Lord, give me the strength to endure all this fun!

Here's a question to introduce you to today's topic. What kind of twisted mind would, on breaking into a shed and discovering a store of paint, decide to spray-paint his genitals black? I'll give you a clue: the hand-prints on the wall were only about a metre off the ground.

Seasoned parents amongst you will need no further help; of course, the answer is: a four year-old, three days into his summer holiday and already bored. We only found him when we were getting ready to go to the park. He was naked and covered in black paint from midriff-to knees, and from finger-nails up to his elbows. When questioned, he pointed to himself with considerable pride and answered: "I a-painted my willy!"

He was quickly rushed to the bathroom ("Don't touch ANYTHING!") and dumped in the bath. After a hasty conference about solvents we decided to use heavy-duty hand-cleaner. We instructed him to rub this all over the black bits, then, using a sponge (and on the more resilient parts, a pan-scourer) we scrubbed it off.

Under the black layer we found a blue layer. This enabled us to pin the authorship of the new blue shed mural on him. Not that we were in any real doubt about that one. The base layer appeared to be of beeswax furniture polish. Fortunately, this had prevented the paint from getting a really solid grip and the paint had all come off after the third bath.

James, by contrast, has been remarkably calm this far into the holiday. He has spend most of it sitting at his keyboard learning to play a succession of film scores. Admittedly, yesterday he said, apropos of nothing in this reality: "Don't speak to me like that, Veronica, or I'll mention your carrot! AHAHAHAHAH!" Still this is pretty mild by his standards. The worst destruction he has actually wreaked is to untidy his bedroom so comprehensively that neither he nor anyone else can get into it. He has been sleeping in a tent in the garden for the last three months, avoiding all plaintive pleas to tidy his room.

Emma has been playing a surreal selection of computer games. Her favourite is one where a group of hamsters are trying to launch one of their number into space. Whenever I protest at this waste of time (why spend your time staring at a computer screen when you could be.....er...writing up your blog?) she smugly points out that they are EDUCATIONAL computer games. She has in fact gone up two maths sets since she has started playing maths games. Well, that's all right then.

I can't wait until we go camping and the fun can begin in earnest! I may have to take some sedatives with me. Either I can take them or slip them in Robin's nutella sandwiches.

How many LingQs must a man create, before you call him Intermediate 2?

I love the statistics secion on my profile page. I love being able to watch my numbers going up every day, like the milometer of a car, to show me how far I have travelled on the road to language fluency. I believe that there is some magic number of LingQs created, or LingQs learned, or hours of listening, and when I reach it I will be able to speak perfect Russian.

But what is it? Steve Kaufman's answers to my questions are profound yet unspecific. Like reaching the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, he believes that I know it when I get to it.

Mark is more pragmatic. He points out that the statistics section on the profile page clearly shows your targets for each level. When you have reached your targets, you have reached the top of your level and are ready to move up to the next one. What's hard to understand about that?

Aren't your targets a bit too low? I ask him. I reached my targets for Intermediate 2 many months ago, but my abilities still don't match the description of an intermediate 2 speaker.

It seems to me that the problem of determining your targets at each level are, like all those tricky problems in my old physics textbooks, "left as an exercise for the reader". I can see why this should be the case, it depends on the student's personality and learning style, as well as the structure of the language they are learning and its similarity to their native language.

These then, are the numbers that I have come up with for me, a native English speaker with a logical mind and a visual memory, learning Russian. This is based on NO SCIENCE WHATSOEVER, but it might provoke someone else out there to work out their own estimates and then share them with the rest of us.

To get to Beginner 1:
Known words: 3000
LingQs created: 2000
LingQs learned: 1000
Hours of listening:  50
Words read:  4000
Hours of speaking: 0
Words written: 0

To get from Beginner 1 to Beginner 2  needs an additional:

Known words: 5000
LingQs created: 1000
LingQs learned: 1000
Hours of listening:  100
Words read:  50 000
Hours of speaking: 0
Words written: 0


To get from Beginner 2 to Intermediate 1  needs an additional:
Known words: 7000
LingQs created:  3000
LingQs learned: 2000
Hours of listening:  200
Words read:  150 000
Hours of speaking: 20
Words written:  0


To get from Intermediate 1 to Intermediate 2  needs an additional:
Known words: 10 000
LingQs created: 5 000
LingQs learned: 3 000
Hours of listening:  200
Words read:  300 000
Hours of speaking: 25
Words written: 6000

You can see from these figures that I am not a big fan of speaking before I feel good and ready, and that I am a keen reader.

I also figure that it takes me, on average, a year to progress a level. Obviously, if I were prepared to work full-time at it, progress would be a lot faster. This is as fast as I can go and still have a life outside of LingQ. Er. In theory, anyway.