I’m not sure I really understand the new 90 Day Challenge format. I signed up for both the regular and “hard core” challenge in Korean. I’ve been hitting it pretty hard the past couple of weeks and am way ahead of the pace in each category in the “hard core” challenge (except speaking and writing, which I haven’t done), yet I’m WAY behind in coins in the regular challenge. I create LingQs like crazy, but I’m nowhere near the pace. How does one possibly collect 50,000 coins in 3 months? What am I supposed to be doing that I’m not? Lots of SRS?
(And by the way, I love the new LingQ. It’s a great site. We usually only comment when we have a problem or question, but overall this is becoming the best language learning resource out there. So good job and thank you!)
Same here, it’s a total mystery to me how to aquire coins. I just read 3 articles articles and didn’t receive any coins. It would be nice to have the mechanism clearified somewhere - like this it’s a little frustrating and the challange has the opposite effect on me than intended.
You get coins for making words known and for creating LingQs and moving them up in status from 1 to 2,3,4 and known. I’m sure you were doing these things so you must have earned coins. You may have to refresh to update your coin status.
It is very difficult to accumulate those coins ( I tried a new type of challenge for French but even if I read more articles than during the previous type of challenge I was far from fulfilling) also there is a problem if few words are blue already in the articles in advanced levels By far I preferred the original type of challenges.
I’m doing a Chinese Challenge since Sept 1st and I’m at 9 coins (in the iOS app) under progress and 754 coins somewhere in the list.
I’ve gained 1 coin after reading a few articles (under progress) and 0 under the list. I would expect that the coins in the list and under progress would be the same - is this a bug?
Just read another article, created 26 lingqs and moved 1 or 2 words to known - no coins added.
Oh perhaps the system is confused because I’m in 2 Challenges?
There was a problem with the app displaying the correct number of coins earned, but I think that was fixed in the most recent update. Make sure you’ve upgraded to the latest version. That fixed it for me.
OK, thanks, the updated app does show a different coin count. However, also on the website the coins are not updated after finishing a lesson. I need to go back to the challenge to see the actual coins.
Still it would be nice to know how one actually receives coins.
Coins are earned for creating LingQs, moving them up in status or by simply adding known words. Each word is worth 1 to 4 coins depending on its importance. Each stage of its learning cycle is worth 1X the number of coins. So, a known word is worth 5X its number of coins. ie. a word worth 2 coins is worth 10 coins once it becomes known, either by LingQing it and then moving it up to known (the check mark), or by making it known right away.
I’ll add my two cents. I looked at your profile and man, you are having a hard time with coins. But then for smoeone like me who reset my language and just started LingQ again 9 days ago, I have an ABSURD number of coins in just 9 days. Granted, I’m averaging 333 activity points a day or more without any writing or speaking, but I get the huge benefit of being able to add those first 2,000 common words, which are worth more coins than anything I’ll see from here on out. For reference, I’ve only been doing Chinese since 09/15/17.
And therein lies the problem with coins being the ranking system. By being fresh to the site I get a massive advantage plowing through those first many words worth 3-4 coins per level.
And yet, look at the #1 guy. He is simply adding known words. Has a few thousand words of reading but over 10,000 known words added in the latest time period. I’m not sure how that works statistically, marking more words as known than you’ve read but assuming it is totally legitimate (and I have no reason to doubt his character, and perhaps he just forgets to hit the “complete lesson” button at the end which doesn’t add words read), it’s a totally different way of scoring.
My proposition would be to make the activity score the driving force behind a challenge. I understand that they are an average of the past 30 days. However, clearly data is kept. So activity score or simply all the stats not including coins can be used as the ranking system. They are already required to do the challenge. The ranking board requires a single number, so it is much easier (programming wise) to create a challenge total for the activity score of the time period of the challenge (a sum and a new variable). This is much easier than adding subcategories for every single stat and making a weird formula just for a challenge.
I’m glad to see so many improvements to the site since I last used it nearly a year ago. It’s now my main studying force, and I’m doing it several hours a day. Reading over 4,000 words a day and learning around 48 LingQs a day for now. That’s truly an incredible pace that simply wasn’t possible with the (still amazing) ChinesePod, or even living in Taipei and Shanghai for a bit.
We thought the coins would be simpler since you can see yourself earning these. As compared to the Activity Score which people seemed to be confused about all the time. Nobody really knows what is included in the Activity Score. Plus having coins, activity score, points for tutoring just leads to confusion. We were looking for a way to simplify. But, as you point out, there is a big difference in ability to earn coins based on your level (ie how many blue and yellow words you even have) and how many of the more frequent words you are learning.
To bring back the activity score will bring back the questions about what is in it and focus attention on yet another metric again. Perhaps we should allow you to earn coins in other ways too. Like by listening or by words of reading. The fewer blue and yellow words, the faster you should read so the more words you should cover. If we give coins for words of reading, that might reduce the disadvantage of being an advanced user.
Earning coins for activity is a great soltuion to this, I think. Because I can do something like listen to 10 hours of Chinese on LingQ and get ZERO progress in the challenge! Or I can read 50,000 words and make minimal coins.
Especially once I find all the words i know, say around 5,000 Chinese words, I’ll start to only run into words worth 1 coin per stage. Someone really advanced like Branicek has to learn 4 ESOTERIC words to get the same amount of coins I receive for coming across words like “I, you, he, love” when I first got back on LingQ this month.
Haha, yeah I assumed they would look weird, my stats for the past month. But I am going through sth I discovered works best for me, a kind of a rapid massive exposure to new words and lingqs, by going through texts before fully reading them. So what I did and am almost finished with is that I imported all Hsk 4,5,6,6+ articles from The chairmans bao until September 2017 (a bit over 1500 of them), and all Upper Intermediate and Advanced lessons of Chinesepod until August 2017 (a bit over 900 podcasts). I am almost finished with the words and will move on to going through the full texts and audio. Before I had read maybe 400 chairman Bao articles already and listened to around 100 upper intermediate chinesepod lessons. For the past month when I went through the rest I always looked just at the context of the word, to understand it’s meaning and purpose in a sentence or a phrase, so I haven’t actually read the whole text. I found that this way I improve much faster, going through the same thing twice, first just exposure to the most important parts of the text that I might not understand yet and when coming back some time later (a week or a month), I still have very good retention, and thus I am just refreshing it and decreasing the load on my brain when reading the whole thing. So in the next two months of the challenge I will probably only convert lingqs into known words and ramp up the actual reading, but maybe spice it up with reading bits of some books that I already have in my library (around 20 of them). I am definitely not doing it just to earn coins
