for me. But I know that 1,000 hours is much better than 100 hours and much closer to the mark, whatever that mark may be.
I might go ahead and order it and see if I can read myself a proust of Proust (I think lower-case will work best for the unit?). I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle reading it though… I have a copy of Balzac’s “Le Père Goriot,” which is way over my head. I can really appreciate Maupassant and Zola at my level, though.
Agree with Don, when you reach a Proust you are ready to read most things away from the computer. I also think the listening goals are too low. However, most people, myself included, listen away from the computer and it is hard to measure the listening with any accuracy. I think we should strive for at least 30 minutes a day of listening.
I am not even close to a Proust on my German LingQ statistics. Of course I have read most of what I have read away from LingQ, but still, I need to get cracking!
Because it cannot be measured objectively or automatically by the site. You can add your hours of listening to your profile statistics but we cannot control what you choose to report there.
What do you think of people who has 200+ items on their iPod playlists and listens 7~20+ hours a day, mostly while multitasking and even while sleeping? Should listening be concentrated?
Apparently, it still takes most of them 4 years to understand 95% of TV in a more time-consuming language.
How about reading whilst listening, does this count towards the reading proust? I tend to read once, then read and listen about 10 times. Hence my actual reading is approx 10 x more than what is logged in my reading score.