Daily Dose of English 140
Hitrate
Daily Dose of English 140
Intermediate
Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about hit rate. Hit rate. This is a word that you're probably not going to find in a dictionary. In fact, when I googled it, it came up with some things about economics and other things like that, business. Because it's a term that has been used before, but not really in the way that we've seen it. And in a way, like we, and I'm talking about we at Refold, that's the company that I work for, have sort of come up with this. It's not literally like we invented it from nothing, but it's, we have not been able to find anywhere else that really uses it. And so I wanna talk about it today. because your hit rate is a very simple goal calculation similar to a streak. A streak is the number of days in a row you've done something. I currently have a 1,080 day Anki streak. I've done Anki for over 1,000 days straight. Every single day I've studied Anki. On my Kindle app, I have a streak of 216 days in a row reading something every single day. And I have weeks in a row is 157. So those are some pretty big streaks. I've been doing those things every single day for many days. In the case of Anki over almost three years. But hit rate is a little bit different. Hit rate is the number of days that you've done that divided by the number of days in whatever you're calculating. We use six weeks, which is I think 42 days, right? So six times seven, yeah, 42. So 42 days. So if you've studied 42 days for the past 42 days, you have a 100% hit rate. If you've studied 21 days of the past 42 days, you have a 50% hit rate. If you studied, whatever, what is it, 40 days out of 42, that would be a 40 divided by 42, 95% hit rate. Right, so that's how you get your hit rate. You can change the divider number if you want it to be smaller or larger, but we use six weeks because that's, That's a good time frame, but we might change it because it is a very simple calculation. And the thing about hit rate is that it is much, much better than a streak, because streaks are this sort of weird thing where you don't get a streak by trying to get a streak. You get a streak by being consistent and having a good habit. You can kind of force a streak for like 30 days or something, or like really force it, but it's really, really hard to get a very large streak on purpose, if that makes any sense. It has to be something that is so ingrained into your life that it's an accident that you keep going, essentially. It's how I think about it. The example that I always use is brushing your teeth. You probably have, or hopefully, you have a streak of brushing your teeth for every single day for many years. Potentially you have like a day or two in there if you're like heavily traveling or something like that, but I still feel terrible if I don't brush my teeth. It feels just bad in my mouth. So I've brushed my teeth probably every single day for like a decade, for like 10 years. And I don't even think about it as a streak, right? Why would I? Of course I brush my teeth every day, right? Of course I breathe every day. Of course I do Anki every day, right? That's just a part of my routine. And that's the level of like habit you need to have a streak that goes on essentially forever. If you're really trying to get a streak, you can do that. You can absolutely have a, you can force yourself to get like a 30 day streak or whatever. But the problem is that with things that you wanna keep going with, which is usually what you do with a streak, is that as soon as you stop that streak, you're gonna stop doing it entirely, right? If your goal is to learn to play the piano, and so you say, I wanna do 30 days of piano in a row, you end up doing 30 days maybe, and then on day 31 you do nothing, day 32 you do nothing, and then you just keep doing nothing for a while, and you go, wait, why did I stop? And that is the golden thing of hit rate. You see it starting to go down. And so you go, oh, I had a 95% hit rate on my piano practice. It's now going down. Now it's 93. Now it's 90. I better keep going again so that it goes back up to 95, or whatever it is. And so you keep doing these things, because for a lot of these things, especially for language learning, you don't literally need to do it every single day, but you need to do it for most of the days, most of the time, over a very long period of time. If you speak a language that's relatively related to English, so something like Spanish or French or German or whatever, you're going to require at least 1,300 hours of time, good time with English, well-spent time with English, in order to become functionally fluent. If you speak a language that's very different like Japanese or Mandarin or Arabic, you're going to need something more like three or four thousand hours. Potentially even more because they're very different languages to become functionally fluent. And that you can't just force yourself to get to. You can't say, I'm going to do an hour a day for 4,000 days. I'm going to do an hour a day for three years. That's just, you're not going to force yourself to do that. What you have to do is focus on your current habits and what you're doing now and your hit rate, how many days you're successful. And then eventually you'll have, 80% hit rate, 90% hit rate, 95% hit rate over the course of a couple weeks. Then eventually you have a 100% hit rate for a couple weeks and then it will go down to 98%. You miss a single day. Then you go, oh shoot, I can do better and you get it up to 100%. And then you start to get this streak of having five, 10, 15, 20 days at 100% hit rate. And you just keep it up at 100% hit rate. And then eventually six months goes by and you've had 100% hit rate because you've created a very strong habit that is almost as ingrained in your routine as brushing your teeth. And that is why hit rate is a lot better. than streaks, because they can turn into streaks, but only, but not at the beginning, right? You can't start with a streak. I sort of think about it the same as like going to the gym in order to build muscle, for example. If you go to the gym with your goal to make your arms a certain size or whatever, let's say you wanna have your arms be 40 inches around, or not 40 inches, 40 centimeters, that would be, 40 inches is humongous. I mean, some people have that, but you know my point. You set a specific number. I want my arms to be that big. That you can't control. You cannot control your physiology. You can't control your body and how it builds a muscle. You can't control your genetics. Like what if you can't get your arms that big, right? What if you're a small person? What if you're really skinny? What you can control is your habits, your diet, what exercises you do, and those things. That's what's going to get you to that end goal of 40 centimeter arms. Um, but you can't get there without the habits and the stuff in place, if that makes sense. Right? So if your goal is, it's basically the same as saying if, if you're, if your goal is to become fluent in English, that is about as useful as saying my, I want to have a 1000 day streak. Instead, you should be saying, I wanna learn English every single day for at least 45 minutes or something like that. That is a much more actionable goal that you can work on every day. Every day that you wake up, you have the choice to do something in English. You do not have the choice to suddenly become fluent though. That is not something you control. A streak is a slightly better goal than that. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar, right? And so, focus on your hit rate instead, and that's going to get you a lot further in life. That's pretty much everything that I have to say about hit rates. Oh, the other thing that does come to mind is in other English, like in other conversations, a hit also is a contract to kill somebody. So if you watch a movie like John Wick or play a video game like Hitman, A hit is the amount of money or like the contract that somebody pays to kill another person. And don't do that, obviously, but it's a pretty common word. And so sometimes the word hit rate can sound like the amount of money that you charge to kill somebody. Don't do that. Don't kill people. That's bad. But I wanted just to let you know that there is a funny sort of other less, not very common version of what hit rate might mean. Uh, that's everything. So I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your afternoon or day or morning or, you know, whenever it is, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Um, and try to focus on your hit rate, but I'll see you again tomorrow for another day of the daily dose of English. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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