Tracking listening

Hi All

Just wanted to ask people how they best track their listening with lingQ?

I’m trying to give myself a bit of a language sprint over the next month and want to aim for a couple hours of listening time per week. Though not all of this will be necessarily audio with accompanying text. For example, audio from assimil conversations etc.

Would you recommend just loading in the audio file into a lesson and just leaving the text field blank? Or is there a better way to do this?

You can manually add hours with that + sign. You do not have to import audio files.

In the app and on the desktop you can simply click the “plus” sign and add any time you do outside of Lingq.

I may be wrong, but if you create a lesson without text, it won’t save. So you’d probably at least need to give it a couple of characters in the text body…

However, if you are doing Assimil, you can also create lessons in LingQ for each lesson. It takes a bit of work, but I think it’s worth it.

Here are the steps:

So far I’ve only done this with German and Spanish. The German was the “Superpack” with 4 cd’s. If I remember correctly one of the cd’s has all the mp3’s. That’s the one you want. For Spanish, I also got a new version of the superpack. This one has a usb thumb drive with all the mp3’s. If you play the mp3’s on your computer you may notice that it has the “lyrics” of the lesson you’re listening to. It has the main story and the initial exercise (not the fill in the blank). You can extract these lyrics with a program like mp3tag. The following are the instructions as I remember for mp3tag.

  1. Copy the mp3’s to your computer (this might not be necessary).
  2. Open mp3 tag and go to the directory where the mp3’s are
  3. Highlight all of the lessons
  4. Right click and click “export”. This should show a popup with “export configuration”.
  5. If I remember “lyrics” are not part of the main list of items. You may have to click on the “add” button if it’s not there. If you needed to add it then the “code” should be (i’m on version v2.90a):
    $filename(txt,utf-8)$loop(%_path%)%artist% - %album% - %title% - %track% - %unsyncedlyrics%
    $loopend()
  6. Once you’ve done that you can click “OK”. I noticed that there is a checkbox “One file per directory”. This is ticked and all the “lyrics” go into one file. Nicely formatted. I’m not sure if unclicking it will create one per lesson.
  7. File is created in the same directory.
    The file will have all the lessons and it will some extra “stuff” you may want to edit out. I created a lesson for each, importing them individually and uploading the audio for each. It’s possible you can refine the “code” above to eliminate the extra info you don’t really need (artist, album, etc).
    Hopefully that helps if anyone wants to try. Older versions of Assimil might not have the mp3’s or “lyrics”, but I’m pretty sure any version that mentions mp3 should work for this.
    Note…there may be a better program to do this. I did this a couple years ago so not sure if there’s a better way.
    Another note…leave the lessons as private. As much as it would be great to share, I’m quite certain that would violate copyright laws.