Does anyone else feel like its a little too difficult to get the Gold Apple? 4000 Activity Score is tough to reach. Maybe 3500 would be better? What do y’all think?
Hello, MarkE,
Well, I could get there pretty fast, actually, though that was certainly because LingQ is the only thing I do to occupy myself with during this quarantine time. I started on LingQ about a month ago and got to the Golden Apple at day 20 or so, I guess.
But, apart from that, the whole point of the Golden Apple is not to be easy to get it. It should stimulate you to be more active and spend more hours with the languange, of course, just like all the apples before. A real challenge.
At least that has been my expirience so far.
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OK thank you
It really depends on how much time you have to use LingQ how hard it is to get it. I find you get much more activity points if you vary your activity. Read, listen and write and if you can afford to, speak. That way your activity rate will go up much faster than if you only read.
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I’m just trying to reach silver 
Actually. I don’t mind. It would be cool, but like streak, to me it’s not very important. First of all, I haven’t the foggiest idea how it’s calculated. Seemingly people with better looking “stats” are sometimes lower in activity score. I think there’s a time component and not necessarily all based in stats. And it can’t be the manually added time. I think that doesn’t factor at all.
Second of all. Your pace will be your pace. There are going to be people that do far more work than you always. You can keep striving to achieve the better numbers, but they may not be achievable for you and definitely not me =).
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I really like the concept, if they expanded it more that would be interesting.
That is true. It is indeed a measure of your activity rather than your success. When I added about 30K known words in Norwegian recently, it still only left me with an activity rate of about 2,5K. Never added words that fast in French and Dutch but I´d have much higher activity rates studying these languages cause I spent more time on them, read more pages and listened longer.
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I don´t think it should be any lower than 4K, although it might be of value for some users if there was an even higher mark, say a diamond instead of the apple at 10K. It should be hard to reach the highest level, which now is gold. Of course if you find the activity score important to you and/or have a competitive spirit about it, it can certainly be an uneven playing field in how some people have all day to study while others have jobs, children, commitments in their way.
I don´t know the formula for calculating the activity and I doubt LingQ would reveal it (they may also change it from time to time), but this is what I have noticed so far.
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Activity rate is how active you´ve been for the last 30 days. This is from the LingQ help: “The Activity Apple shows how active you have been on the site in the last 30 days.”
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Your activity rate shown in the forum seems to be the straight sum of your activity rates in all your languages.
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Activity rate has little or nothing to do with your “success”. I have had much lower activity rates where I made much more words known, because I spent less time studying. I´ve made almost 40K words known in Norwegian this month, but still have a bit to go to get the golden apple, but I have often had activity rates of 6-11K in French or Dutch with much fewer learned words, cause I spent more time learning.
That´s how it should be though, it´s called “activity rate” not “rate of success” or “rate of learning” (which would be impossible to measure anyway when you don´t know how much the person knew in advance) -
Activity rate seems to figure in all your different activities and seems to weigh some more than others. I´ve noticed for example how my activity rate goes up much faster if I submit writing. Listening also seems to weigh a bit more than reading. I suspect online discussion weighs more than anything. It makes sense logically and business wise, because that is the most engaged you can be in your learning and cause there is an actual flow of money involved. It makes sense to me to make you have to do varied activities, especially what involves engagement, to max your activity rating.
I´ve seen someone with a 30K+ activity rating, which seems to be hard to get by only reading and listening, especially since I looked at their last 7 days and they were not more active than me during that period, less even if I remember correctly and considering how I had about 11K in Dutch (13K overall) when I did it for hours a day, both reading and listening, which got me the laurel in Dutch. I think they probably did a lot of writing/online discussion to get it that high.
-------but speaking of the activity rating, I´m just a little bit shy of the gold apple in Norwegian, so I need to get cracking.
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I don’t really care much about it but I do about increasing my productive time in studying German in this period. So, if what I‘m doing helps me to get more results and understand the language better is good for me.
I’m totally focused on how I’m improving on the languages I’m studying, all the rest is just software ideas, gamification and stuff…
Sure, it could be useful, funny, maybe motivating but at the end of the day, what you care, it’s to get results with the language you’re studying, not the color of an apple 
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I try to tell that to the autistic side of myself, but it´s not listening. I can´t rest until I have the golden apple and all the clothes and background items for my stupid avatars, who don´t even exist as material objects. I know it´s stupid, but it´s pretty compulsive. To make things worse, you only seem to get the minimum coins for all Norwegian words (cause it´s a new language in Beta mode), making me have to get an extremely high number of known words to fully build the avatar. I wasted my entire weekend, which had good weather in this country of mine where that´s a rare thing, obsessively reading Norwegian.
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I don’t think it’s too difficult - it’s definitely doable. I found myself reading/listening around 2 hours a day on LingQ when I had a Golden Apple.
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Well, at least it’s useful for making you read Norwegian :D. I personally don’t even know how coins work and couldn’t care less about the avatar. But the good news is that we all are different and need different motivations. At the end, the focus should be on the result anyway.
Coins just work such that you get more coins for more commonly used words 1-5 that is and that is multiplied by your level of knowing the word, so making an extremely common word known would be 25 coins, moving a very rare word from new to recognised would give you 1 coin. If you just accumulated coins it would be a certain weighed measure of your literacy.
Of course the meaning of coins it to use them to guy things and background items for the avatar. It´s just a bit of a gamified feature, but I enjoy using it for motivation and I show the avatars to my daughters sometimes and let them choose items for them, because they sometimes think the avatars are neat.
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even 1000 golden apple is hard for me
Best thing you said is the connection with your daughters and avatars. That could be even more motivating, explaining them you’re working hard to achieve a goal and they can personalize the avatar as a result of that.
For the rest, the only measurement if you’re doing the right thing is if you are learning the language for your specific purpose with it. No coins or apples or any other thing can give you the reference if you’re succeeding in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Imho.
But if it helps, it’s ok.
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All these measures tend to correlate with your. ability to some degree, but sometimes only to a small degree. You could certainly reach 100,000 know words but be completely unable to converse for example.
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Hello lingo-freaks,
I did’nt care for any points or colored apples or other stuff.
At the end of the “day” ( in reallity I mean years) you have to make the ends meet, that’s mean you should be really able to understand the target langue. In the moment I try it in “english”, dutch and french.
It’s easier for me to learn english and dutch because these languages are related to german. Thea are belonging all to the proto-germanic languages.