Passive Listening vs. Active Listening

I’ve been reading on the progress on some people on here, and I find it quite amazing when people say “I listen to about 6 hours of audio a day.”

It had me thinking that I wonder how people could fit that time within the day. I balance college and a few hours of work a week and I’m happy with my 1500-2000 words of reading a day followed by a few minutes of speaking and about 30 minutes of active listening. I’m also quite conservative with my statistics. If I want to say I read a lesson once, I actually read through sentence by sentence before I feel like counting it. I also don’t like to create a lot of LingQs because I don’t want to overwhelm myself.

When I mean active listening, I mean I listen to the audio actively picking out words and trying to put them together, sometimes with the transcript, and other times not so much.

Does everyone here count their hours as mostly passively listening? It seems it wouldn’t be so tedious to go into auto pilot and listen while multitasking while doing chores or a job. Or am I underestimating people that they actually really do 6 hours of attentive listening?

I guess what I’m really asking for the sake of discussion is the difference of learning between passive listening and active listening.

I count all listening, both passive and active. I compare it to listening in my native tongue. When I passively listen to someone speaking English, I know what they are saying even though I may not respond to it mentally (i.e dwelling on what is said). I think music is an example of passive listening. I know what the artist is saying though I may respond to it because of the instruments in the background, this would be contrasted with actively listening to the lyrics and dwelling on what they are saying.

I count all because hearing the language passively allow to understand it better actively.

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