Practically at least one earbud lives rent free in my ears ahaha 
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Wow, thatās incredible. Great job.
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Great and informative post. Iāve only been on lingq for 2 years, studying Japanese. Stats say Iāve read 3.2 million words, with 20k known words, 50k lingqs. However, because of the way Japanese works I reject many types of permutations because you could easily build 100+ words for every verb if you wanted. In terms of hours, much less then you, with maybe 1500 or so outside of lingq in the last 2 years anyway. I do have an Italki teacher to and do written essays once or twice a week, certainly helpful. I did have a couple of questions about your method though.
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Did you run into limits through importing? I understand you use youtube, and I have as well. However, recently Iāve been importing audible books and having them transcribed. Books are definitely a step up in difficulty from podcasts with vocabulary and grammer I donāt see in podcasts often. But Iām now hitting limits on transcription (600 minutes a month, which isā¦ barely 1 book). I donāt remember this limit before when doing youtube, but maybe youtube has itās own transcription? I think I can manuelly do it with some services and build out a lesson but man itās a PITA.
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How did you learn the characters? I havenāt been using lingq for that (except implicitly when reading, but it puts Furagana anyway), instead using a few different SRS apps on my phone when Iāve got free time.
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- If you mean by youtube having subtitles/transcript then yes. If Iām wrong, a bit more clarification would help!
- Only through lingq. Hereās a great mindset/philosophy to share with you. If you met someone new for the first time, and you learn their name the first time, it might not stick. But after days go by, you see that person again and relearn their name because you never remembered subconsciously. Another round went by. Each person is equivalent to a kanji/character in which, you have the see each characters in different cases in different days. This is the interesting part I believe. The brain requires rest to process each character and it will reset to the next day with a higher chance of acquiring it. Now with this case, youāre gonna have to acquire or get used to 30,000 peopleās name.
Hope this was useful, happy hunting!
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You should be interviewed on Steveās channel! Congratulations on your hard work and achievements!
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Thank you very much. Wouldnāt that be fun!
Your story is very inspiring, it gives me hope for my own language goals with Japanese! Iām curious how much of the listening you built into your routine is active vs passive. In other words, when you have language audio playing, how much of the time are you actively focusing on the material (not doing anything else), and how much of the time do you have it in the background (focusing on some other task)?
If these are the type of questions you plan to answer in the video you mentioned, no worries, Iāll eagerly await that wisdom! 
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Hi stfranz,
Before it was about 30 minutes of active and the remaining is passive.
Now itās about 15 minutes of active and the rest is passive due to efficiency increasing when you can recognize more and more at a faster rate.
In reality, the more active listening the better but the mental compacity gets more fragile.
I would say about 1 hour total of focused and the rest of the 7 hours is just noise while doing anything else. I listen at my day to day job, which is convenient because I can wear headphones all day but itās better than nothing. In the end, active listening is all you need to be honest. Passive is just a ghost following you until you turn around and catch it and gain something from it at that moment
If you want to make more use of your time, increase the vocabulary so high that you barely have a weak spot and the efficiency multiplies even more during active listening sessions w/ transcript of course.
Thank you for your question
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Youāre a software developer, right? Do you find it hard to listen while youāre doing your job? Iāve wanted to try this with Spanish, but I felt as if my job would be to fixate on solving problems while trying to listen. I understand that itās passive, but I would imagine that it would be a different passive than doing something simpler like chores ,for example.
Whatever you do, for long listening I recommend bone conduction type headphones. I like those with built-in mp3 storage, these are usually designed for swimmers.
Or any other open air type should be fine too.
If you listen to music while working, it will the same for listening to a language, but I find it at times that it could be distracting. I donāt recommend it unless you have easy tasks.
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When you speak Mandarin, is your accent like a nativeās? Does passive listening really improve oneās accent?
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Passive listening barely improves oneās accent. It helps but the rate of improvement is very slow. Have to be attentive when trying to improve your accent. My accent is not native like. Some say they couldnāt tell that Iām a foreigner until you make a single mistake then they know. The biggest factors are word use, speed, and saying each word correctly. Shadowing in my opinion helps a lot because youāre actively finding differences in real time between your voice and the native speakerās. Thanks for your question
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I completely agree with you that actively listening, reading the text, and clicking on words is far more effective than just listening passively. When I was learning German, I made the mistake of spending too much of my time on passive listening, and I think that was one of the main reasons why I didnāt see the kind of significant, intense improvement that I could have achieved if I had been practicing active listening instead.
Using a platform like LingQ, where I could read and listen at the same time while clicking on the words I didnāt know, would have made a huge difference. Looking back, itās clear to me that active engagementāwhether itās active listening, active reading, or actively clicking on words to check their meanings with the help of an AI modelāis truly one of the most effective ways to learn a language.
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I agree. The only caveat is that we need mental effort capacity to do that. So, probably, that is where the real training should go, to increase our mental effort capacity step by step, by also avoiding to drain it in other things. This could be a topic by itself.
Probably passive listening has its benefits too, by keeping our mind hooked on the target, by giving us a constant reminder, and by sometimes reinforcing here and there the words that we already know. But the real learning comes through a ton of effort!
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I definitely agree with you on the point about mental capacity. In my own journey of learning German, even though I had dabbled a little bit with the language back when I was working a full-time 8-to-5 job, I think what truly made the difference was taking a much-needed breakānot only for my career, but also for my mental healthāand dedicating part of my day to focusing on German without the pressure of working full time every single day.
That shift really gave my mind the space and capacity to fully absorb the intention and focus I was putting into learning the language.
I also think thereās an important caveat when it comes to passive listening.
The problem is that we often convince ourselves weāre studying when weāre not. For instance, if someone at an A1 level listens passively to something far beyond their comprehensionāsay, a political discourseāthey might feel like theyāve studied a lot and can now relax. But in reality, no real learning has taken place, because the content was too advanced to understand in the first place. Thatās why active listening is so crucial. Actively engaging with the textāby reading along, clicking on words to check their meanings, and even turning to AI for grammar clarificationsāmakes the learning process far more effective and meaningful
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Congratulations to you chytran! When you say you spend about an hour a day doing active listening, does that mean listening to audio alone, or listening and reading at the same time?
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Listening and reading at the same time. Thank you for your question!
the sheer volume of hours that you have put into it is absolutely insane.
How much active studying (excluding the passive listening) would you say youāve spend on average per day ?
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Would say about 30 minutes of active. Throughout the years, combination of the early phase of heavy active listening focus and passive listening. Itās close to 2,000 hours of active listening and the rest of 8,000 hours will be passive listening total. According to FSI, around 2000 hours of studying should be enough to be functional in the language.
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