Just giving a few final thoughts after reaching my personal goal for listening and known words on Lingq and possibly being the only person to do both at the same time in terms of sheer numbers. There’s a lot of lessons learned throughout the last 4 years and glad to call it quits here. In terms of listening, always listen to everything and possibly everything that you can get. Because no matter how many words you have, there will always be a new word that you will hear in a conversation, which makes it challenging due to the fact that language learning is an endless journey. The statement is true. Will also like to share a few things learned about listening and attaining vocabulary.
Listening:
Always balance out listening content to get mix of all type of content and diversify.
Conversation, podcast, tv shows (at least 2 people+)(most important one)
Videos of interest (at least 1 person+)
Medical, politics (Not needed but someone will eventually mention these and will like to talk with you. Usually the older generation)
Active listening is King and is necessary to attain listening comprehension at a faster rate.
Passive listening helps and it’s an additional reminder of the things you have already acquired. Not required but is useful
You’re limited based on the known words amount that you have. In order to listen and acquire faster, known words must go first then go crazy with active listening
There’s different ways to listen
Listen to all words and attempt to translate in real time.
Focus on words you don’t know or havent heard yet. Also assume that your brain will catch the known words naturally and you won’t have to focus on them.
Encounter a word in a sentence and reset the audio to the begin with the word translated to make it more comprehensible and repeat.
CI works when you understand what you read and can be transfer to listening ability.
Known words:
Words increase efficiency
There’s a barrier to access the language without the words
Reading isn’t needed but it helps
Gives you the tools to allow access to subtitles to be able to read/listen
Target the unknown words and ignore existing known words.
Will be giving more learning philosophies and will talk about everything that happened throughout the years in a single broadcast that will happen this Saturday Nov 1 10AM (Pacific Time). It will be a spontaneous stream, in which there won’t be a fixed structure but more of a story telling and giving advice. If you have questions that you like to be answered. Would be happy to answer any given questions.
Congrats, you are doing great. Couple of questions if you don’t mind:
Can you maybe share some of your favorite resources, e.g. podcasts, YouTube / 哔哩哔哩 channels etc?
Do you have tips for how to overcome the early intermediate stage, where you might understand content for learners (textbooks, slow and clearly spoken podcasts for learners) but want to start to actually listen to content made for native speakers? I really struggled here. I mainly relied on reading and listening to transcribed podcasts, but I always felt that progress was too slow.
Do you also have some tips for how to start to output, i.e. going from passive understanding to active production (speaking / writing)?
Thanks in advance.
I’ve learned quite a few L2s in my life, but to achieve 10k listening hours and 100k known words in a tonal language like Mandarin Chinese in just 4 years - that’s a “next-level achievement”
What do you mean by this? As in reading-only isn’t needed, as your method was predominately reading while listening, then re-listening during your passive listening time, right? And you can read now fluently?
Under which circumstances did you use, and find more useful, each of these different ways of listening?
How did you target increasing your Known Words first?
Extensive reading. Only read text during the time of reading/listening. Otherwise, didn’t do any reading by itself as an activity. In order words, the words read in my stats are mostly false and are mostly words I skipped in order to hunt for words. In reality, it’s probably 2 mil/6 mil actually read. Since I can’t get an idea how much I read exactly, just left the stats alone. Found it slowing my progress down in the long run if the goal was to get the listening/speaking down as fast as physically possible. Personally found it more of an assistant to help read text better when reading/listening. Not a book reader, which didn’t make reading itself as appealing personally. In terms of reading fluently, able to read about most things with no problem. Once in a while, there will be a word that is important and don’t recognize it. Would say about 95% of the time is comprehensible.
1st only applies to words within a listening context that your brain has already learned and is being reinforced for more clarity. It could be during the advance stage or if you’re reviewing old content that you have already read/listen to. 2nd is mostly during the intermediate stage when it’s your first few times hearing certain words but you have learned the other words, in which you are being forced to slow down to translate those words slowly into your subconscious. In order words, making it comprehensible to the ears. To the eyes, it knows the meaning but the ears have yet to learn the words. The rest of the words in the sentence are already comprehensible probably due to being the most common words. 3rd is during the beginning stage when every word is recognizable through the eyes but the ear has never heard any of the words yet.
Personally found that word list are pointless mostly but if you are put in a sentence environment or an environment that an average person is used to seeing (articles, books, any text from left to right), the brain is most comfortable with that since it’s used to that pattern. It’s pretty much doing word list but in an environment in which you are comfortable with. Only lingq and very few apps provide you with this specific environment that is considered useful because it filters words that you already know and you can focus your energy on the words not learned yet in comparison to using your mental energy to filter words yourself. Lingq simply helps you skip that step and helps you conserve your mental energy. Found it a lot easier to learn words that way. The idea is ignoring all words that are already known (white) and focus only on yellow/blue. Targetting only the words you don’t have yet. The review for white will appear when you’re reading/listening. It’s just a specific strategy for only communicating and ignoring reading books as a hobby. If you play pokemon and your goal is to capture all the pokemon into your index, you will almost always never try to capture the one’s you already have and run away when encountered in battle but will stay only for the ones you are hunting down.
This was just an approach to focus only on listening/speaking. Reading and acquiring known words were just barriers to achieve that goal.
Chytran, Unfortunately, I will be at work the whole day, might not be able to watch the live stream. Therefore, it would be nice if you could make a recording of the live stream for a later viewing available. I will appreciate it if that is possible.
It is quite a lot. You are right. Did the math required to hit that number in 4 years and it comes out to be 8 hours daily approximately, which was the numerical amount that was kept at.
