I remember Steve and a few others set a goal to spend 1000 hours listening to target languages this year. We’re at the 25% mark today, so how are you doing? It looks like I’m at:
148.8 (French)
49.8 (Korean)
198.6 (Total)
So I’m a little off pace so far. I’ll have to do just about 3 hours/day for the rest of the year to get there…it’ll be tough but I’ll sure try!
Total - 220.2
Moving house and not having internet killed my progress for few weeks, but I’m trying to get back on track.
I just heard about this competition. I haven’t tried to keep track of my listening hours but I will start today with Spanish, Portuguese and Italian! thanks for the motivation 
Russian = 227 (plus some non-comprehensible listening radio/podcasts in the background)
A little under par, but not too far off : /
Do you think it counts as listening time if you are in conversation with native speakers, for example in a bar or club for 4 hours? Or is it only if you are listening to materials like podcasts, movies, etc.?
Listening is listening. Listening to a conversation among natives is actually very good since the human contact increases the resonance. If you are trying to say the odd little bit in the language that even makes it better.
I find that I am much better able to focus on and absorb FL audio if I have it playing in the background - especially if I am doing something else at the same time (household chores, etc.)
I know that this may go against conventional wisdom. Even common sense would tend to indicate that one should try to concentrate and focus on something in order to learn it. But experience (indeed painful experience) has taught me two things:
1.) If I consciously try to focus on listening to something it quickly becomes boring - and then I completely switch off mentally.
2.) If I really FORCE myself to go on listening, I still don’t remember anything in the long term. What’s worse, I may end up starting to hate the sound of the language in question!
So for me the amount of time that I can spend, as it were, only half-listening to content is what is most important.
OMG, I am the worst!
Total hours listening so far (this year): 149,75
Speaking: 38,4
No pausible excuses.
Last 3 months
Chinese
Listening 59
Speaking 43
French
Listening 37
Speaking 8
English
Listening 61
Speaking 14
Listening total 157
Speaking total 65
But in this data hours of speaking indicate hours of taking lessons, so I don’t know how long I was speaking during these lessons. Maybe about half of lessons is a listening time. The following is realistic.
Listening total 189.5
Speaking total 32.5
This data means that I already put datas on Ling snapshot. I sometime forget to put them, so total is more than this one.
My recorded time on LingQ for French is 74.5. But! I do not manually add extra listening time, which is about 2hrs. per day in the car (while commuting-roundtrip). Also, there is just no way for me to tally up the amount of time I listen to online stuff. So, for the record I am LingQ-officially at 74.5.
Oscar, I am the lowest on the totem poll of total listening hours. ^^
Yvette, we still have time to recover positions! Let’s go for it!
Ok! I may start keeping a loose record of my listening time outside of LingQ. In fact, I may just manually add in my commuter listening time, which is two hours everyday. I am still up for this challenge. So, yes, “let’s go for it!”
I agree with the approach of listening to the foreign language while in the background.
I listen to Portuguese podcasts or Italian MP3s while I am doing mundane work (like correcting mistakes or planning lessons), and even though I’m not actively paying attention to the dialogue I find myself catching the main idea and words and phrases sticking in my mind.
This is perhaps useful practice for when you are actually in a social situation like a big group, and it’s impossible to listen to all the different conversations at once but you’re still able to get the main idea. If you don’t even have a clue what they’re talking about, it’s impossible to participate!
I also think it’s useful to practice listening while having some kind of other background noise if possible. This stimulates real-life situations like noisy bars or clubs when it’s very difficult to even hear what they are saying, let alone understand.
I am coming round to the “All Japanese All the time” guy’s view that listening to a language is useful even if you don’t understand what you’re hearing. I’ve been listening to Chinese mp3s, and I recognise some words now, have even figured out what some of them probably mean. It gives me confidence to start learning Chinese.
With Japanese, although I understand very few sentences completely, I recognise several words in a sentence and it helps me to remember their meaning.
“I recognise some words now, have even figured out what some of them probably mean”
But how do you know whether you are right in your assumptions???
I have found having some largely unintelligible audio on in the back ground, maybe as i go to sleep, can be useful, you hear and identify some common phrases and constructions and it can help reinforce some words and phrases you’ve been learning from your understood texts and audio. But having it all the time would surely make me burn out, and start to tune out from the language.
@hape wrote: "But how do you know whether you are right in your assumptions??? " Answer: I study the associated transcript in LingQ 
I would imagine that more than a few hours of listening a day would cause burned-out ears, at beginner and lower intermediate levels. At advanced levels it’s not much more tiring than listening to your native language, and you can do that for hours, right?
Very true, i would hope that the more i understood, the more i could listen without having to concentrate super hard, hence listening for longer. From your LingQ stats you’re of course pretty advanced in your Russian, so I’m sure you could do some long hours of listening to unknown audio before getting a headache : )
