Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve begun to suspect that the Words of Reading statistic is over-counting the words I’ve read each day. For example, Lesson Statistics state that I have read this lesson 1.3x but I have only read it once:
I should note that I reloaded the page and closed and opened the lesson. I’m guessing those actions count whatever words are on the screen?
Upon completion of today’s readings, LingQ claimed I had read 3425 words. When I converted the ebook to text and pasted into Word it indicates only 2121 words. It over-counted by 1304 words.
I was so proud that I had read over 125,000 words over the last couple of months, but that’s probably wrong too. Ugh.
Unless you are sitting there refreshing your lessons, your 125k is probably a good estimate.
from what i can tell, it counts when you change pages, when you create a lingq or click on an existing lingq. So if you do an action on the page it updates the counter.
Maybe you are back tracking and clicking around that is adding to your word count?
This is an issue I have reported several times before. Not only does it mess with your long-term statistics, it also gives you more “coins” (I use them to estimate the amount of work I want to do per session).
As best as I can tell, the entire screen’s worth of words is counted at some irregular interval, such that just leaving the screen open with 12 words on it, eventually you’ll have some multiple of 12.
(It only seems to happen in the browser. Disabling two-column view may limit the effect somewhat but I haven’t found it to help reliably.)
Thanks all. Today I tested again. I read the first 4 chapters of a book. LingQ show 4332 read, actual words in those 4 chapters is 3203 words (according to Word).
One variable is that the reader crashed twice and I had to go back to the main menu. On one occasion the lesson resumed at the prior location. On the other occasion, I had to leaf through a few pages (maybe that got picked up?). Otherwise, I did not refresh the page, did not close and reopen the lesson, and did not page back and forth, and did not check statistics while reading.
this is a question i have always had with lingQ. Always wondered what counts as a read word because sometimes you will lose your place and you need to scroll
Sometime when I resume reading an ebook and listening to the audio book I forget where I was during my previous reading. So I listen to the audio and try to find to find where I was. I go one page up and one page down. When my real reading starts I have already something as 100 coins. It relates to the fact we cannot indicate precisely where we have stopped previous reading.
Only hope is that the word counting is false statistically always in the same way. Probably the shorter the text you read the more important the error. So if it is false always in the same manner, at least it’s comparable between weeks and months although real value is “Unknown”. We can only say we may need to remove 30% or more from word read.
This might not be relevant to your question but I noticed that on the web app, it takes about a minute after moving to a new page for words read to be updated. I wonder if this was a choice taken by the developers so that quickly flipping through pages of a lesson didn’t add to words read.
Today I was much more diligent about not closing, not refreshing the page, and not checking stats until I was done with the lesson. The lesson didn’t crash today so I didn’t have to re-seek. The results are that I read 3934 words, LingQ thinks I read 4191 words, which is an overcount of 257 (roughly a full screen of text on my screen in double-column mode).
That’s a more reasonable margin of error. I’ll change up the test tomorrow. I have a hunch that checking the stats mid-lesson may be a factor.
I’ve been tracking my reading this month manually while using LingQ (using a plaintext text editor to perform word counts on each day’s readings). I have continued with my normal usage patterns (combination of Chrome and Firefox in two-column mode on desktop, and mobile app. Close out of the lesson in between sessions when I read twice a day, etc).
My average over-count is about 20%. So, I don’t think LingQ is that far off. I will factor the results of this experiment into my reading targets; goal 1M read words, so I will target 1.2M words in LingQ statistics.
