Elenia wrote:I read mostly print books, and I am lazy, so for my own input challenge I tend to count lines per page, but only for pages that aren't full - for example, at the start and end of chapters. If there is a page break within a chapter, I still count it as a full page, but if it is on the first or last page of a chapter, I will skip it. I've found that 'normal' lines per page in the books I have is about 32, but I've read a book with as little as 25 and as much as 36. I don't really care much for total accuracy. I see the numbers I've set as minimum targets. I don't count rereads for my personal input challenge, and I doubt I'll count single page rereads for the SC, although if I reread an entire book, I'd count it. I also don't count any of the other reading I do. I think I can afford a little leeway because of that - I've done a good few thousand extra words of reading in Lingq and Readlang that will probably never get counted.
I'm also fairly strict with audio, mostly because I'm too lazy to think of the time I actually spent listening to the TL. I also can't be bothered to tot up all of my previous listening, which is why my personal input challenge will only count audiobooks. I know where I stand with them!
I'm in two minds about accuracy: one the one hand, it's impossible to be totally accurate about a lot of input. On the other hand, a nerdish part of me is fascinated by the numbers, and in terms of target-language, I feel the number of words one is exposed to, passively or even better actively, is important. And while it's not normally all that easy to count words precisely, e-books do happen to lend themselves to doing that, so I thought I might as well. I will also be able to work out a words-per-minute equivalent for the audiobook for Odinsbarn, since I have it, and can then use it to estimate the number of words listened to in other audiobooks (for which I don't also have the e-book), and by extension, the number of words read in the real-book equivalent.
Like you though, I have tended to err on the side of under-reporting or under-estimating in my personal recording, and would take the same approach in the SC, e.g. calculate pages from 300 w/p rather than 250.
One thing I am fairly sure about is that the typical words per minute of an audiobook is quite different to that of a typical audio podcast, at least of the type I listen to which are typically from radio stations. I saw a research report somewhere into typical words per minute of various national radio stations in different countries. Some of them were hitting truly astonishing speeds. I think I mentioned it on the forum somewhere. Probably Spanish was the fastest, but none of them was exactly slow, even what you might think of as the more restrained ones, such as the Germanic languages.
Edit: this might have been it.
http://prosodia.upf.edu/home/arxiu/publ ... letins.pdfMemory played tricks as usual, since the only "Germanic" language considered was English. I'd think German would be similar. I haven't listened to enough Scandinavian yet to make a comparison (or more precisely, I still can't reliably hear beginnings and endings of words yet in any Scandinavian language to make a sensible judgement). My guess is that it would be close in speed to English than Spanish.
[
EDIT: 04.05.16: As you will see in the edited posting previous to this one, I have tidied up my chapter listings, and added an approximate page-count based on the (arbitrary) value of 300 words per page].
They had read the first 200 pages an odd chapter here and there, and then got fed up and left it...then come back months later and finished it in 2 weeks. Most reviews give it 5 stars though.
), I split the text version of the ebook into its constituent chapters, and counted the words in each chapter, according to the Unix/Linux "wc" command. The results are below. [EDIT 04.05.16 I have tided this up a bit now - see further below]:
