Today I noticed that just 13 days into the new Hardcore challenge I already surpassed the goal of 1183 newly created LingQs.
Maybe because I’m reading an old book with a lot of new, unknown words my count is quite high but 1183 LingQs in three months is nothing.
I propose to lift the amount you have to reach the goal to make the Hardcore challenge a bit more…hardcore.
It’s a lot easier to get new Lingqs when your known vocab list is smaller, as there are more words for you to discover yet. It’s a lot harder to find new Lingqs when you have a larger vocab list, as you come across new words infrequently. They have to set numbers that work across various levels, so I’d caution against your haste to get that number raised now, as you’ll likely find that same goal much harder to reach in 6 months.
When I was creating a lot more lingqs more frequently, the reading and listening goals were harder. Now, I’m blowing past the reading goal easy, but struggle some with the new Lingqs/known words goals. Which part is hardcore has changed over time!
I have almost 40.000 known words. I would bet that at almost every level you will find content where you can create at least 30 LingQs daily. This is challenging but realistic. Let’s just consider you read 2000 words a day with a new word percentage of 10%, so 200 words. Of these 200 words you will probably ignore some 10 proper names or other non-words. But now, of 180 new words how many of these will go to your new words count and how many to your LingQs? And remember that even collocation LingQs are counted.
So even in the extrem case that you know 150 of them, you will have 30 words to create LingQs and make collocation LingQs, so you easily end up at 50 LingQs.
Okay, my point still stands that a stat being hardcore is relative to where someone is at in their process. You’re saying “this stat is beyond easy for me, and therefore should be changed for everyone”, so I chimed in to counter “this stat is pretty hardcore for me and some others, I disagree that it should be changed”.
I could go into my own numbers from an example day and how they are wildly different from what you wrote out while still representing pretty hardcore studying, and how it sounds like you and I are probably using the platform differently based on what you wrote, but ultimately I don’t want to end up in an extemsive sidebar. I’ll be curious to see how others weigh in - perhaps I’ll be outvoted, yet! But, had just wanted to chime in with the perspective that the goal was actually pretty hardcore already for at least me, so that could be taken into account by the decision makers reviewing your proposal.
When I was actively learning Chinese I participated in almost every challenge. As a beginner I never had problems hitting the goals. For example during my first challenge I created 16885 LingQs. While not impossible I feel I would have to go out of my way to find new and possible very hard content just to fulfill the challenge goals now. Another tough nut is the LingQs learned category, I rarely move a LingQ from yellow to known and consequently failed my last hardcore challenge. Both of these stats are not very interesting to me to begin with. And I feel there are many challenges in language learning that are unrelated to vocabulary. Personally, I’ve moved to more active study techniques like scriptorium, shadowing, reading aloud and production but those are not well captured in the stats.
Regarding the vocabulary, maybe Chinese behaves differently from more normal languages, because the more words you know, the more you are able to guess the meaning of unknown words from their constituent characters. So I would assume one to create fewer and fewer LingQs, the more advanced one becomes; while keeping the unknown words ratio constant. To me it seems that the hardcore challenges becomes harder the more advanced you get, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The regular challenges not so much, because an advanced learner can generate a lot of coins from reading alone.
One can argue endlessly about the right target numbers, I’ll pass. But for me, the ideal solution would be if I could create my own personal challenges, combined with the streak system, e.g. read 12k words and do 3 hours of listening every day for the next 90 days. The other stats are meaningless to me anyways. Obviously one can recreate a system like this using other apps or spreadsheets, but an integrated system in LingQ would be nice.