What Do Experienced Lingqers Think Is Known Or Read Word ...

BabyRuth

United States

What do experienced Lingqers think is known or read word minimum for the fabled B2/C1 shangri la?

May 22 at 21:40

It depends, on your goals, well-roundedness, what else you're doing, blah blah blah.

But what do people think is a good target for a near European language (words read, known words, etc) ? Its not to pin down something elusive and variable, but to sustain motivation for a more intense burst before moving back to a regular daily pace. I want to study more languages but I want to get to a truly high--but not perfect-- level in one before spreading myself too thin or returning to old ones.

Interested to know the opinion of anyone who has reached said level--not necessarily perfect, but where anything you don't know you can learn from within the language, like you did with your native language from the age of 8-13, etc.

LILingquist

United States

Wednesday at 03:55

To answer the OP's question, plus adding a little of my own info, I started to see this area in Spanish around

--1.75 million words read

--30,000 known words

--Just under 1,000 overall hours of Spanish. In other words, pretty much dead on FSI/DLI estimation of hours. 23-25 weeks of learning 40 hours per week. The hours typically referenced are merely "classroom" hours. It doesn't take into account the hours of homework and self study these students often do. For people like us, doing it on our own, we don't have a classroom so just count the hours you spend with the language.

rhess

United States

Tuesday at 17:43

For Italian, I took an official B1 exam in person in Seattle almost exactly one year ago and passed easily. At that time, my LingQ stats were obviously much lower (I had about 20k known words, 25 hours of speaking, and 1 million words read, including reading done before I started with LingQ). With that in mind, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that one could be very proficient in a language at 2-3 millions words read, 40-50 hours of speaking, and 35-40k known words. This also assumes that B2 is the threshold for being proficient/fluent, but obviously some people may have lesser or greater goals.

Now, have I reached this point? I think that's a hard maybe.

After about 2 million words read (this includes time spent reading before I found LingQ), I can read books unassisted now, though I'll still come across unknown words. However, 95% of the time, that unknown word doesn't impact my ability to understand the passage.

I don't practice writing through any kind of concentrated practice, though at the B1 exam 1 year ago, I obviously passed the writing portion at that time.

After ~300 hours of listening, I can easily watch youtube videos, listen to podcasts, watch/listen to the news, watch most movies/tv shows without subtitles, etc. However, some movies/shows are much harder than others due to dialects/accents. So, I've still got a lot of practice to do there (probably minimum 100 more hours).

Finally, I have conversed many times with language partners in only Italian for well over an hour, and apart from pausing every once in a while to think of a word, or sometimes asking for help thinking of a word, it's been very fluid.

Basically, I think I'm close to that point that you describe wanting to reach, but not quite. So, my statistics may be a good estimate on the very low end of what's required, but obviously there are many other extremely active users on LingQ whose statistics may tell a completely different story.

davideroccato

Italy

May 26 at 13:50

I want to study more languages but I want to get to a truly high--but not perfect-- level in one before spreading myself too thin or returning to old ones.

Ok, I'm gonna give you my opinion based on the fact that you are studying with LINGQ as main tool, at home by yourself, and with a simple strategy. You can go faster or change this strategy, it's just difficult to be "sure" about everything for a lot of different reasons that you know already.

One thing to me is sure. Before going to another language it's better if you are at ease with the language you are studying now.

I start from these figures posted by @mark.E

60K known words.
600 hours of listening.
3 million words read.

Known words/Words read.

You can target million of words read or number of known words as you prefer. I believe those two numbers are connected in the long run.

Based on the non-scientific whatever experience on hard learners here on LingQ, more or less it seems we have the same numbers for specific languages.

You might take the new Advanced 2 numbers of known words for a specific language that LingQ has and add 10k-15k more. (this is my opinion to be conservative).

For example, in German, 55k-60k known words should provide 95% reading comprehension (based on individual statistics old time users have with this language). As I'm a bit more conservative I go for 65k.

You probably would reach the same target with 4.5/5.5 millions words read. I don't count on this number because I don't want to think about all the time LingQ doesn't count well and adjust it manually. But it's a choice. At the end of the day, if I need 5 millions or 6 millions it doesn't make a big difference. I just need to do a lot of work!

You can target one or the other, it seems more or less you are going to reach similar results. For example, if you count words read and I count known words, for the same language, we would reach probably the same level of passive vocabulary knowledge with one number or the other.

Listening hours.

Now, it's true that @xxdb agrees with those listening hours so I would consider it as a great reference to aim. Although, he has a tendency to listening from the start that would require more listening hours than having already a big passive vocabulary. But he also uses flashcards to boost his initial period so things could match.

I'm sure about one thing though, once you have increased your vocabulary, listening become easier. But different languages might require different strategies. So with some language it seems it would be better to start as soon as you can, with others you can work on more vocabulary first and you'll be faster if you start afterwards.

Listening is a different beast because you can use TTS here with reading and then switch to many different stuff online. Others are more expert on listening than I am as I always improved this in the target country.

Besides writing and speaking, I think you can have already a good "reference" to understand when you could be comfortable with one language before going to the next one.

In my opinion, when you reach C1/C2 and you are comfortable with the language, you can switch to another one.

Anxxos

Jersey

May 26 at 08:38

Distance to fluency:

nfera

Australia

May 26 at 09:07

I've spent over 1,000 hours with Italian and I can't read books unassisted. I can watch movies, but not read books. I am not fluent in Italian, despite crossing this 720 hours threshold several months ago.

Not sure exactly where you got that from, but generally the FSI numbers are only classroom hours. You are expected to do several hours of homework per day on top of that. You can find reports on the Internet of people going to the FSI courses, but generally, in the end, it worked out that their homework hours was about the same amount of time as they spent in class. I.e. You need to double the FSI classroom hours numbers. Eg. 1,440 hours for Level 1 languages.

I suspect after 1,440 hours in Italian, I will not be able to read books unassisted with ease. My suspicion, considering how close I am to this point now, is that I'll be able to do it, but with difficulty and many unknown words.

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 26 at 09:41

I think the challenge (that we're all finding out) is that there is a difference between learning on our own and immersing. Hours in the one are not the same bag for the buck as hours in the other.

In my own case with Spanish I had essentially prep work... Maybe six months of memorizing anki words an hour a day followed by a year of immersion 15-20 hours a week. At the end of the year I was "done". i.e. Spanish was burned in and I was fully out of "study mode".

In French after about 4 hours a day of watching videos and doing anki for six months I can just about hold a conversation if they really really slow down and are patient (essentially only taxi drivers will do this), otherwise they speak so quickly (because they assume incorrectly I'm fluent) that I lose it. In this case I have had nowhere near the immersion I had with Spanish although I had about 80% of the input.

With Russian with more than 3X the effort of French I can just about read children's books and I can understand schoolteacher russian. I can understand street russian in TV shows with subtitles but I get nothing without subtitles. I can have a conversation with a very patient tutor (it must be excrutiatingly painful for them) but with a native speaker they quickly give up. Even to myself I sound like a three year old.

My conclusion is that it is possible to get to low intermediate in comprehension with a bit of effort on your own.

Getting over the finish line (i.e. you're out of "study mode" and the language is burned in for good) either requires direct immersion with native (or close to) speakers OR a ton more effort with immersion equivalent [painful stuff like shadowing, glossika for a year, having conversations with yourself every day for a year etc etc].

I'm OK with it though. There is no way at the current stage of my career or life stage that I can just decide to go immerse so I'm essentially stuck in study mode at a slow pace until (who knows when).

nfera

Australia

May 26 at 11:39

@xxdb

"I think the challenge (that we're all finding out) is that there is a difference between learning on our own and immersing. Hours in the one are not the same bag for the buck as hours in the other."

Honestly, I think self-study is better. Surrounding yourself with native speakers is, in my opinion, only efficient to develop your speaking skills. The rest, self-study is more efficient. For listening, I can listen to podcasts of 1.5x speed (i.e. more efficient). For reading, I read by myself, not reading out loud to a native speaker. For vocabulary, I read while listening to transcripts/books and look-up words in the dictionary (in real life, you aren't going to be asking the native speakers for a definition every minute). If you only hang out with native speakers as your only means of language activity, you stagnate. Spoken language just has a much smaller range of vocabulary, phrases, and grammar usage. You could spend two years speaking to natives, speak great, but then still suck at reading, as you never practised it. Honestly, in my opinion, surrounding yourself with native speakers is overrated. It's a solution to develop your speaking skills, sure, 100%, it's great for that, but it's easy to close your eyes to the other domains of the language (namely, vocabulary and reading).

I think the reason people advocate for 'immersion' (whatever that is, but let's assume surrounding yourself with native speakers in this example) is because they 'feel' like it works. It does work, eventually. With enough time. But I wouldn't necessarily call it efficient (speaking skills aside). Secondly, because hanging out with people is fun, they don't count how many hours they are actually spending in the language. Thirdly, people talk about the same topics over and over again, so they feel confident in nearly all their interactions and they use this as a means to access how good they are at the language. But if they were to venture outside their everyday domains, they would have a limited vocabulary and poor reading skills. This was my experience with German. I felt confident. Then I started reading and realised how rubbish my German was.

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 26 at 12:04

While what you say sounds right, I think we might be talking apples and oranges here. My goal is to get the language across the finish line.

TLDR; yes thinking it through after typing a wall of text, I'm talking about verbal comprehension combined with fluent speaking. wrt to reading well yeah immersing isn't necessary. You learn to read by reading.

Meaning that if I stop using it and then come back to it, it hasn't degraded so badly that I sound like a clown or can no longer understand people. I only have the experience of getting across the finish line with one language (spanish). I barely use it at all but when I come back to it, it's like the old saw of "riding a bicycle". I can still understand almost perfectly and I can still speak without any breaks. Sure I can't talk about philosophy in Spanish with a small number of words but I can definitely circumlocute around the concepts and use a bunch of words to describe what I mean. So in spite on not having learned the words in Spanish for a particular knowledge domain, if it's something I know about in English I can still have a conversation about it in most cases.

I haven't manage to "complete" either french nor russian. In both cases I can neither understand perfectly nor can I speak well enough to be able to hold a conversation across most domains.

My thesis in these cases is that to get across the finish line (I guess yeah I'm talking about speaking) I do really think you need to immerse in some way shape or form.

davideroccato

Italy

May 26 at 14:03

Honestly, I think self-study is better. Surrounding yourself with native speakers is, in my opinion, only efficient to develop your speaking skills. The rest, self-study is more efficient.

Well, we need to distinguish a few things. Immersion doesn't mean only going to school in a foreign country.

I did self-study while I was in any different country.

But for sure, immersion by itself doesn't mean anything and I always take in consideration immigrants. They can spend their entire life in a foreign country and have a poor knowledge of the language.

So, immersion per se doesn't mean anything.

But if you self-study (with the tools we have now) + I can go to the bar right now and speak the target language, it's a BIG HUGE difference.

I will improve my speaking (yes) but I also have the possibility to use straight away what I'm learning, reading, studying, etc.

I can also ask people everything and they will answer. About everything. I can ask about football, history, names, slang, etc. All for free, and I can even have lots of different opinions on the same stuff. They will talk and share, I will learn!

I will also improve my listening which will make easier to my brain to focus on other things.

If I work in the target country I will also improve my writing if I have a job that requires me to write emails or stuff.

My brain won't have any choice!

I will have so much less distractions and I won't have to use my own native language all the time, like I do here.

Plus I will have a lot of fun in experiencing a different culture, food, habits and so on. You have a lot of different learning moments that you can't compare it at home. I can't!

If I could choose today I would do the same things I'm doing now with LingQ + the target country. I will definitely fuse together the best of these learning methods.

Anxxos

Jersey

May 26 at 09:51

All your comments are very fair, in my humble view.

However, you use a higher bar than the US diplomatic corp!

Just provided the table to help framing expectations.

Many parameters will cause material variations, like method and, very critically, age.

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 26 at 10:11

Could be we are all using a higher bar that's true.

In terms of the method, though, many of us have been trying to tweak and look for shortcuts using close to scientific methods and while it seems (to me after three years of research and self experimentation) that there are a variety of "tricks" you can use to get to low intermediate (which is no mean feat - being able to understand schoolteacher like TL is amazing(!)), there are tons of people still on here, still plugging away after five years or so.

The table is definitely legit for framing expectations that is definitely true.

But TLDR I'm not convinced there is much you can do to tweak beyond low intermediate without doing e.g. at least hour a day talking to natives. You just gotta keep grinding it out and accept that studying your TL is your hobby. As for age; Master Steve is OLD and he still rocks it.

But yeah thanks for posting the table.

nfera

Australia

May 26 at 11:13

@Anxxos

"However, you use a higher bar than the US diplomatic corp!"

I'm saying that the numbers you quoted are nothing what the FSI have ever claimed. They never claimed that 720 hours of Italian means you are 'fluent' in Italian. They would've said that 720 hours of classroom hours with us, in our system, is the average amount of classroom hours that participants take to pass our functional fluency test. These are two very different things, because they do a huge amount of homework and 'recommended' self-study! It's like me using LingQ, but at the same time watching 5 hours of Italian TV every day for a year, but not recording it on my LingQ stats, then all of a sudden saying, 'Look at my LingQ stats. I've read 1M words on LingQ. This is what you need to become fluent in Italian'. Obviously, completely ignoring the 1,000+ hours of TV I watched. If I did this, you would call bullshit, right? Or maybe someone would even accuse me of cheating on my LingQ stats? ;)

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 26 at 09:43

It's important to note that these hours are *immersion* hours. The FSI clases are 8 hours a day every weekday.

Anxxos

Jersey

May 26 at 12:50

Checking it out, FSI has actually updated its classification.

Here is the latest:

FSI language difficulty

FSI language difficulty - want to find a language to learn that's in the easy category? Maybe you want to give yourself a challenge and learn the hardest?! These are the easiest and hardest languages for native English speakers to learn!

jt23

United States

May 27 at 20:33

@Anxxos Thanks for the FSI comments.

I do wonder, however, whether 2 x 720 hours (classroom + homework) of, say, FSI French really gets one to B2/C1. Spread out over 50 weeks @ 40 hours/week that's ~6 hours /weekday.

I'm sure it's a good start and an FSI grad could function in French, but B2/C1?

I've looked at the FSI materials and they are the old canned dialogs, vocab lists, drills etc. If I'm to believe Krashen and Kaufmann this isn't the most efficient way to learn.

Then again, if one is getting paid and one's career is on the line, perhaps motivation would make a big difference.

nfera

Australia

May 28 at 06:29

@jt23 B2 isn't that high. B2 means passing a B2 test. I passed the reading and listening parts the other month. I did it with 1.5M words read and ~500 hours of listening (mostly LingQ, some Netflix). It's easier to pass the associated test than to reach the qualitative description of the CEFR level.

GMelillo

United States

May 28 at 12:11

This is slightly off topic, but I know nfera that you have focused primarily on television/movies for your listening, with the idea that you want exposure to more conversational speech. And then you'll approach literature naturally as you pick up the vocabulary to make literature accessible to you at a known words % that you are comfortable with.

I did things the opposite way. I like reading more than watching and I have a higher tolerance for seeing unknown words and still enjoying the reading experience than I do for listening to audio that I can't parse word-for-word. So while I've been pushing my reading right up to the threshold of authentic literary fiction I've been more gradually stepping up the difficulty of my listening: podcasts for italian learners -> documentary films -> lectures and talking head podcasts for native speakers. In the same way you are letting your known word % drop naturally until literature is accessible, I have a % un-parse-able speech threshold that I'm sensitive to and have been letting drop naturally. In any case, I've decided that now is the time to push myself into more television/movie listening, but I'm finding it still challenging, because even with whisper I'm not able to get a perfect phonetic transcript of what I'm hearing.

Can you describe your experience with this, and your current level of comprehension? Are you at the point where your grasp of conversational italian is strong enough that it never takes away from your watching experience, or are you at the point where you are self-aware of parsing every word and you can clearly pull out words and phrasing that you don't know (this is where I am with documentaries)? What is your experience with regional pronunciations? All of the native-directed television/movies I've found have used regional pronunciation, often to identify a character or signal something about the story. How do you handle this? Do you put the effort into to repeated listening of moments of regional pronunciation? Do you just ignore it and keep listening, and have you found over time that you've gotten better at parsing these pronunciations?

My expectation is that I just have to deal with the ambiguity, and keep myself in the I-enjoy-this-enough-to-keep-going zone, and listen for another couple hundred hours, and I'm willing to do that, but if you have any more specific advice I'd be interested in hearing it.

nfera

Australia

May 28 at 13:45

@GMelillio It's interesting that you took the route of literature first. As much as I love reading, I do not like clicking on a kajillion blue words to get through a single page. Going by your ratio between number of lingQs and Known Words, I'm guessing you had a bit of experience of Italian before LingQ, right?

I have watched a lot of Netflix, but also imported a lot of YouTube into LingQ. Generally nearly all my listening these days is listening while reading (to YouTube audio on LingQ) or watching Netflix with subtitles. These days I consider my LingQ listening while reading to YouTube is my 'intensive' reading (where I look up words in the dictionary), while Netflix with subs is my 'extensive' reading (as I don't look up words in the dictionary). The reason I use subs on Netflix is because I consider it 'free' reading practice. The reason why I listen to the YouTube audio while reading the transcript is for 'free' listening practice (plus listening increasing my reading speed significantly). Eventually, I'll practise them separately, as one skill can be a crutch for the other, but, currently, doing them together is working great and I'm still seeing strong gains in listening, reading, vocabulary, and grammar all together.

With regard to the standard Italian, lightly accented Italian, strongly accented Italian/half dialect, completely in dialect continuum question, I can parse most words, if they are speaking standard Italian or near to it. If they are speaking dialect, they might as well be speaking Spanish. But there are a few dialects, which are close to standard Italian and those I understand a little more of. From my understanding, many Italians understand Roman dialect, due to its close proximinity to standard Italian, but mainly due to the availability of TV series/movies in Roman dialect. I don't relisten/rewatch to content these days, with the only exception being 'Strappare lungo i bordi', as it's a great mini-series and to improve my understanding of Roman dialect (first was with subtitles and then two times without).

Direct advice would be:

First focus on standard Italian. Most content is in standard Italian. When it's in dialect, most Italians would be having subtitles on anyways, so it's no issue (depending on if/which dialect they know).
Read while listening or watching Netflix with subtitles is a great way to understand the content and improve your listening skills
Netflix has quality subtitles and a subscription is worth the price (you can also import the transcripts into LingQ to add them to words read for the stats)
Alternatively, there are many great human-subtitled YouTube videos
TV shows or entire YouTube channels are easier to understand, as, over time, you learn the characters'/hosts' accents. Start with TV series before movies.
Here are some TV show/YouTube channel recommendations: https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/it/web/community/post/4997559

GMelillo

United States

May 29 at 00:46

@nfera - for some reason I can't reply to your reply, maybe because of how nested the replies already are. The short answer is: yes, I have prior experience with Italian.

I studied Italian in high school and placed into the final semester of a four semester language requirement in college (this is 20 years ago!). In the meantime I've learned some Ancient Greek, Latin, and German - and what I picked up from studying these language is a desire to do this anti-Linq-philosophy-thing where I memorize all the patterns of verb inflection or noun declension before I look at any content (I don't care much about syntax, I just want to be able to recognize whatever the morphology of the language is telling me about the function of particular words), so I did a refresher on Italian before I started up on Lingq a year ago.

I also use the lingqing a little differently. I don't mind re-reading sentences a few times before deciding to click on a word. I basically give myself time to make sense out of what I'm reading and try not to look up a word unless I absolutely have to. I find that a significant amount of the time I can make sense out of the text on my own if I allow myself the opportunity to recruit the whole battery of linguistic information I've got stored up in my brain, and it's fun to feel a sentence sort of "click into place." So I know there are some words that I just never bothered to linq because I grasped the context well enough the first time, and then those words kind of became more truly "known" words without going through the linqing and promoting process.

That, plus the fact that I study the linqs from a book pretty intensively once I finish reading. Read and lingq - study all linqs -- re-read while listening if possible.

So I probably had the real core high frequency vocabulary of italian already loaded in before I started and I now have very few word-roots or verb stems lingqed more than once.

Anyway, that's all rambling. I've noticed that people who like learning languages seem to also really like reflecting on how they learn languages.

Thanks for the advice. The page of resources is extremely helpful. I'll also check out Netflix. A few months ago I tried to start watching tv on rai.tv but the subtitles were not close enough to what I was hearing to satisfy my desire to have an exact transcription. When I started watching TV series I would watch while saving the audio, then I run the audio through whisper and get subtitles much better than are available on RAI.

nfera

Australia

May 29 at 19:42

@Gmelillo Your way reminds me of how Alexander Arguelles likes the grammar intricacies as well. If you do know all the conjugation rules, then you only need to learn the root word (exceptions aside).

The time that you give yourself to mull over the definition of the word is, yeah, only possible when reading, otherwise you are stopping the movie/podcast every few seconds. The learning through reading literature is definitely the route you have to take for Ancient Greek and Latin. I can see where you got the technique from.

With your listening hours, I think you are close to me anyways. You don't lack the vocabulary or the grammar, just the parsing of the words while listening (and at speed). I think you are pretty close. Every 100 hours of listening is really a step up the ladder, as some others like @chytran have mentioned.

GMelillo

United States

May 30 at 00:23

@nfera The Netflix suggestion was a good one. The subtitles are more accurate than the RAI subtitles, but then the import function didn't work for Linq, but that was a blessing in disguise because there is this "audio description" feature where a narrator talks about everything happening on screen when there is no dialogue.

So now I have ling lessons of a Netflix show where I can listen to the audio but don't have to adjust my listening hours down for all the dead space with no speaking in the television episode. It's just an unbroken string of linguistic audio to listen to.

nfera

Australia

Tuesday at 13:34

@GMelillio I was wondering what you were talking about with 'audio description', but now I see. For some reason, there is a much larger availability of subtitles/audios on the browser than on the Netflix mobile app.

For what it's worth, I record my listening stats 1:1 for watching movies. I don't depreciate them whatsoever.

Also, with Netflix on the browser, if you use the Chrome extension Language Reactor, it allows you to easily repeat sentences with a hotkey. Furthermore, you can skip to the next sentence said (i.e. subtitle timestamp) if you don't want all the non-talking space.

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 23 at 12:43

About 600-700 hours of spoken input (e.g. youtube videos or TV shows).

About 300 hours of spoken output.

Knowing at least 7-8,000 base words (most likely equivalent to 30K in lingQ).

This is for high intermediate functional (i.e. early teenager equivalent) rather than advanced (i.e. late teens equivalent).

nfera

Australia

May 23 at 10:53

1) It really depends on what languages you know. As my first Romance language, I've read over 2 million words in Italian (and 600 hours listening), but I can't read an adult book unaided. With ease, anyways. If I already knew Spanish, for instance, I suspect, after 2 million words, I probably could.

2) It depends what you studied/have read. If you have predominately studied spoken language, like I have, with YouTube and TV shows, then I have acquired/learnt a different set of vocabulary than that required for, say, a fantasy book. Many words would be the same, but there are just some very specific words, which I don't know.

For me, I just keep studying content, which is interesting to me, has 5-15% New Words, and is in the domains, which I am trying to acquire the vocabulary of (conversational, then history/economics/politics/non-fiction, then fiction). Very occassionally, I open up the course of a book I want to eventually read in Italian and I check what the % New Words is per lesson. When that drops low enough (ideally 8-12%), I will read my first Italian fiction book.

I tried my first piece of Italian-translated literature the other day, but it was too hard. Even though I've read The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe in English, it's still too hard for me in Italian. Even though I did it on LingQ, I just had to look up too many words and it was annoying. Plus, I think, why am I spending time learning this oscure, literature word now, when I am lacking more frequent vocabulary, which I need to understand normal conversations?

TL;DR Depends. Pick a goal like 2M or 4M, then occassionally check the % New Words for that book. When it has dropped low enough, then study it.

jt23

United States

May 28 at 23:31

@nfera I enjoy and benefit from reading your comments. Not to disagree but to supplement...

Once I got some basic French vocabulary/grammar sorted, I found LingQ, fired it up. then pointed it at French fiction I had read in English -- St. Exupery, Camus, Simenon, Reage, and JK Rowling (translated into French). (I am a literary person.)

Sometimes I was looking at 60% Unknown Words. I knew I was overreaching, but I figured, why not? I did eventually settle into a more sensible order, starting with "The Little Prince" and now the first "Harry Potter."

Even Harry Potter started at 40% Unknown. But I'm now 60% through and the remaining chapters are all 15-25% Unknown, which seems like a breeze to me now. (It does help that there are so many cognates in French.)

I have no beef with how others scale their language mountains. This is how I'm climbing Mt. French and I'm enjoying it.

nfera

Australia

May 29 at 21:11

@jt23 Yeah, for sure. You can definitely do intensive reading with a high percentage of New Words. That's what I had to do on LingQ, when I was a beginner (as I started Italian on LingQ). What I found worked was to read + lingQ New Words on the first read through of a story/lesson, then re-read it while listening to the audio, RWL again, and then listen to the audio many times over. It really did drill in the vocabulary and build up my listening comprehension. I gotta say that I'm glad I'm passed this stage though.

These days, as an upper intermediate, I really do prefer reading while listening to content with a lower % New Words, as you can focus more on the content itself instead of trying to understand WTF is going on. xD My transition into fiction books is reading while listening to a game of D&D published on YouTube and imported into LingQ. Perhaps this is even more entertaining, because the characters have different voices, they don't know what's going on, it's unscripted, and there's still a narrator, describing some scenes with descriptive fantasy words. But the first book will still be challenging, I know, because in Italian, like in German, they use a literary tense, which is only very rarely used in spoken language, so I haven't really encountered it much.

jt23

United States

May 30 at 00:59

@nfera What I particularly like in your comment is the notion that one goes through stages in language learning. What worked at one stage will not necessarily work best at another.

I'm already adjusting my style from mostly vocab acquisition to a more detailed study/practice of grammar, structure, listening comprehension and pronunciation.

This slows me down. My daily LingQ point score has dropped, but that's OK -- as long as I can maintain my streak!

I'm fascinated to read here of all the different strategies people invent for their language journeys.

PS In French I understand "passé simple" is a literary tense, as well as the "antérieur" tenses.

nfera

Australia

May 30 at 08:44

@jt23 Yeah, exactly. You realise that your biggest weakest is X, so you adjust to your focus, like what you are doing.

linguine

Antarctica

May 23 at 10:29

O tempo perguntou pro tempo, quanto tempo o tempo tem,

e o tempo respondeu pro tempo, que o tempo tem tanto tempo, quanto o tempo tem

BabyRuth

United States

May 24 at 22:57

do you really live in anarctica? did you get that from the assimil book lol

mark.e

United States

May 22 at 23:43

60K known words.
600 hours of listening.
3 million words read.

BabyRuth

United States

May 23 at 01:40

could you say more? what do you base this on?

xxdb

United Kingdom

May 23 at 13:18

In my experience of the one language I have burned in (Spanish), this is right on the money for the hours of listening.

I cannot say for the reading since I have not learned a language to "completion" using this method (lingQ)

GMelillo

United States

May 22 at 22:46

I think I'm in this zone.

I saw a chart on Lingq at some point that put B2 at 80 hours speaking, 400 hours listening, 2000000 words reading. I am at 410 hours listening, 4000000 words reading (with a corpus of books at 2200000 words read), and 18 hours speaking.

I just started speaking a month ago, and I think something like A2 for the flow and authenticity of my speech is correct, although my vocabulary is a little richer on account of all the reading. I can read literature pitched at 8-13 year olds with no problem. Any listening that is not sitcom dialogue (e.g. documentary films, more formal podcasts) is rock solid (100% comprehension of the gist with a very rare loss of the thread of the speech and the occasional word that I hear as a word but don't know).

This took about a year to achieve, and I plan to work another year on this language before I consider adding a second.

Hope that helps!

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