Steve is saying that in his experience in mere volume/quantity of content is what he finds to be the biggest determining factor in vocabulary acquisition. This means we should be trying to consume as much content as we can. To do this, I’ve found:
- Listening to the audio while listening increases my reading speed (unless you are already a very advanced reader perhaps)
- Increasing the audio playback speed in turn increases this speed, as @PeterBormann advocates, when you become intermediate and above
- The way LingQ manages definitions (choosing the best definition in a list) really is a massive slowdown. Potential ways of getting around this include: turning on auto-lingQ, using @roosterburton’s extension to auto-lingQ all, or really the best would be using Language Reactor /@roosterburton’s Video Tools so you get most of your definitions from the bilingual translations of the second subtitles instead of dictionary look-ups
- Podcasts, interviews, YouTube ‘talking heads’ are more word dense than TV series, movies, and documentaries (usually by about double, unless you use @roosterburton’s Video Tools and increase the speed of non-speech sections)