One German author I find really hard is WG Sebald. I have almost given up on his Die Ringe des Saturn.
The problem with the Words Read count is that it doesn’t reflect on what’s read and learned outside LingQ. The Known Words count is a somewhat better metric for this. For example, I have learned Portuguese without using LingQ much, but I can quickly gain a lot of known words when I start using LingQ more with Portuguese. The Known Words count will then give some estimate for my level in Portuguese compared to, for example. Spanish.
Speaking of “unreadable” novels in German… So if you German learners think that after reading all Harry Potter novels and watching 1000 episodes of “Die Tagesschau” in German, you need a “new” challenge to keep you busy for the next 5-10 years of your life, here it is: Sechs unlesbare Romane, die man trotzdem lesen muss - WELT [nice that Proust is also made a German-speaking author :-)]
I recently saw an article on this forum, or maybe it was a Steve-tube, where someone compared 60K Russion words to 10K English words (all lingq). Also, they said something about the language structure influencing the multiplication factor, like in Finnish you have 15 cases, which results in a larger multiplication factor. I think German was mentioned as well. I am wondering whether the language guru’s among us could make this systematic. In other words could lingq users have a table with approximate multiplier with English as reference? That would be really cool, and also some kind of a reference for learners. Just asking.
There is this table: Avatar Help
but the multiplication factor is much smaller there between English and Russian. I don’t know what the table is based on. Or how this would work with Finnish, which not only has 15 cases but also many verb forms (finite and non-finite) and suffixes that modify the meaning of nouns and verbs.
Thanks. That is indeed what I mean. The numbers appear to be low. And unfortunately beta’s are missing (Finnish). I really hope beta’s are to be included and the numbers to be reviewed by the relevant experts. Thanks for the pointer!
no problem. I suppose that when reading Russian or Finnish texts, you would encounter only a fraction of different possible forms for each noun or verb, so not all of those forms would be counted as Known Words, even if you would actually “know” most of them, if required. So the multiplier wouldn’t be that large after all, especially as the word count in English (or Dutch) would probably fail to include many phrasal verbs.
That would be the reason to use experts and not any automated tool. Although Finnish has quite some logic to it. Still, the table does need some revision. I hope the lingq-experts are reading too!
Apart from the obvious question if you mark all words known including proper names etc. there is also a matter if you unmark words once you forget them. It is not uncommon for me to read a text and actually descrease my known words as a result. The more strict you are with your statistics, the more they reflect your level.
Having said that, I prefer to estimate my level by the number of words read and listened to. In my opinion and experience, you may communicate with people knowing only 5k words, if they are really most common ones plus you have spent already hours on conversations. Novels are indeed most demanding in terms of vocabulary needed. But here also time spent on reading can facilitate intuitive understanding of sentences despite some words unknown. Like in our native languages we keep encountering unknown words, but our intuition is amazing.
I feel you, I’m 30k into German and I do not feel comfortable yet. Some languages need larger numbers I guess, I will stick to it until I do feel comfortable, no matter how long it takes.
Good luck with your learning, and let’s enjoy the road!
Lieber Mark,
auch die deutsche Sprache saugt immer mehr ausländische und auch englische Wörter auf.
Das Unwort des Jahres ist das eigentliche englische Wort “Lockdown”, das ich gefühlt in den Nachrichten 25 Male lese oder höre (mindestens). Also das Wort kennt weltweit jeder, auch dessen Bedeutung.
Aber wie gesagt, auch ich entdecke in der deutschen Zeitung immer wieder Wörter, deren Bedeutung mir nicht klar ist (technische Wörter, Wörter aus der Baubranche, oder aus der Computerbranche) und ich dann im Duden (Wörterbuch für den deutschen Sprachschatz) nachschaue und vielleicht drei Tage später wieder vergesse, weil ich es einfach nicht benötige.
Auch ich habe mir schon “Steve-Videos” angehört bzw. angesehen und mußte feststellen, dass die deutsche Sprache nicht seine stärkste Sprache ist und er da ziemlich nach Worten “ringen” muß.
Aber “sorry” ich will da keine Wertung vornehmen. In der englischen Sprache komme ich auch an meine Grenzen und brauche vielleicht noch ein paar Jahre um mich einigermaßen gut ausdrücken zu können.
Wie wäre es denn wenn wir uns gegenseitig ein wenig puschen und uns abwechselnd deutsch oder englisch unterhalten ? - Antwort erwünscht.
Ach so, 50 tausend bekannte deutsche Wörter decken meiner meinung nach bei weitem nicht alles ab. Denk daran, wir sind alle nur Menschen und bleiben begrenzt. -Nobody is perfekt ! Bye for now.
I don´t have the time to read all comments here so I am sorry if everything I say here has already been posted.
The number of known words means something very, very different for each language, for a lot of reasons. A language like German, due to more complex grammar, and even more so due to a tendency of having composite words, has more versions of many words than English for example, so you need a higher number for the same level of understanding. For example “ich, mich, mir, mein, meine, meiner, meinen, meines” vs “I, me, my, mine” and “car, door” vs “Auto, Tür, Autotür”. When Icelandic gets added, you can bet it´s going to be even more extreme with this than German, both with the increased number of word forms and perhaps even with composite words.
I think in most normal, Western European languages, you´d usually need more than 30K known words to be a fluent reader. Steve did say it was about 40K in some youtube video where, he, Mark and some LingQ users had a discussion. I agree with him on that and I´d estimate it to be somewhere between 40-50K known words.
Not all people mark known words in the same way. Some will be overconfident of now knowing a word and some will be less confident or just prefer to only mark words as known when they know them really, really well and are very unlikely to forget them. People also have different principles when they mark words as known. I mark everything as known except words from other languages (when I know they are at least). Some other people may try to not to mark composite words etc. as known, only the base form. I´d mark “words” like " don´t, you´d, l’eau, l’autoobile, s’appelle, t’me " as known for example, so for me the number to reach fluency would be higher than for someone who x-ed out words like that.
I can´t really tell you why people stop at a certain number, but it may just be that LingQ isn´t the only source they are using. They may find it enough to get to sub-fluency here and then find people to converse with and become fluent that way or just feel they have enough of a head start to just get into reading physical books.
I think I can count myself as a pretty successful polyglot and I like to get well above 30K (even with languages I know to some degree before starting with them here). I think I could have stopped at 30K or even 20K with Dutch and then jumped to other learning methods, since I was already fluent in a few related languages and had by then learned most of the most commonly used words - and what I´d learned with LingQ would have still served me well enough, but I like using LingQ, so I chose to keep at it.
You seem to only be discussing fluent literacy here, but I also really advise you to not ignore listening.
I’m just returngin to the forums after several months away so I haven’t read all comments in this thread, so some of this might be duplicative. See that t-harangi commented I skipped right to that and read it and, as I suspected, we are 100 percent in agreement on that as I do with the handful of other comments I’ve read.
When Master Steve has talked about “20-30,000 words” and “fluency,” he is talking about Romance languages. This is the likely threshold where learners can 1) UNDERSTAND most of what native speakers are TALKING about, especially to you in coversation or whatever topics you have read a lot about/are familar with; 2) reach “potential fluency” in that you can convert much of that 20-30k of passive vocabulary into active vocabulary; 3) really reach a breakhthrough/turning point where you have enough of the langauge in you to really improve your skills by using it, you can come back to it, not forget it, etc–if you are a little rusty at first.
Again, this is for Romance languages. In English it’s maybe 10-15K words. In Russian/Slavic languages, it’s 90-100K words (where Steve is/was). I think this is interesting to note becuase, although I haven’t watched as much of Steve’s channel in the past two years, I would say that Russian, and to a lesser extent Czech, Korean, and Ukranian are the last langues that Steve really studied to these serious levels (and potential) levels here on LingQ. Once he started getting into Greek, Arabic, Farsi, etc. he’s really just taking serious long “peeks” at the languages. He’s not going for “fluency” anymore with these languages. He will strunggle a lot when he speaks, and certainly not read unassisted. Rather, he’s exploring these languages, pursuing the interest, crossing them off the bucket list, etc. In other words, he’s dabbling a lot more, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that has to do with his viewers and customers. Not that the language man is under pressure to perform, but I think interacting with all of us, and that he’s confident he truly “knows” many languages, he can move around a lot. The most extreme version of this is Moses McCormick. If and when Steve does this, he treats language learning like a buffet, and like a tapas bar for Benny Lewis. For Moses, it’s like living off the samples at Costco. He speaks dozens of languages, but he’s not holding 2 hour conversations in Hmong or Tibetan.
What will happen when you get into the higher numbers is that you will need an ever greater amount of known words to close ever smaller gaps in your knowledge of the language. Climbing from 30k to 40k might have a huge effect. Going from 100k to 110k less so. So please dont plan your overall progress to be proportional to the number of known words. I have more than 96k known words in Czech which enables me to understand about 93-95% of most texts. But to close as much as possible of the remaining unknown 7-5% I will most likely have to double my known word count. So the last 5% is going to take the same amount of work and number of known words as the first 95% and of course you can never really arrive at an absolute 100% understanding of the language.
If you are assuming that 50k is going to be the optimal number of known words for fluency you are headed for a disappointment. The highest achiever in German on this platform has a known word count of 284069. More than 5 times the number that you envision. He is followed by several people with around 120k words.
I agree, because the law of “diminishing returns” and Pareto’s 80:20 principle apply here. In other words, striving for a (near-) native level of reading comprehension is probably not a good investment of our learning time.
For many languages, reading about 2 million words should be enough to reach a higher level of reading comprehension.
For Slavic languages, it might be 2-3 million words (I’m not sure).
If it is a good investment of your learning time depends solely on your own goals. If you have very diverse interests like Steve Kaufman than learning a bit of everything will enrich your life greatly. I, however, am a foreigner in the Czech Republic so getting as close to a native speaker is important to me. I have already accepted that I will spend the next years working on closing the remaining 5% even if that means sacrificing other interests.
I think the numbers are just motivational. It gives the beginners a goal that feels doable instead of overwhelming them immediately. These metrics don’t meant anything to me.
No you cannot be fluent with 30k words. You might find ways to express yourself understandably but you cannot control what the other person will answer. So even if you yourself might be able to express yourself with 30k words (which is already doubtful) you are not going to be able to understand the response of a native speaker, who uses a vocabulary 10 times as big.
I think we have all been in the situation where we have proudly constructed a meaningful sentence only to be responded to with an incomprehensible sequence of strange sounds.
To be fluent you don’t have to speak like a native speaker but you do have to understand them effortlessly. This cannot be done with 30k known words.
I agree.
Personally, I’ve given up on the idea of becoming a “hyperglot” with 10, 11, etc. languages under my belt.
Instead, I’m going to focus on a few languages (English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese) where I can reach the highest possible level, because that’s more in line with my personality and professional goals.
But, I’d like to add a few other L2s like Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Dutch, and Hebrew (at an intermediate level) to my core languages.
Unfortunately, life is short, and there’s simply too much to learn
