To sharpen my question – what does Steve mean when he recommends 1 Mil words per year?
I am now at 11k LingQ known words. I can get the gist of Harry Potter and newspaper articles. I think I could reach 1 Mil/year, getting the gist, But I think I would find that unsatisfying.
I would miss so much and it would take years to get verbs reliably in that manner.
Does the language “reveal itself” unconsciously over time with repeated exposure? Am I too impatient?
Maybe he thinks Twitter is books?
@ericb100 when I say that I mean “understanding” the language somehow. I call it sound but it doesn’t have anything to do with only pronunciation. It is that stage when you feel if a sentence is correct or not, even if you don’t know it grammatically. It is just what happens in normal conversations amongst native people, when they ask each other these things: could I say this or it doesn’t sound right, or it sounds to informal, or the spelling is not right but I don’t know the correct one, it just doesn’t feel right, and so on.
To me, it depends on the sound, life is sound, a core vibration of the language. I don’t know how to better explain it at the moment.
We could also say it is something like @jt23 wrote, the language the “reveal itself” in our unconscious. We don’t know how we learn these things but at certain point we just “feel” the language.
However, is this gonna happen with only reading+listening exposure? I don’t know because I’ve never done it. It is for sure gonna happen with real people exposure living in the target country and sharing our life with local people. The fact is that we share a lot more than only text and words when we interact with people. So, if we can reach the same feeling by staying at home I see it more at a mirage. But maybe we can get close to it, saving time and money before going to the target country.
The more the exposure the less is probably the time needed to the target country. The better and focused the exposure the less the time we need to spend in this task. But I’m not a good example on doing things right!
@noxialisrex 
well, to be fair, there was no Twitter when he was a teen. But he’s definitely reading a lot of tweets now. Or maybe he is using his new xAI to understand Twitter and what he is doing with all that!
Based on my observation as a German native speaker who has been observing the writing products of other German native speakers for decades and whose exam topic was the intricate relationship between the oral and written dimensions:
If you always try to write like you talk in German, you’re uneducated (notable exception: some informal ways of communication on the Internet).
A lot of German native speakers write extremely poorly - unless they write professionally (as journalists, etc.) or have an academic background (i.e., gone to Fachhochschule / university).
So, no: Neither listening nor reading a lot alone create good writers. That would be just an absurd claim.
On the other hand, good writers are always good (and avid) readers…
And no, speaking and writing in German (or any other language) are not identical.
There is extensive research about the highly complex relationships between orality and literacy See, for ex.: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354232254_Modelling_spoken_and_written_language_An_introduction
No, Elon is smart:
Maybe he uses Blinkist (and Co) to extract the essential parts of a book?
Or he uses his favorite generative AI to read summaries of the essential parts of a book?
That is, you can get the essential parts of many (problem-solving) books just by reading the summaries 
And even pleasure-giving books such as LoR can be summarized as follows:
Nine hippies run around for three books - just so one can throw a ring into a volcano at the end.
What more is there to know? Ah, I forgot the Witch King of Angmar and the Nine
Of course, “reading” two books a day this way is a poor performance.
Elon, you can do better than that, right? 
PS -
The real challenge per year is
“Read one million of these summaries per year!”
That’s what David Goggins would do 
From “ultrarunning” to “ultrasummarizing”.
No big deal with an “ultrareading while listening” approach in a not so distant L2, by the way… And why not use Encyclopedia Britannica for that (at least for the folks learning English)? J.R.R. Tolkien | Biography, Books, Movies, & Facts | Britannica
hey, I just wanna share with my experience. I never used Russian and spoke, but I was listening a lot. Like movies and songs, everything in Russian. I even started to recognize accents when people started to talk in Russian. I understand to believe in this methods, after 12 years brainwashing in school is hard, but it is working, and it’s a proven fact !
@PeterBormann : what you wrote about writing is absolutely true. However, a second language learner can definitely speak and write more or less in the same way and it would be more than enough. If you speak clean and correctly and if your writing is, let’s say, email well written standard, not too formal or too emojis, I would say it is ok. From there you can only progress but as writing per se, it would be already better than the average of any population.
I’m very ok with ultrasummarizing. Does Blinkist really work? To be honest, there are always more and more books nowadays that are just fluff, lots of nonsense pages or chapters just to sell and maybe only 1 idea inside that it is worth it. Too many copycats or remakes of the same ideas with other names just to make them sound new.
If Blinkist works, I would become a fan!
Well, I talk and write differently in German depending on the communication situation.
That is, I talk differently to
Many things change here, esp.
Ditto for the texts I write. That is: I write differently to
Or to put it differently:
Neither oral nor written language (networks ) are “homogeneous entities”. Instead, natural languages are networks of networks of… and layers of layers of … (phonetics, morpho-syntax, collocations / idioms, discourse structures, genre-specific conventions, etc.)… and, esp., native
speakers, can handle all these “nuances” as accomplished artists do.
Mutatis mutandis, this also the case with advanced non-native speakers.
“it would be more than enough.”
That’s just a beginner / intermediate “misinterpretation” where folks think that the tip of the language iceberg “is” the iceberg
This low level of language processing might be ok in some private contexts. However, it is
not acceptable in the domain of knowledge workers because the stakes are “much” higher…
See for yourself (you can read a few book summaries for free, for ex.
on your mobile device): https://www.blinkist.com
Or you could use other summary websites such as:
However, sometimes it’s sufficient to ask your fav Gen AI for a summary containing the most important points
That said,
I wouldn’t use this approach for scientific texts, prose or poems, but it
often works quite well for problem-solving non-fiction texts.
@PeterBormann I agree on what you replied about writing, which I understand very well. Although I’m a bit more opened and flexible on the last part, with different interpretations. But that’s ok, I can live with different concepts and always learn if this helps to push myself beyond mediocrity.
Thanks for the other link as well, I didn’t know it all. I’ve bookmarked them both and I will definitely consider to import something of it on LingQ as soon as I’m done with the material I have. With the new Whisper thing I’m becoming a fan of Podcasts again because now it is faster to have the transcript, and probably I could prefer podcast+Whisper compared to book+TTS. Quality audio as priority + modern text and very dense in words/time spent.
Talking about podcasts and German, any suggestion for this thread? Thanks. Link here > Welche Podcasts würdest du zum Anhören auf Deutsch empfehlen?
At least in my professional life the statement, “He writes like he talks,” has been an insult. I assume there is a similar insult in German.
Yes, but I would also say that is different. Writing like talking is not the same than talking like writing (if you know how to do it properly). Because usually the average population writes very badly and I don’t think it is a “guilt” neither. Many people of my parents age have dedicated their life to work very hard and were also very poor when they were young. Life was very different even few decades ago. I don’t blame them if they don’t know how to write properly and/or talk average.
For young people that have a university degree might be a different story. Still we have many of them that don’t know their own native language very well but have important university degrees. Weird society we have.
That’s why I would say it was enough before. When I was in France, my writing at that time was definitely better than the average male population of the country. I was basically a C2 and I think it is ok for a second language learner, especially for a person that wants to manage more languages. I think that an healthy compromise is ok, depending on our goals.
Yes, you hit the mark of the mark with that statement
“I think that an healthy compromise is ok, depending on our goals.”
Definitely. And it always boils down to, well, “preparation and training”
If I read the same article on LingQ with 500 words 5 times does it count as 500 or 2500?
Becuse I nearly read every article about 5 times.
Well…if you take a speed reading course you can easily 10x your reading rate…as Woody Allen quote goes:
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.
It involves Russia."
While I didn’t get it done in a year, I just read my millionth word in LingQ in French.
For me, that million words means that I can read about anything in French and make good guesses at unknown words from the context clues.