Wednesday, 21 July 2010

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.

2 comments:

  1. Although I think I studied Chinese very well, I am still Beginner 1 because of my known words.
    What do you think of my Progress Snapshot?
    I must say that I like speaking Chinese.

    Known Words 3862 words
    LingQs Created 6981
    LingQs Learned 1966
    Hours of Listening 273.3 hours
    Words of Reading 319106 words
    Words of Writing 6054 words
    Hours of Speaking (including Japanese) 262.0 hours

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  2. Well, if I had to make a wild guess I would say: probably beginner 2. I'm basing that as much as anything on the amount of listening you have done.

    Obviously, with Chinese the amount of effort required to learn and read each "word" varies enormously, depending, for instance, on whether you already read Japanese.

    A better test would be to read the description of the competences you acquire at each level. The LingQ levels are based on those defined in the Common European Framework of References for Languages (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages).

    A brief summary might be as follows:
    Could you ask for a cup of tea with milk and sugar?
    Could you buy and pay for a pair of trousers?
    Could you ask the way to the station? Could you understand the answer?

    If so, you have probably reached beginner 2.

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