Hi, I have a date set in my calendar for when I am going to reach advanced 2 based on a specific rate. All I do is minus my current known words from the advanced 2 number, divide it by 50 (my chosen daily known words increase rate) and then count forward on the calendar that many days. Every now and then I will recalculate to see if I’m on track.
This gave me the idea that it would be great if Lingq could do it for me. You could set your achievement (for example advanced 2) and there could be a live calculator to tell you at which date you would achieve your goal. This could be based on your daily/weekly/monthly rate. I.e ‘at this rate you will reach advanced 2 on the 30th November 2021!’ It could also work backwards i.e you could say I want to be advanced 2 by this date, Lingq could then automatically tell you how many known words you would need per day and nudge you accordingly, this could also be set up as a sort of custom intensity level. I have other ideas but I think this one would be fairly straightforward to implement as it is just a formula and I think it could be very useful and motivating for some.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think this would actually be practical. The metric of “words learned per day” drops pretty significantly as you progress, because you will encounter an ever decreasing number of new words. If you mark words conscientiously, the last 2-3000 words to get to Advanced 2 can seem to take forever, as opposed the relatively fast pace in the lower intermediate stages.
I think more realistic expectations can be set if you base your progress on total words read on LingQ. If you were to decide on reading 1.5 million words by X date, then you could track your progress on how you’re keeping up, and track your reading speed etc. 1.5 million words read is sort of a good ballpark for reaching Advanced 2 in my experience.
I was missing something similar to this and created my own tool to forecast the progress of my known words for my Japanese and Chinese. The problem is that just dividing the number of words by days is way too simple since it would expect that all of your learning days would be identical.
I ended up creating a forecast tool with excel using the FORECAST.ETS and FORECAST.ETS.CONFINT functions that gives me forecasts with 90 % confidence intervals based on all of my recorded data. So I basically end up with two dates. The earliest and latest probable dates.
The forecast will be more precise for future data points that are closer and get vaguer the more in the future the forecasted point is. It also gets better if the progress is steady and more uncertain if the progress is less steady and it adapts all the time as it gets more data. It is extremely motivating to follow it and something similar should be easy enough to implement in LingQ.
Personalised machine learning predictions based on anonymised user data would also be interesting, but they probably wouldn’t be in the budget for LingQ. However, maybe they would make for an interesting master’s thesis or something for someone.
I have something similar to this. My goal this year is to read around 1,000,000 words on Lingq. I have a Google Sheets spreadsheet to track how much i’m reading everyday, how much new Lingqs i’ve created and how much words i’ve ‘Learned.’ I divide the sum of my words read count into weeks too. I also have a counter for how much reading I have left til I reach my goal
Good point, I didn’t consider this. I had always overlooked words read to be honest but now I have worked out if I read roughly 2500 words a day I will reach 1,500,000 by the end of next year. Do you think its strange that the only way to keep your streak going is by adding more Lingqs? You would think the emphasis would be on filling the ‘hours listened’ or ‘words read’ bar given that these are the ‘input’ metrics.
To be honest, I never cared about streaks. On the one hand, my schedule has always been too inconsistent, and on the other, I often alternate between different languages on different days, so I never tried to maintain any streaks in any of them.
Also, if you’re doing 2500 words a day, it’s definitely a good baseline to have, and you’ll make steady progress, but as you build up known words, you’ll find that 2500 will stop giving you the the little “fire” badge thing, since you’ll only “reach your daily target” and not double it. And then you’ll start getting a yellow marks, not even reaching your target so streaks will start going out the window. But that is of course TOTALLY FINE. It just means that you’re getting really good, and not that you’re not doing enough, so that’s one of the other reason’s why I don’t care about streaks.
An interesting thread! Something we can look into in the future for sure. To have some goal clearly identified and being worked toward like this would be motivating. As for LingQs being our metric, we kind of feel like if you’re creating LingQs every day, you would be reading and listening to match. It’s an easy metric to track and meet, at least in terms of understanding.