I like your solution. Tracking activity is probably a truer representation of work done. Master and Margarita is such a beautiful book, I’m motivated to learn how to read Russian in the future just so I could read the original text and other great Russian works of literature. LingQ should consider introducing better challenges, how about for each language we select 10 Classic works which are available on the library and we get a badge for reading all of them.
To continue with the fitness analogy, I went through a phase of wanting to become stronger at the bench press and I used to naively think increasing repetitions would carry over to an increase in strength in the bench press. ‘If I bench more I will be able to bench more’ basically. And in the beginning that was correct, for a complete beginner simply benching an empty bar more and more times will lead to an increase in strength. But with time, the increments of strength increase will reduce (diminishing returns) until the beginner will have become an intermediate in the movement. In order for the intermediate to continue to gain strength efficiently he must then increase the weight of the bar, which will lead to an increase in volume.
By volume I mean weight x repetitions. Increasing the weight of the bar allows the intermediate to be progressively overloaded, thus leading to further increases in strength.
Soooo, if we look at LingQ through a gym rat’s lens we can consider known words as repetitions and consider weight as the difficulty of the text. In the beginning stages of learning a language we will become more fluent (strong) simply by reading lists, lists of vegetables, colours, days, animals etc. But if we want to continue to gain fluency we would be wise to starting increasing the weight on our linguistic barbell by looking at some phrases, articles, poetry, literature.
Strength training continues to be rewarding for me because it has lead me to improve my understanding of diet, biology, discipline, programming and lots of other things.
You touch upon this too. Gaining insight into a foreign culture and acquiring the ability to communicate within it is what it’s really all about. It took me a long time to get to 60K known words in Dutch - nothing magical happened when I achieved this but it still felt cool!
If I had to make a greatest hits mixtape of my fondest memories of learning Dutch no LingQ challenge or avatar badge would make the cut. Feeling the depth of wisdom which Anne Frank managed to convey in her famous work at such a young age whilst learning the language stays with me.
I think the discussion here has been very interesting and insightful, much more so than if it had just been about which users had the highest word counts. So though I named the thread in a very silly manner, a lot of good discussion came from it. I don´t have a problem in some of the responses coming a bit off as “in your face” as I think it´s more important to have a meaningful discussion, where people are also allowed to express how they feel negative about what you post, rather than having a sort of “toxic positivity” culture where everyone who doesn´t just post compliments and “great job” comments with heart emoticons perhaps even gets flooded with more negative and harsh reaction than they had themselves in the first place, even if they made good points.
Some of the negative reactions were also obviously triggered by me stepping on some landmines so to speak, which I or some other users who were surprised by the reactions were not aware of, me not having been on LingQ long enough and not having read enough forum threads. I just hadn´t “gotten the memo” so to speak. All of that has been sorted I feel.
As for what it actually means to be successful/productive on LingQ, I think you have the enjoyment side of it, how much you learned yourself and how much you contributed. A really successful and productive LingQ user would for example be someone who was able to use LingQ as a springboard to become literally and conversationally fluent in a new language, contributed material to the site and constructive posts to the forum that helped others learn and of course enjoyed the ride.
I´m not sure whether I´m too worried about how good he is at languages. I´m sure he has some talent and passion for languages, whatever his exact level is or whether he prefers to perfect a few or dabble in many. I think he did add a lot of valid points and observations to this thread and that is what I´m most interested in. I agree with most of what he said, but not always to the same extent that he feels about some things.
You may well be right, he has good stats, spent lots of time and has a good attitude. But I think it would be very hard to know who is most successful unless you know quite a lot about what they have done outside of lingQ too. Like I´ve said before, I think the most successful you can be at learning a given language in LingQ is when you use it to help yourself reach fluency in all aspects of it. Unless you spend insane amounts of time (and as a result, money) in online chats with tutors, that´ll only happen when you take what you learned here outside of lingQ and into the real world.
True, I feel that I’m in a similar situation. I’m not exactly fluent in Spanish, French and German. However, I feel if I’d not rush things then I would probably be fluent by now.
There is no way for me to know where you´d be at if you had done certain things or even to know much about where you are at right now.
I´d generally suggest, if you want to become fluent in every sense of the word, to listen to everything you read, sometimes before and sometimes after you read it. Afterwards is generally better when you are less advanced, but you can also alternate between listening before or after, regardless of your level. When you are more advanced it´s usually better to listen first and then grab what you missed by reading afterwards. Then try to find people to talk to online or in the real world when you have reached a fairly high level on LingQ.
I have yet to become all-around fluent in any language I´ve studied on LingQ myself. That is ultimately (or a least potentially, depending on my time and how my situation develops) my goal for each language.
