I’m a few days into a 90 day challenge in Korean, and I really want to meet all of my targets this time and make a significant step forward. The listening is the biggest challenge for me because I don’t have a lengthy commute to work or other natural daily time when I can listen for a solid 20-30 minutes at a time. So, I have to make the time for it throughout the day and get in bits and pieces when I can.
But here’s my question. Is the 45 minutes a day that’s required by the challenge intended for just the intensive listening done through LingQ (which is most of my listening anyway), or do a lot of people add in other extensive listening they do? For example, if I watch 30 minutes of TV news on the KOR-TV app on my AppleTV, should I add 30 minutes to the listening I did for that day? Or if I watch a 2 hour movie, do I add 2 hours?
I realize I can really do whatever I want, but I’m not sure which is really in the “spirit’” of the 90 day challenge? So, I’m curious as to how others have handled that.
I generally only count as studying activity listening that I do to texts that I will also read and where I will save LingQs, or listening to podcasts that I can mostly understand. I find that watching TV, especially if we don’t understand much, is not that effective. But that is just me.
For me, I add time to my listening stats anytime I hear Spanish. For example, I have a class on Wednesdays from 4:00 - 6:30pm which is conducted only in Spanish. So I add 2 hours, to my listening stats. So, for me, I add any kind of listening, TV, hearing someone talk, radio, music, or whatever.
In my opinion trying to learn through watching/listening material that is above your current level is not a valuable learning method. I do think it is good to submerge yourself in the language in that way, but I don’t you can consider it “learning” time. Ofcourse this is up to yourself, but I don’t add time for music that I have listened, unless I have been listening with the lyrics on the side and reading along
I should add that I also find the “hours listened” a really hard subgoal. I can easily read 10 times more than the set amount, but for listening I just don’t manage to cram that time in
Thanks for the responses. Taken together, they kinda confirm for me what I was planning to do, which is to count all listening but “discount” things to account for less value. For example, if I watch a news program and am really paying attention and trying to understand (and catching bits and pieces), I can count that at 50% of the time I actually spent. Movies and TV shows at maybe 25%, so 30 minutes for a two hour movie. Reserve 100% credit for those things where I also have a text to study or which are roughly at my level where I can understand a good portion of it.
Otherwise, as cossiemickey said, I will have a very difficult time meeting the listening target at all, though I can easily meet all the other targets.