Questions from a newbie

Support & Feedback Forum
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I joined six weeks ago and am just getting my head round how everything works, but still have some questions. Could anyone help???

A. The list of 25 “most important words”…

Are these my Lingqs with the highest frequency in my target language frequency list?

If so, I would like to give them priority and get them securely under my belt. They come up as Flash cards - but then I can’t find an easy way of moving straight on to “Cloze” and “Multiple Choice” to move them to a fully learned status. Is there one?

And is there anyway of printing these out?

(As a matter of curiosity, why is “Cloze” called this???)

B. Once I’ve moved to Stage 4 with a word or phrase, am I’m right in thinking that it moves into my learned words?

If so, does it come up for review with any form of spaced repetition?

If so, what are the intervals?

(I’m using LingQ in conjunction with Memrise and need to know whether I need to export my lingqs to Memrise, which has a sophisticated spaced repetition programme that dins vocabulary into you. However I like Lingqs way that puts initial learning into context - and I shall certainly stick with this as the first round of learning… and if I can then avoid having to export them that would be even better)

C. How do these points work??

It seems that I can ratchet up a lot of points by just reading something and moderately mindlessly marking the words I don’t know - but there seem to be less points awarded for the hard graft of actually learning the Lingqs or putting in a lot of hours of listening (I’m taking Steve’s advice of downloading Dutch podcasts from wonderful Sylvia and Fasulya - and listening while I’m cooking, or am in the car or even on the beach!)

Have I misunderstood the points system?

As a (much) older learner I am ashamed to say that I am still competitive!!

2

Here is a partial reply, a fuller one will, no doubt, soon be forthcoming from either Support or one of the members who understand this sort of thing :slight_smile:

Rather than using complete or fill in, grammarians borrowed the Gestalt Therapy term “closure” - a cloze test is one where you bring closure!

The Activity Score is an average over 30 days. If you go to Help and look for activity score you can learn more about. “Points” are the internal LingQ currency. You can look in Accounts for more details.

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A) I believe they are indeed the words that are categorized by frequency. I think this is based on the lessons you have taken so far. If you want to sort them out easily to get them into “Cloze” for example I suggest that you grade them as “2” and then on the right side filter by words on “2” so you can do a cloze test on those words.

B) Once you move them to stage 4 or the check icon they are indeed learned words. I don’t think LingQ works with spaced repetition. You can review your learned words “filter by category 4”, but the idea is that you move on and once you find a word that you feel you are not confident with you click it and set it back a few levels.

I used Memrise a lot, now I use it on the side, but learning words seperately is, in my honest opinion, pretty useless. There is enough material here, so that you can always go on and listen/read new lessons. The words that are really important will eventually show up anyway, and you don’t need to know every body part in your target language. Taking out of consideration that you are a physician looking for a job abroad for example.

C) I personally have no idea how the points work exactly. I read much more than I listen, because that way I can multi-task easily.

I’m not that much of an expert here, but this is what I can say from what I have experienced

4

As I understand it the activity score is:

“The Activity Score measures your activity on the site in the last 30 days. It is calculated as follows:
Activity Score = Created LingQs+Learned LingQs+Words of Writing+(# of Conversations*60).
Manually entered Writing and Speaking numbers are not included in the Activity Score.”

I think deliberately this has been set up to encourage LingQing, as making a new LingQ is the easiest way to get your score up. The philosophy is that LingQs are not just about words, but patterns and phrases and the more you do it, the more you will progress.

5

So how many points for creating a LingQ, how many for learning one and how do the writing points work? And if you are right, why no points for listening. As I understand from Steve’s introductory video, the whole point of LingQ is to listen, listen and listen again!!

6

Thank you, we Brits are perhaps a little less on the ball about Gestalt therapy. And I speak as someone with a masters in occupational psychology!

It’s the activity score that I am curious about. How many points are awarded for what…

7

Thank you.

8

1 point for every LingQ created or learned. Never submitted writing but I assume it is one point per word.

Don’t know the answer to the listening question, maybe it’s because listening varies a lot in quality. I listen to about 20 hours a week away from LingQ and input the stats manually. I would be lying if I said every minute of that time I was concentrating 100%. But that’s just a guess, a real LingQ person can probably set the record straight.

1 Like
9

To clarify, you also receive 10 Activity Score points for each day over the last 30 that you visit the site for a specific language. If, for example, I visit the site every day to study Korean, then 300 points are added to my Activity Score for Korean. As to listening, we would love it if listening was included as well, but it is something that is quite difficult to track accurately, and most people do their listening off the site, so instead of having an element that is easily manipulable we decided to just exclude it from the calculation, but still include it in the Progress Snapshot.

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Alex,

Pt 1; Activity points

you have a leader board where you rank people by their activity. Presumably this means that LingQ thinks this is motivating. (as a statistician, I know that you don’t collect information unless it’s significant)

But if this is the case, surely you need to explain how it works? Interesting no-one lse seems to know either!

So I get 10 points for each day i visit the site. But what else do I get points for?

Is spcole right in saying that a point is awarded for every LingQ created and every LingQ learned?

Someone thinks that points may be awarded for writing and it may be 1 point for each word submitted through the site? Is that correct?

And what about the point that I made in my initial post… I appear to be able to ratchet up huge numbers of points by accessing text and just marking words I don’t know in a quite mindless manner. And this is given to equal weight to learning a LingQ???

Please clarify!!! And why isn’t it written down somewhere???

You say that you can’t award points for listening (which as i understand it is the whole point of LingQ) and I can see this is indeed difficult. But in the 90 Day challenge I’m finding that the need to create LingQs is getting in the way of time that I need to be spending listening!!

Now I don’t want to be unappreciative. It’s a GREAT site and a GREAT community. But i do like to understand. (I guess I need to find some way of drawing a veil over the leaderboard and the achievement scores on the bottom!!!)

11

Alex,

Pt 2

Sorry to be a pain… but what about the other 2 questions that I raised.

getting the top 25 words (under my performance guide) from FlashCards into Cloze and Multiple Choice (and am I right in thinking that they are high frequency objectively - or is it high frequency to me)

AND

how does the spaced repetition programme work (is there one) - if so, does it take into account when i make mistakes. It will be quite easy to export stuff to memrise, but it would be easier if I can do it all here.

And I’m really appreciative of your help and support!

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Thanks!

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On the Activity Score, spcole83’s equation was correct, though it also needs to include points for each day the site is visited, as mentioned in my earlier post.

The Activity Score is more of a general indicator than a scientific calculation. Since everyone uses the site slightly differently, some users who are more active may have an Activity Score that is significantly lower.

We did have the Activity Score calculation in the Help section before, though we’re currently in the process of redoing the help section and will include a calculation in the update. The calculation, again, is what spcole83 posted above along with my note about points for visiting the site. Hopefully this helps ease your mind a bit :slight_smile:

14

The top 25 cards are selected based on their frequency. The most frequently occurring of all your LingQs (excluding ones you have learned) are shown at the top of this list.

You can learn all about the SRS system right here: lingqcentral-en.lingq.com/lingq-srs

15

Just found it and it was helpful. Answered a lot of questions. Thank you. I think I’m probably going to export my lingQs to Memrise as i think they need more active revision than the SRS system you use.

But that’s really easy to do. And the first round learning will definitely be done here. I really like the way they come up with their context.

16

OK! I understand! It does drive me a bit crackers, but I think what I need to do is to ignore the activity scores and just concentrate on hitting my 90 day challenge targets. (Doing well so far. I’m a little behind with listening, but not very much! I am determined to catch up)

Thank you for being patient with my rather tetchy post.

And to say again… this is making a real difference to my Dutch listening skills. It’s only been six weeks and I can already notice the difference. So a really big thank you.

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17

I agree, the 90-Day Challenge goals sound like they would be a better fit for you :slight_smile:

Glad to hear you’re already noticing progress. Keep up the great work!