Need advice for 10,000 hours of Listening Hours Livestream

Open Forum
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Hi fellow Lingqer’s!

Link: https://www.youtube.com/live/oy8_L8Eh3VI

I would like advice on what to discuss for an upcoming livestream to celebrate hitting 10,000 hours of listening to Mandarin by the end of October with Lingq, which is coming up in November 1, 2025.

Would also like to ask for some great topics and questions that I can answer to save for future lingqers during the broadcast. Thank you and hope to receive some questions from you guys!

Happy Lingqing!

References:

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Hi @chytran,

Regarding the possible topics:

  • Tones: acquisition vs. explicit learning
  • Intensive vs extensive reading (while listening)
  • A pure comprehensible input (CI) approach vs an enhanced version that combines CI, spaced repetition, and explicit learning of grammar.
  • Early or late speaking
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Thanks Peter. Great topics

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What would you do if you were starting again (or part way through)?
Yes, how much is your approach CI based (mine is mostly, in a Lingq way).

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Wonder question. I will discuss this. Thank you bbbblinq!

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thank you,

I would be interested to know anything you did that was a waste of time, especially if it made you learn wrong things (affected learning negatively) ?

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How many hours of shadowing have you done until now? At what stage in learning did you start doing it? Also, how many hours of listening had you already put in if you could remember when you started shadowing it ?

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Great question. Will mention this definitely. Thank you Asad!

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I second the shadowing part in general.
Also how many repetitions you have done, in what, how you manage this concept overall.

What you have improved and what not, for example, considering these basic exam categories: writing, reading, listening, speaking, grammar.

Can you also talk about your mental effort capacity, if you are a person that like to focus on things, and so on. And how your capacity to handle effort improved from when you have started until now. Because I believe you started way back, then stopped, started again, until the day you went full speed. Or something like that.

Good luck.

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Perfect questions, will add to my list of topics

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The timezone doesn’t work for me, so be sure to record it. :slight_smile:

Some ideas:

  • How has your listening comprehension changed over the course of your journey with Mandarin? Eg. After how many hours did you feel you were at the level, where you could understand children’s content vs. clear, formal interviews vs. conversational podcasts, etc? And how much of a listening comprehension difference do you think you noticed between 5k and 10k hours?

  • At 10k listening hours, do you feel you’ve reached your listening comprehension goal that you set out to achieve? Or did you feel like you reached it earlier? At what amount of listening hours?

  • What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered in your journey with Mandarin? What did you try to overcome them? Did they work well?

  • What mistakes do you consider you made? If you plan on learning any other languages in the future, what would you do differently next time round? How do you think you could’ve made your journey with Mandarin more efficient and/or effective?

  • Graphs are also nice way to visually explain stuff. They may be a bit of work to create or you might not have the data, but they could really summarise your experience in a clear, succinct way. If you’re interested and can be bothered, some interesting graphs may include:

    • a stacked time series line chart of listening hours broken up into active vs. passive with labelled milestones (so an arrow pointing to the position where they occurred) like “85%+ comprehension of children’s TV shows,” “85%+ understand formal interviews,“ etc.
    • a stacked times series line chart of your estimated total time learning Mandarin split up into reading vs. active reading while listening vs. passive listening vs. conversing/speaking vs. shadowing with key milestones labelled as well, like “10k LingQ Known Words,” “50k LingQ Known Words,” “first tutoring session where I felt completely fluent,” “read first adult paper book at 85% comprehension,” "“point where I could live and work in Taiwain/China but struggle,” “point where I could attend university in Mandarin/Chinese” etc.
    • a double axis time series line graph of estimated total time learning Mandarin vs. LingQ Known Words

P.S. If you haven’t done much graph making before, it’d be a bit of a learning curve. :stuck_out_tongue: At the very least, you could just screenshot your LingQ graphs.

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I would love to know how your interests have evolved as you’ve consumed more and more content in your target language. This is something I find really fascinating. For instance, I imagine that the interests you had when you first started learning the language were quite different from those you developed later on, once your proficiency improved.

At the beginning, you might have been drawn to simpler materials, such as children’s stories or beginner-friendly topics. But as your comprehension skills expanded, your genuine interests in the target language likely began to flourish — perhaps aligning more closely with the subjects you’re passionate about in your native language. I find that process of transition especially interesting: how our “training interests” in a new language eventually give way to our authentic ones.

Another aspect I’m curious about is whether you’ve integrated artificial intelligence into your language-learning routine. Since AI technology has advanced rapidly over recent years, I wonder if you’ve managed to use AI tools — particularly for listening practice — to enhance your exposure to your target language. Have you found any ways in which AI has made it easier to accumulate listening hours or diversify your input?

Lastly, I’d love to hear whether community played a role in your progress. Did you have friends or peers who were equally passionate about listening to large amounts of content in the foreign language? Were you surrounded by others who also recognized the importance of consistent audio input as a foundation for language learning?

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I’ll use my lingq graphs and give the best answers I can. Thank you very much for all the suggestions :rofl: and yes it will be recorded. It will be raw so there will moments of stuttering but will try my best to be straight forward to all the questions given!

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Well put out questions and topics that I haven’t thought about much. Will write them all down! Thank you kadirkaratas!

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