I was just working on a lesson on LingQ on the web. The audio for this lesson is about 30 minutes long. I spent about 30 minutes listening (and relistening) to the first 15 minutes of the audio. I never actually listened to the end of the track, though.
I later went to my stats, hoping that the 30 minutes of listening I had done would’ve been tracked. But it shows that I have not listened to anything today. Does that mean that LingQ only tracks listening time based on whether I’ve listened fully to the end of an audio track?
That would be disappointing. Often, even if I listen to the end of a track, I spend lots of time rewinding and relistening to harder segments. I’d hoped that this time would be tracked. Also, as in the example above, I sometimes don’t listen all the way to the end of a track. It’s sad if that counts as a “zero” in LingQ’s eyes.
I do know that I can manually add in time listened. But I don’t think I want to bother with that. I will probably just end up ignoring listening stats instead, which is a shame.
I think LingQ tracks both reading and listening the same way, which is if you finish a lesson it counts the word read and times listened to one time only. I think this is fair. You can up the stat of the number of times you have listened to or read a lesson manually as well, along with manually adding specific hrs or words read, but I would actually advise against that.
First off I do think the listening hrs are probably the least useful statistic to keep track of. I never cared about that one, I just listen as much as I can. The words read statistic is a better indicator of progress, and specifically, the “rule” of only counting each lesson read one time gives you a specific idea of what you need to accomplish. Your goal should be to read @ 1-2 million words of unique content.
If you read one book of 100K words 10 times, it’s not the same as reading 10 different books of 100K words one time.
Same is true for listening. LingQ keeps track of the amount of unique content you’ve completed reading and / or listening to. That is the statistic. That’s what you need.
Thanks a lot for your response, which not only answers my question, but also provides some good principles for how to think about the statistics and how to use LingQ in general!
I loved keeping track of listening hours too as I liked to watch multiple stat bars increase. When I got around the intermediate 2 level I started to do most of my listening away from Lingq lessons and just from youtube videos, netflix shows and the radio. At first I manually inputted the hours but then when I started to do passive listening whilst working out I agonised over how long I was ‘actually’ listening for and how many minutes to input. In the end I just gave up recording it completely, as t_harangi says its probably the least useful metric.
Can’t be. I only listen to an audiotrack once and I do listening around one hour every day. This year only 18 hours were recorded (about 5%). I don’t mind, really, but if Lingq want to present that kind of statistics it should be accurate.
I’m pretty sure it will count things you’ve listened to multiple times. I have a few podcasts that I already played multiple times and they increase the count when I listen again. It does seem to only update when the track finishes.
Ok, but something is wrong. This year I’ve listened 300~400 hours, not 18 as the statistics says. Could it be that I’m following the transcription while listening and for that reason it is recorded as reading? Or that I do the listening on iPad?
Please note that listening time increase automatically only when you finish recording. So you need to listen it to the end to make it count as your listening time.
I agree that listening is important for learning. But do you specifically mean to say that the listening statistic is important? @t_harangi recommended earlier to not worry about the listening stastistic, but rather just to listen as much as you can; and also that the “words read statistic is a better indicator of progress”. I have come to mostly agree with this. It might be nice if LingQ were “smarter” about tracking listening, but I don’t think programming this is the best use of the developer’s time, and I don’t think it would lead me to listen any more than I do now (which is “as much as I can”).
As far as I can tell, LingQ counts the entire time of a lesson as being listened to, when you finish it. This means if you listen to almost all of it and then don´t finish it, nothing is counted. It also means if you fast forward till almost the end and let it play till it stops, it will count the whole time of the lesson, even when you just listened for one second. I am also pretty sure it counts lessons multiple times if you listen to them multiple times, although I didn´t test it specifically, it keeps count if you look the lessons up in your playlist. If in doubt, one could always just test it.
What I do is I never manually add any hours listened to or words read. I feel my LingQ stats keep track of my work on LingQ and nothing else. I also don´t think any films or series you watch are easily counted in listening time, since not all the time you watch has any spoken language (as opposed to audio books).
I disagree with it not being a useful stat. I think one should try to make sure they listen a lot, since it´s easy to get lost in the game of gaining more known words, thus increasing your literacy but neglecting to develop an ear for the language. The “hours listened” stat can be a clear motivator and reminder to do so.
Yes, just as dgbeecher pointed out, I think listening as much as I can is very important, but keeping track of it as a statistic is kinda useless – precisely because I’m listening so much.
There is not the same quantifiable correlation of words encountered vs. word learned with listening as there is with reading. Reading is learning, listening is more about solidifying – though of course I do learn new words while doing it.
I actually feel the same way about speaking. It’s of course very important to speak at some point, and to speak a lot, but keeping track of “speaking hours” would be useless in my opinion.
Think of it like swimming. Does it matter to keep track of how many hours of swimming practice you have? No. You can either swim or you can’t. So if you want to be able to swim, you’ll need to practice as much as you can until you can comfortably get from one end of the pool to the next and then keep doing it. But when you show up to try out for the waterpolo team, no one’s gonna ask you how many hours you have practiced.
I’m asking somewhat in jest here (and perhaps the smiley meant that your comment was also somewhat in jest), but: How much more listening do you need to do? When have you done “enough”? And how do the stats tell you this?
Thank you, Zoran, that’s probably one of the reasons in my case since I often drop the few last seconds when listening. But I also found another explanation. When you are watching (and listening to) a video the listening isn tracked as it seems.