Sorry, if I wasn't clear in my first post. 85%+ of my reading comes from listening and reading at the same time to relatively easy content; between 96% (80 words / LingQ lesson) and 98% (40 w/l) comprehension.

Typically talking-head style videos on news and politics, sometimes history here is an example:

I also used to use a transcription service to transcribe podcasts: https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/ nowadays I use: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp and create them myself.

A 90m podcasts results in about 6 LingQ lessons, something like 12.000 words; importantly, the time I spend studying is 90m in this case.

What I wanted to express is that, people who read mostly books, will most likely need more time to work through an equivalent bulk of material. Or in other words my approach is more extensive than intensive. Take a look at the profile of @TofuMeow for someone who must have spent thousands of hours reading Chinese on LingQ.

My booklist is a bit out of date and maybe misleading.

Some books that I read and understood are:

The Harry Potter series (almost done), the Hobbit, the Three-Body Problem (1)

Books like Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kafka's The Trial were wasted, I tried to read them too soon and didn't understand much.

The rest are short and simple simple non-fiction books by the likes of Peter Thiel, Ray Dalio, Peter Schiff, Scott Young etc. Some I didn't quite finish (Dalio is a waffler) so I should probably clean up a bit...

In total probably 1.2 million words come from books. Also a word in Chinese (on LingQ) != a word in languages with an alphabet.

The way I was able to read many of the books is by knowing their content beforehand :)

"The way I was able to read many of the books is by knowing their content beforehand :)" how do you do this with 15 months of chinese?

"between 96% (80 words / LingQ lesson) and 98% (40 w/l) comprehension." how did you find so much stuff where you knew this amount of words?

"I also use a transcription service to create transcripts from podcasts:" how good is this service?

I know the content of the Harry Potter books, by virtue of having read them before I even considered studying Chinese, so when reading the books in Chinese I can easily fill in the blanks. Mathematically my comprehension is probably around 90-95% depending on the scene.

how did you find so much stuff

The first thing I did on LingQ was to import videos by 大康, working through his and similar people's content for multiple hours every day for 15 months, resulted in the mentioned 96% rate of comprehension for this type of content. Note that this is with the transcript, just listening is of course much more difficult. Btw. I feel that my progress has been rather slow.

you knew this amount of words?

LingQ tells you the number of words, normally every lesson contains about 2000 words. I take the number of yellow words after studying as basis for the above calculations. For example if a lesson has 100 yellow words -> 95% comprehension. I admit this is a bit simplistic, but I like it as a rough guide.

Regarding transcription services, see this thread:

https://www.lingq.com/en/community/forum/open-forum/best-way-to-generate-subtitles?post_id=317153

There are many such services, Amazon's is good enough for me. I'm willing to share such a transcript so you can judge the accuracy for yourself, if you're interested contact me. But you can also just sign-up there and test it, they offer 60 minutes for free, per month.

@bamboozled

Btw. I feel that my progress has been rather slow.

Why do you think that is? Would you have changed anything about your method?

LingQ tells you the number of words, normally every lesson contains about 2000 words. I take the number of yellow words after studying as basis for the above calculations. For example if a lesson has 100 yellow words -> 95% comprehension. I admit this is a bit simplistic, but I like it as a rough guide.

When there are new words in your lesson, how do you deal with them? Do you pause the audio to look up the definitions, continue playing the audio and do it super fast, or do you do it before starting the lesson through the vocabulary tab?

@nfera

I have spent what I feel is a lot of time studying Chinese (even before I started on LingQ) and have little to show for. My Chinese can hardly be called functional, reading is painful, listening comprehension is spotty and speaking abilities non-existent. I would have hoped to be farther, that's all. But unrealistic expectations may be a factor as well. Regardless, I believe in habits and numbers, so I just do something everyday, keep the streak going, and try not to focus on results but on the time I have spent cumulatively. I will re-evaluate my approach once I reach my (arbitrary) goal of 2k hours of listening. Most likely, my next goal will be output related.

Re:audio

I don't stop the audio when LRing, the audio is often external to LingQ anyways (podcasts / Youtube), I just tap the word on the iPad and accept one of the user hints, I use English as dictionary language so there aren't many cases that require an actual dictionary. But most of the words encountered in Chinese are just recombinations of known characters, this is related to LingQ's word splitting algorithm, those get paged to known.

Sorry long post incoming, but I have a lot of thoughts on listing and reading (LR).

Why do I like LR? It reduces the cognitive load, for example I don't have to think about the pronunciation of a word or character at all. It reduces the chance of getting distracted. It's often more interesting to listen, the speaker might also convey meaning when speaking that might get lost when just reading. It also allows me to understand spoken content I wouldn't be able to understand without transcript, e.g. podcasts. It does train listening and reading at the same time, but listening comprehension takes much more time to develop. I (unscientifically) estimate probably 2x as much to reach an equal level (e.g. being able to read a podcast transcript has become easy for me, but listening to it is still hard. I also think it is very efficient, I can also increase the audio speed by 25% for most podcasts when LRing, thus saving time.

As for vocabulary, I believe I have learned all the words I know (passively) through LR. I don't treat vocabulary acquisition as a separate activity and don't use SRS/Anki.

But LR seems to work better in regard to meaning, e.g. 健康-> health/y has become quite natural, retrieving the pronunciation (+ tones) feels much harder (Jiànkāng).

---

A couple moths ago, I started reading books (without listening) after LRing for over a year for an average of 3h per day. And it was quite difficult, at first the process was painfully slow and exhausting. My reading speed was around 25/26 minutes per 2000 word lesson... But it improved to about 20 minutes after about a month of daily reading (1 hour). I'm hopeful that it would improve with more practice, but I currently don't have much free time and prefer the easier LR.

Two things hold me back when reading literature, vocabulary and pronunciation. The first might sound like a contradiction to the above, but the content I usually LR has become relatively easy: podcasts, political pundits, YouTube, news. When looking at literary texts, I see words I have never encountered before. So, why not get an audiobook for those and do LR? The cognitive load is to high, it's mentally taxing, too many words to look up requiring constant starting and stopping. What works however is to use the sentence mode, together with TTS and the translation feature.

The pronunciation is holding me back as well, when reading I like to subvocalize (controversial, I know but it helps me concentrate and improves comprehension imo), I would also like to be able to read aloud. It often takes me too long to come up with the pronunciation for many words

So long story short, LR helps a lot but doesn't solve all problems. Some skills will have to be practiced separately, that includes reading. And especially all active skills like speaking or writing. Those are in my case still woefully underdeveloped, despite 1400 hours of LR.

Thanks for the explanation @Bamboozled , very interesting :)