Lingq keeps track of how many words are read within a day and I want to use this statistic to set myself some reading goals, however I don’t really understand how the tracking works or how accurate it is
I tried doing some tests but since there’s a bit of delay before the stat gets updated it makes it a bit tedious to troubleshoot and I figure I would ask it here directly :
Can I trust that this number of read words is going to reflect the number of words of all the pages I read in a single day, or are some other criteria taken into account?
Are there things I shouldn’t do in order to keep it accurate? Is flipping back and forth between pages or opening the same lesson multiple time susceptible to artificially inflate this statistic?
Thanks in advance for any answer, understanding this better will help me a lot
If you flip the pages back and fourth it is going to inflate the numbers.
To keep it accurate, when you finish a lesson, go to the lesson’s stats and change it to 1.0x reading.
Well that’s a shame, I can’t rely on it at all then
But at least now I know it, I’ll try to find another way to assign myself some goals, likely based on the time spent reading instead
Thank you very much for the reply!
It is innacurate, treat it as an estimate. I do find it very useful for predicting roughly how long one would take to learn based on rate of reading per day. it also keeps one on track. End of day focus on reading a lot.
Many times i finish a lesson it show a number below 1.0x, even as low as 0.4x. I have to manually set it to 1.0x too.
It also doesn’t take into account the reading done while in "edit sentence " mode.
We don’t learn by feeding the brain precise numbers of words each day. We learn by feeding the brain lots and lots of words with lots and lots of repetitions in lots and lots of contexts.
Just out of curiosity, how would you count each and every word that you read? Does that mean you glanced at it, understood it without conscious thought, were shown the word? I cant’ think of a single accurate way to determine exactly whether I read a particular word or not. I can go back and count them, but what if I read some of that material twice, or three times. It’s a silly exercise.
I’m just looking for a way to set myself daily reading goals that are consistent and not too fuzzy.
Back when I was only studying English the process was quite straightforward, as you put it I would simply tell myself to read as much as I could each day, but now that I’m working on multiple languages and that time is getting to be more of an issue I’m looking for ways to organise myself.
I want to make sure that I don’t get lazy and can keep track of what I read, so I can increase or decrease those goals as needed without managing my time by feeling alone. Or that I don’t start to prioritise some languages to the extent that the time I spend with the rest gets below a certain level.
Obviously there’s no way to control it 100% but I think that looking at the number of words read each day could serve this purpose.
However given that in this case I can’t automate it I’ll try to use timeboxing sessions instead to set myself such goals, I need the practice anyway
Using the LingQ generated word count will work fine for what you want to do. It is consistent and your study habits are probably fairly consistent. So from day to day or week to week, the numbers will show that you are meeting a numerical goal that you set.
The graphical presentation of all the statistics is also useful as you can see trends in your reading habits that you might want to change. Don’t overthink the process. Again, the mind does not work in linear quantitative ways.
Yes this is what I’m going to use, I’ll split my reading time into timeboxed sessions distributed across my languages
The issue with this is that in my opinion it requires more self discipline, but I think this is for the best as it will also be a good opportunity to improve in this regard
Thanks everyone for your input and advice !
For tracking time, you can use your phone or my prefered way a gym timer. I use it to make sure I spent at least 3hrs per day with the language. You can set it up to work like a Pomodoro timer too with breaks and etc.
I’ve found that the browser version of LingQ consistently overcounts the words read, by counting the words on screen multiple times for one reason or another (I haven’t been able to conclusively figure out why, whether it re-counts words on the screen after a certain time, or when switching between tabs, or what the problem is…)
To be fair, it’s possible that this has been fixed; I have since stopped using the browser version for the most part…