I added outside listening a few times and it did not count toward my coins for the day either.

One bug I did notice, though, is that when I go to a course and click "play course audio", I do not get listening credit for that either.

I only get credit for playing things in my playlist and for playing lessons that I have opened. My playlist even gives me incremental credit if I don't finish listening to the entire lesson, but many times an open lesson I play partially will not. The player has to hit the end of the file for some reason to register listening credit unless I'm clicking it from my audio playlist.

what is podcast do you listen?

If outside listening was counted towards coins, the coin total would become meaningless as one could just artificially inflate it whenever one needed to.

The activities need to be done inside the LingQ app to award coins.

I do nearly all my listening outside of LingQ and noticed in the challenges I don't seem to receive a lot of credit for listening despite me adding time. Although early on I think i was doing some listening inside the app and it really didn't seem to be adding much from that either. So really not sure. It doesn't feel like it's counting listening much at all.