Screen Time

 

At the beginning of each week, my new phone (the one I bought back in March) keeps presenting me with statistics of my "screen time" for the previous week. I've not yet bothered to figure out if there is a way to turn off these reports, even though that thought does pop up in my head every week too. It's also a weekly reminder of the famous quote about lies and statistics... You know: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statitstics..." (Often ascribed to Mark Twain, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was really someone else who said it before him.) 

To return to my phone statistics, they are all lies as all they might show is how much I've been checking my phone screen. It obviously has no idea that I also own a tablet, a laptop, and a TV - which I look at a lot more. Moreover, the phone doesn't even tell the truth about how much I use the phone, because it obviously also does not count all the hours that I spend listening to audio books from it (with the screen black). 

Which all just makes me wonder why they bother about these "digital health" statistics at all. Because I'm pretty sure that even most kids probably usually have access to more screens than their own phone during the week...

Ah well. Just a reflection towards the end of another hot summer day that I've spent mostly indoors with various screens, between turns to the laundry room...

PS. I also haven't got a clue where the phone statistics go once I've seen them; which is why I can't include a picture of them. Instead, I give you a photo of a 'dog rose' from the cemetery. (More worth staring at for a while than the statistics, anyway...)

 

Statistics

 Most of you (dear readers) are probably familiar with a quote often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain (who in turn wrongly attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli - who according to the omniscient Wikipedia doesn't deserve the credit either):

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Whoever said it first, this still tends to be repeated a lot, and it came to mind for me once again when I looked at some of my own statistics from 2020.

 

BOOKS & AUDIO BOOKS

On my computer, I keep a database list of books I've read, going back to 2002. Usually at the end of a year it tells me that I've been reading about one book per week (including printed books, e-books and audio books). That was also my conclusion when printing out my list for 2020: 51 titles.

However,  I also received some statistics from Audible, which is where I keep most of my audio books. According to them, I listened to 58 titles (for a total of 703 hours). 

As on my own book list I've only marked 22 titles as Audible books, their statistics surprised me. I know there are some titles I've listened to that I did not enter on my own list as they were lectures or drama rather than books. There are are also some books I've listened to partly, but have not finished (so also did not get added to my own list). The total number of hours spent listening may perhaps be right, considering all the times I've fallen asleep listening and have had to rewind and re-listen. (I usually set a sleep timer, but it happens that I miss that, and some books have been talking away all through the night...)  But that I should have listened to as many as 58 different titles in one year still seems very unlikely (or a statistic lie!), however I count.

Ah well - never mind... I'm just curious about how they're counting!

The official 2020 Postcrossing statistics are probably more correct:

However, those statistics do not include all the postcards exchanged with friends... 

 

 

 Then there is Duolingo. They sent me their figures already back in October, claiming that...

and

Sounds impressive, doesn't it? (counting minutes and words...) They also claim I earned 23560 "XP" (points) and 431 "crowns" (to do with finishing levels within courses) and advanced to Diamond League (whatever that means).  I am very sure that "studying" a word is not the same as memorizing it, though... (There's an awful lot of forgetting and repeating and wild guessing involved in trying to learn multiple languages...) 

Spanish is indeed the Duolingo language I still spend the most time on; and having started from zero some 4½ years ago, I have definitely made progress - but Spanish is also their main course, which they keep updating and adding new lessons to all the time. 

Finnish is my latest added course - it was introduced last summer (2020), still in beta version. There are a lot of people of Finnish origin living in Sweden, and back in my childhood they were the dominant group of labour immigrants. So nearly all my life I've always heard a lot of Finnish spoken (but never understood a word...) Even learning just a few words and a teeny tiny bit of the most basic grammar (very different from Swedish) feels like progress.

Well. At least when I ask myself what I do with my time, I have some statistics!

2019 Statistics

Reading

Since many years, I keep a list (database) on my computer of the books I read (or listen to, as I do much of my reading via audio books nowadays). I probably sometimes forget or leave out some (for example when listening again to old favourites in between other books). But usually I seem to end up with an average of about one book per week - and 2019 again seems to have been a pretty average reading year for me: 51 titles listed. (As for which ones also get mentioned here on my blog, that really depends more on my own inspiration to write, rather than on the book!) 

Languages

Every now and then I also try to sum up my language learning progress on Duolingo. This year, in mid December, I got an email from Duo himself (the little green owl, see image) to celebrate my achievements in 2019. Besides confirming that I'd been practicing every day (which I knew), it says that (over 351 days) I spent a total of 156 hours learning, completed 2340 lessons, and learned 8190 words (!)

As for the number of words, I suspect it depends on how you interpret the word "learn". Considering how many different languages I've been juggling, I don't doubt that from their point of view, they did throw 8190 new words at me... However, how many of those were words that I already knew, vs how many truly new ones stuck in my memory, is probably a different story. I also find the number of lessons surprisingly high, compared to the number of hours. But it may have something to do with my having "tested out" of some lessons in some languages (German, French, Danish, Norwegian). But never mind: I think I can still safely say that I've kept making some progress...

The language I'm primarily working on is still Spanish (slowly but steadily...) I've also been trying to better my French, and update my German (after all, society has seen some changes since my school & university days). With lower ambitions, I've also been continuing with Dutch, Welsh, Turkish and Russian. Ranked in Duolingo points (XP), my list currently looks like this:

Spanish - 51987, German - 22455, French - 20690
Dutch - 19670, Welsh - 15545, Turkish - 15090
Russian - 13191, Danish - 8773, Norwegian -7111
Swahili - 1348, Latin - 918, Scottish Gaelic -157

The last three are recent courses that I added out of curiosity... Swahili because it's "different" but still uses our alphabet. Gaelic to see how it compares to Welsh. (Seem to differ more than I thought.) Latin because I took Latin for two years back in secondary school (nearly 50 years ago) - but usually don't talk about this (shh!), as someone might then get misled to believe I actually know it... The Duo take on it seems to be to treat it like any other [modern] language (rather than jumping straight in to old quotes and tons of grammar). I may give it a few more lessons, and see how it goes...