Thankful for streak shortening bug :)

[yulia_st]

Today I experienced the infamous streak shortening bug - and I’m glad!

I’ve never been a streak fanatic. There are many websites and apps with this feature, but I’ve never paid it much attention. However, when I started using LingQ in October, I decided to use the streak for the first couple of months, simply to keep myself on track and to create a habit. As I spent more and more time on LingQ, my streak grew to over 250 days. And gradually it became a burden. Why? Because my ability to read and understand Italian also grew, and much faster than I expected. Increasingly I was reading and listening things without importing them into LingQ, simply because I could understand them without extensive dictionary support.

At some point I realized that keeping the streak was becoming counterproductive. I could read and listen to native content for hours, but it had no impact on my LingQ statistics, so I felt obliged to come to LingQ and read something just to keep my streak alive - or worse, just cheat and click mindlessly on unknown words. Also, as my vocabulary grew, it was becoming harder and harder to reach my daily LingQ target. But I also realized that I didn’t want to lose my streak, because it looked so nice. Even though I knew I didn’t really need it anymore, even though it became a burden rather than a benefit, I still hesitated to drop it.

And now the streak shortening bug has come along and solved this problem for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really sorry for people who feel the loss of their streaks, and I hope this will be resolved. If it happened to me three months ago, I would have probably reacted differently.

On the other hand, my experience shows that no metric, tool, or motivating feature is useful if it’s not useful for you. So if you have a really long streak, why not use this situation to rethink whether it’s outlived its usefulness?

[FrankG]

Wise words, very timely and appropriate for me too … Thank you.
Although all the range of motivational activities/counters etc all have their own unique part to play at different times and at different levels of progress, and we all need a ‘push’ or ‘pull up’ now and again, and they are indeed useful in context, but it’s good to occassionally re-focus on the main reason we use LingQ ! …
The efforts and comments of so many fellow LingQers are a continual inspiration to step it up a notch.
Many thanks again … Br, FrankG

[Gerfried]

You are totally right.
It’s a really burden to keep the strike going and on and on. For example, it was stressing for me, when I visit my far away living daughter and her husband and the little twins, to make my daily lingQ’s.
I also think, to have some day’s off, is’nt so bad.
I changed my strategy a little bit, and read a bit more real books.
In the moment, I read the interesting autobiography (in english)of Edward Snowdon. I think the whole world knows him. He has to live for ever (or not)in russia. I read 50 or 70 pages a day, without looking in a dictionary. Only the context is important. So I learn hopefully some words over the time.
Another strategy for me is to listen to the digitial radio day and night. So I consumed thousand’s of hours daily news from BBC 4.
Every time, when I listening to the radio and when I can catch a wondertful sentence from an inspiring human being, I wrote it in my notice-book. Now I have the feeling I can understand approximately 80 percent. At he beginnging of my english-learning-career, I could barely understand a single word.
Sometimes I’m looking english Net-flix films. So I can learn, how the language in reality was spoken.
Bye for now.