What is a good 'words of reading' goal to set for yourself (on a daily basis)

Open Forum
1

What is a good ‘words of reading’ goal to set for yourself (on a daily basis)

2

Hey, LearnTillDeath (= also my mindset! :slight_smile:

It depends on your language level:

  • In the “ultrareading-while-listening” approach (from a B1 level upwards), which we are discussing in this concurrent thread: (https://www.lingq.com/pt/community/forum/premium-access-forum/comparison-of-approaches-ultra), the daily goal is to read and listen to ca. 8-10k words in 2 Pomodoro blocks à 25 min (= 50 min altogether).
  • However, at the initial stages A1 - A2 this is out of the question. A smart approach is here simply to “read-while-listening” at your own pace!
    In general, it’s a good idea just to focus on the daily time you can spent with the language, not on some other metrics!

My recommendation for most “regular”, i.e. non-hardcore learners is usually:

  • 1-2 Pomodoro blocks a day (reading-while-listening; fast- or slow-paced)
    plus
  • some additional listening (ca. 30 min or more) in your free time.

If you follow that simple routine over an extended period of time, all of your stats on LingQ, e.g. the number of words read, the number of known words, etc., will skyrocket, esp. when you can adopt a fast-paced “ultrareading-while-listening” approach (again: see the link above).

Hope that helps
Peter

2 Likes
3

one can read 8-10k words in 50 minutes? or is this the goal? if you had to say what is the estimated unknown percentage of this because looking up words burns a lot of time etc.

2 Likes
4

the right amount of words of reading per day is going to depend a lot on how many words you already know.

personally my goal on LingQ has always been getting a certain number of new known words per day. For the past couple of months I was aiming at 150 new known words per day, and it looks like that required 2000-3000 words of reading. But nowadays I have to do 5000 words of reading per day just to get to 100 new known words.

I imagine that going forward it will be necessary to do ever increasing amounts of reading to find the increasingly rare new words.

C’est la vie.

5 Likes
5

I think this 8-10k in an average considering that you stop looking for words.
I’ve just started testing this with Spanish and I can say it could differ a lot from the text density and the time I stop looking for some tedious words (bare in mind that @Toby almost doesn’t even stop but if I’m not wrong he started to change his setting after 4M words already read).

In any case, yesterday I’ve done 8k words with 1 Pomodoro at 1.5x, the day before 3k but I think I had calculated badly because I’m trying to find a solution to go a bit faster. On average for the first week, I was 5k with 1 Pomodoro. The more you advance less LingQs you need to create too. So it’s plausible but I’ll keep testing.

3 Likes
6

Yes, I’ve been doing this as well with a similar target and you need to increase the amount of words read.

However I suppose the focus will shift from high density blue words to high density yellow words in order to convert more words afterwards when you will have a large amount of known words. And when you are ok with those, you will shift to writing and speaking.

2 Likes
7

Isn’t it bad to not look up words? There is context but even in english there are words that ive heard and didn’t understand like to elope, to dime out, ahistorical are some examples in english. Or is not looking up words better cuz one can see more words in total this way?

2 Likes
8

Great question! That could be a topic on its own.

2 Likes
9

Thanks!

1 Like
10

Thanks!

1 Like
11

I prefer to look them up but I don’t obsess about it. Sometimes I want to be more precise sometimes I don’t. It depends on the situation. If it’s important the word will come back over and over.

It also depends on what kind of goal you have for the language. If you want to become a translator, an interpreter, or just to be fluent or for tourist purposes. There are many different goals and you tune your method to your goals after all.

If I read outside LingQ I don’t care much but if I use LingQ I create LingQs because I prefer to do so. For now.

4 Likes
12

No, the goal is doing 1 or 2 Pomodoro (à 25 min each) a day or 5-6 days a week (which is probably more realistic for regular learners) with respect to the L2 to be acquired.

8-10k (or sometimes even 8-12k) is the average range of word amounts processed in not-too-distant L2s in ca. 50 min (according to the experiences of Toby and me. Note: We’ve been testing this with Germanic and Romance languages for quite some time now).

Therefore, the “8-10k/12k amount of words read” is the consequence of just doing 2 Pomodoro blocks a day.
However, as I wrote above, this is only the case for “fast-paced ultrareading-while-listening” (UWL) from a B1 level upwards in not-too-distant L2s.

“looking up words burns a lot of time”
That’s not my experience - neither on LingQ nor on ReadLang (which I’m using at the moment for UWL):

  1. At an advanced level (in my case Spanish) and with an audio speed of 1.5, there isn’t much to look up.

  2. And even at an intermediate level (in my case: Br. Port.) with an audio speed of 1.25x, looking up words is extremely fast in ReadLang (btw, I’m reading Stephen King’s novel “It”).

I had similar experiences when using LingQ v.4.

Caveats:

  1. It depends on the L2 to be acquired
    Looking up stuff on distant Indo-European or non-Indo-European languages will definitely be more time-intensive!

  2. It depends on the text genre
    Non-fiction texts are usually easier to process than fiction. So low intermediate learners should rather resort to non-fiction than to fiction texts - at least if they want to progress faster.

  3. And it depends, of course, on the language level
    Fast-paced UWL (with an audio speed of > 1.0x) shouldn’t be practiced at the A1 - A2 stages at all. Slower “reading while listening” is the better strategy here so that learners have more time to process and look up words.

4 Likes
13

Two aspects are important here:

  1. Our brains need some time to get used to the fast pace of UWL.

  2. Learners should trust the process (of high-volume reading and listening) and develop a certain tolerance for ambivalence / uncertainty.

If learners don’t do this, UWL won’t work for them.

4 Likes
14

My simple test is:
How important are these words in getting the gist of a sentence or paragraph?

Important → look them up
Not important → don’t do it

2 Likes