I signed up for the Swedish 90-Day-Challenge yesterday. First off it took me ages to even find my targets but they still confuse me more than help:
Known Words: 1274
LingQs: 1183
LingQs Learned: 819
Hours of Listening: 68.3
Words of Reading: 13650
Why is Known Words higher than LingQs when everyone keeps saying it’s more important to create LingQs than to learn them?
Why isn’t Hours of Listening a nice round number? And how are those hours calculated? It’s certainly not based on past habits; there simply isn’t that much listening material around for Swedish so I don’t bother with the listening side much beyond my morning commute.
The amount of Words of Reading seems small in comparison. Here’s why. 17 A4-pages set in Verdana, 12pt contain a bit less than 7,000 words and the corresponding audio files add up to 1.5 hours. (This is the book “Konstiga djur” by Lotta Olssen, btw, and audio files are from here: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/250564?programid=2998).
So to reach the targets I have to read this and a subsequent one in three months - but listen to the audio files of each ca 23 times which I personally find unrealistic. Or find a lot more listening material which I would not need to read or Lingq?!
Where will those goals take me? When I add my currently Known Words and the target I get to 2713. This number tells me very little by itself so what does it mean? I still have to collect 261 Known Words to reach Intermediate 1 so is 2700 or so Intermediate 2?
Perhaps someone can explain?
Of course, my main reason to join the challenge despite all the technical problems with the website and iOS app was/is to get focused on language learning again after a very lazy summer but I’d still like to see some logic?, sense? in the targets set…
@Deahna As you have found, your targets are to be found on the page for your Challenge. Go to the Challenges tab and click on the Challenge you are signed up for. We will see whether we can’t add some quick way of getting to these. In answer to your other questions:
Initially, known words are hard to come by but over time you do end up knowing words as you read, even though you haven’t encountered them on LingQ. These may either be words similar to words in your own language, words that you already know before joining LingQ or words that you know since you have previously learned other forms of that word. The pace at which you add known words does pick up significantly.
The targets are roughly half of the required targets to move up one level on LingQ. For the initial 90-day challenge we set the targets at the levels required to move up a level but we felt those targets were a little aggressive in a 3-month challenge so we decided to split them in half. Because the targets are input manually but then automatically split in half and then pro-rated over 90 days, it can lead to some decimal numbers. I really wouldn’t worry about the decimals too much. I agree we should just round them.
The listening numbers are higher than the reading numbers because we feel it is easier to get listening time in than reading time since you can listen during dead time in your day. It is important to try and flood your brain with input and listening is a great way to do this.
If you just meet your targets it should equate to about half a level increase on LingQs scale.
Our main motivation in promoting the challenge is the same as yours - to motivate ourselves and our members to get focused on making a major improvement in their target language. Of course, if you would like to overachieve and exceed your targets in certain areas, you are more than welcome!
Thank you for taking the time to explain this in detail. It makes a lot more sense to me now and I can see why audio is so much higher than reading.
In a way you assume a certain way of life (or perhaps it’s even age-related) for your members. In my case it’s a lot harder to get in listening time because I don’t really have a lot of dead time in my day where getting out my earphones would be appropriate. But I do have a lot where it’s quite ok to get out a book, printout, smartphone, ereader etc for reading. I also find it difficult to concentrate on audio when in noisy surroundings whereas I can concentrate on reading more easily.
Looking forward to seeing which targets I just achieve, which I will overachieve (reading!) and which I won’t make (listening?).
And now I’m off to review my SRS-list for today. Need to learn some more words so I might recognize them next time I come across them
