Also, I've mentioned this before but: I truly do think Listening Reading Method is at least 75% as good for learning as it claims it is.
I've never had the stamina to do an entire book with it, but the one time I did 20 chapters of Listening Reading Method with Guardian (just steps 2-3 of chinese audio with English text, and Chinese audio with chinese text), I improved a significantly noticeable amount. That was 1 month of approximately 20 chapters x 40 minutes each to listen twice to each chapter. So 800 minutes, or a little over 13 hours. 13 hours of study is not that much study time in a month. But it drastically upped my vocabulary and reading/listening ability in that small time, and I'd say for anyone upper beginner/lower intermediate (A2-B1 ish) it would give a significant improvement to your abilities in a reasonably short time frame of study (10-20 hours short study time to see a significant improvement).
The L R Method suggests more study time, at like 40+ a novel and 200 hours in a short time period like 2 weeks. I've never been able to focus long enough to test out how well it works in that recommended study time. But I've tested L R Method in shorter bursts, and any time I did it 10 hours in a month or more I noticed a significant vocabulary boost, reading level boost, and noticed listening level brought up closer to my reading level.
It's the shortest "time investment" study method I've seen that works even somewhat as well as it claims to. It's only downside is it Does require you to focus the entire length of an audiobook chapter, and then do that 2+ times for each chapter. Which for me was the hardest part - I am not good at focusing for long unless I do other things at the same time like draw or move (which I can't do when reading/listening with my full attention).
And I've mentioned this before but like. If you've got Pleco (or some similar tool), for "english" you can just click the megaphone and have Pleco read aloud in chinese while giving a word by word translation. Then read the translation in one round and the chinese in another. Or even, the quickest laziest way to do this - open up the Chinese, paste that baby into Google translate, and use the resulting English text for ur translation part. And click the speaker for the Chinese part for ur audio. An audiobook is going to be wayyyy better in quality, but in a pinch machine audio does work (I used it and it still helped). And Pleco in particular will highlight each word as it speaks which helps keep you following along. So there's reading tools out there to do this in a very easy way with very little inconvenience or set up time, if you're lazy like me and won't do it if it takes too much work. (There's also SOME youtube and bilibili chinese audiobook postings with chinese subtitles, so you can use natural audio for the step of following along chinese text with chinese audio).














