30K known words was my dream number! (Was)

Open Forum
41

I mark proper nouns as known. Shame on me. The thought behind that is that it is of some value to know that a word is a name. It usually is of very low value though and it differs from word to word really. If I´m learning French it is of good value to know that Germany is “Allemagne” and London is “Londres” and of some value to know that “François” is a masculine name and “Françoise” is a feminine name and that neither of these words means “French” as a language.

But it really isn´t of much use to your French to know that “John” is a masculine name if you already speak English, or to know the name of a place where the name is the same in French as in some other language you know (“Toronto” for example). It also isn´t of great use to see some names that are right out of languages you don´t know at all and simply realize they are names of people, for example: " The African Union is facing a backlash after terminating the appointment of Arikana Chihombori-Quao, its ambassador to the United States " - I´m going to get that Chihombori-Quao is a name and mark it as “known”, but I´m not going to remember the word or recognize it if I see it in it´s native language. The words that make up a name might even have a specific meaning in it´s native language, for all I know this name could mean “brave-runner” or “honest-merchant”, which I wouldn´t know and then again the words don´t belong to the language I´m learning anyway.

Optimally one should really differentiate between proper nouns like I´ve mentioned in the first paragraph and the ones like in the second paragraph. Mark most or all of the first kind as known and none of the others. It´s just too much of a bother to me. It would slow me down and also change the way I´ve been doing to so far. It does skew my word count, but in the end the word count is a flawed measure no matter what, as others have pointed out already. I see it as something that correlates with how many words I know and how much and diverse reading I´ve done, rather than directly measuring any of these things. I also see it as a measure of setting goals, which can admittedly get out of hand when you focus on “known words” and ignore listening, speaking and writing.

42

Does the way people use LingQ change at all when they get into higher numbers? Most of the new words will be low-frequency ones, won’t they? So at some point it might be more useful to pay attention to increasing the active vocabulary in some way than to getting more and more words into the passive vocabulary. I saw a youtube video (not related to lingq) on this a while ago.

43

I’m sorry, but I’m just gonna have to disagree with this, statement of “No fluency with 30K words,” just based on personal experiences accumulated over studying different languages and living in different countries.

First off, of course this will depend on the language. I see you’re studying Czech, and yeah, I’m sure that’s different from English or French. I don’t doubt you’ll need more words in a slavic language.

I’m basing my claim on two distinct data points from personal experience:

  1. My level of reading comprehension in French, Spanish, and German at 30K known words marked on LingQ, to me feels roughly equal to:
  2. My level of reading comprehension after moving to the US and speaking fairly fluent English in regular conversations after a few months of being here.

As I advance with different languages, I often see parallels with hitting different milestones, and the parallel of the 30K reading comprehension seems very consistent to me with these languages, namely that around 30K is when unassisted reading of regular paper book is possible, albeit not completely comfortable yet. Back in the day, we didn’t have LingQ or Kindle, so paper books were the only thing I could read and I remember very clearly when I’ve reached that same level being able really process a book – a felling I equate to about the 30K benchmark.

Prior to coming here, I have studied English in high-school, and my abilities were roughly at a level of someone completing both Assimil books in French with a fair amount of speaking practice – another parallel.

IF YOU WANNA PROVE ME WRONG, here is the experiment I’d recommend you do:

  1. Have a person study French, German, or Spanish using Assmil, book 1 and 2. (Roughly 7500 unique words including proper nouns.) Then:
  2. Have this person move to a country of said TL. and begin conversing on a daily basis.
  3. At the same time, have this person read and listen to books on LingQ and mark words on a daily basis.

My hypothesis is that this person will hit similar milestones as I have and will feel themselves conversationally fluent before hitting the 30K known words mark on LingQ and will begin to move onto paper books when they hit the Advance 2 level here, which is 32-34K depending on language.

And again, this will probably not be the case with a slavic language, but the OP was talking about German, and I’m confident that this experiment would prove me right in Germany.

44

Well, there are levels of fluency. I think one could probably get to 30K, leave LingQ and manage to start reading normal books with a low literate fluency, which would then increase through time. I can´t really say exactly when I felt fluently literate in the languages I´ve passed 30K in, because it wouldn´t really count. That´s because I knew quite a bit or a lot of them already or knew other similar languages. I feel I had a low level fluency in French at about 20-30K, ok fluency at 30-40 and almost complete fluency beyond 40K. But I could already fluently read simple books like Little Nicholas in French before I started LingQ.

45

In my above post, I mentioned being away from things for a while. That was also why I referred to Moses in the present tense… I just learned today, after starting to catch up on Master Steve’s videos, that Moses has recently “moved on.”

He was such a wonderful linguist. He loved languages, their study, and most of all, using them to connect to so many people–and not just his interlocutors, but all his followers and subscribers that he inspired.

T cannot recall who originally said it, but there is an apocryphal saying, sometimes wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, that runs “The two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” Whether he knew it or not, for 20 years Moses was doing what he was meant to do, and sharing it with us. As he and I are the same age, it is a truth that makes me admire him all the more.

46

I’m not sure if you saw my comment above, where I discuss this more at length (and t.harangi with practical experience). You are correct in principle, in that you are describing exactly why our “passive” vocabulary needs to be higher than our “active” vocabulary, but are totally off on the scale and application.

30,000 of passive, “known words” that you can understand is about the threshold for Romance languages and German where you can indeed understand the native speaker of the foreign langue. It will be higher for Slavic languages and lower (say 15,000 words) for English. Your active vocabulary that you use in conversations will be much lower.

It is called “potential fluency” because, although you’ll be able to understand the other person, you need to word on your half of the conversation and covert some of that 30K to active vocabulary you know how to use.

47

I see your points, rokkvi, but for the sake of clarity, I usually don’t like to use the word “fluency” when it comes to reading – though I understand the need to relate it somehow to reading ability and ease of comprehension, so I usually refer to that as assisted vs. unassisted reading.

To me, fluency has always been a term applied to conversational speaking ability and in my responses this is what I mean by it.

I believe conversational fluency is possible with 30K known words, as well as reading of paper books – though that may be a bit more sluggish. I started reading paper books in French at 30K and it wasn’t supper smooth, but it was doable. I’m about to hit 30K words in Spanish, and I’ve been testing myself with reading more on Kindle with minimal lookups (contemporary fiction by a Spanish author) and I’m feeling I could definitely make the jump if I had to.

But yes, for truly unassisted, comfortable reading, my French 40K + words feel a lot better than 30K. But if you took my LingQ and Kindle away at 30K, with any of these languages, I think I would do petty good with paper.

48

Yes it´s not that easy to define what the bar for “fluency” is for reading, it isn´t really easy to define it for conversing either and these two are far from being the same thing.

49

I think Steve estimated it at 10% at one time.

50

To contribute to the collective wisdom here…

I like the term “assisted vs. unassisted reading” and think I’ll use it from now on. I’ve never used “fluency” for anything another than easy, flowing back and forth conversation between two peers

In response to a question I once put to Master Steve regarding what I would now call “unassisted reading,” he replied that it all how do with “how much uncertainty you are comfortable with.” He is a lot more tolerant of it that I am. When I was about 30K or so in Spanish, I could comfortably read a nonfiction book I had purchased years before and would periodically test myself to see how well I did. At 30ishK or little less I went through it no problem, with only a little not understood, but fiction was a more challenging. It tried reading La Reina del Sur and might have gotten through it, but it was too much for. Another person, like a Steve or tharangi, would have been fine.

I remember asking when I could go “LingQless” and people suggesting around 40-45K (I think it was Francisco) would be a more realistic known word count for fiction books being more comfortable unassisted. Once of things that got me there was Francisco’s suggestion that I import some of the novels I was thinking of reading. As promised my word count, which was slowing, did indeed “skyrocket” as he said and I was much better able to tackle lingqless novel reading after that. I’ve yet to actually try it, becuase I want to do all my reading in LingQ to preserve the stats, but I read teh first two chapters of La Sombra del Viento and any that wasn’t understood didnt’ really hold me back.

51

The problem with proper nouns is that when you reach the upper 20K and above word count, these nouns become an increasingly higher percentage of “new words” you encounter, since you have already likely have learned the most common 20K + words in a given language.

Let’s say you read a series like the James Bond books – the author will likely use similar vocab throughout and each book will have less and less unknown words in it, BUT each book will take place in different countries with different cities, different names, etc. so those nouns will continue to be “new and unknown” despite the rest of the words being more and more familiar.

I’m reading a Norwegian book in French right now. A lot of names and streets in Norwegian would be only blue words I would have in it. If I then read a Polish book in French, and if proper nouns are the only blue words in it? I think after a lot of reading, these words marked as “known,” can dilute your word count by more than 10%.

52

Since the creation of the Netflix import feature, I have been importing all of the shows and movies I’ve watched there over the years. Many thousands of blue/new words to clear and then either lingq, add to known, or ignore.

I started doing this when I was well north of 30K words and it seems that I am adding words right to “known,” lingqing less, and using the ignore button A LOT more.

53

I hate to bust the bubble but 100K is closer to being fluent. 50K in the target areas that you enjoy. As a teacher I need about 20K words for talking with parents, students, and teachers in Mexico about education in general. Currently, I have about 5k words for education, but I need a lot more for my content area. I enjoy swimming, hiking, and mountain bike riding, camping, and boating. For these six areas I need 15K because there is a lot of cross over of words. I also garden and cook a lot and that requires about 5k worth of words. For each content area you will need about 10K words. Now those words also include, past, present, and future. biked, biking, bike
Don’t focus on the word count, just focus on what you want and need to communicate for your own success.

54

Yes, it is more than possible most writes use the same 1,000 words some a little more. And when I am talking about word most of the words are nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs. If the novel is in the target area that you have been studying or are familiar with you will be just fine.

55

I’m not sure I would need LingQ any more after reaching such high levels. Or maybe I would change topics so that there’s more new vocabulary to learn. I wouldn’t import many books from the same author, unless it’s Shakespeare or some other with a rich vocabulary.

56

1000 words is the vocabulary of a 4 year old not the one of a literary writer. This is low level A2 vocabulary.

57

here’s an article on the subject of English vocabulary: https://www.lextutor.ca/cover/papers/nation_2006.pdf

“2,000 provides coverage of 87.83%, 4,000 plus proper nouns – 94.8%, 9,000 plus proper nouns – 98.24%, proper nouns 1.53%. A vocabulary of 8,000 to 9,000 words is needed to read a novel, and even then, 1 word in 50 will be unfamiliar. A few of these will be repeated topic words, but most will occur only once or twice.”

I think it talks about word families, not unique words, so I’m not sure how it translates to the LingQ known words count. Those are averages over five novels used in the study. They should be compared with the numbers of unique words in the same novels.

58

At about 1,000 words a person can read in a second language if they a highly fluent (Masters Degree or extremely well read) in their first language. Excluding articles such as as, is, are, he, she, they and so forth.

Again when I am referring to words I am counting words that are the focus of a novel. Most writers do not write at a high literary level. And most people do not read at a high literary level.

I teach English as a Second Language and my students can read English at about a 3rd grade level within 6 months. It takes them about 2 years to read collections such as The Hunger Games, The City of Ember, and Divergent. They have instruction for 2 hours a day plus additional homework. Books are best understood if there is a series of books so that a learner becomes invested in the characters.

The majority of my students are from Mexico. The second language must have a similar base vocabulary and include a large amount of cognates (cognates are also not included in the 1,000 word count).

59

I hope everyone here is aware of how talking about the known words count in LingQ is not the same as your actual known word count or what linguists talk about when they talk about known words. I really prefer to say “word forms” when I´m talking about my LingQ stats to people not familiar with LingQ, cause that´s what the known words in LingQ are. Every form you know of every word counts in that stat.

60

I think the OP’s question at the end is what this is all about: “Is [30K words] fluent enough for you guys?”

The collective experience of LingQ users who have reached that level seems to be yes, it’s good enough for potential fluency. However, the consenus on LingQ and elsewhere is that “fluency” isn’t enough for certain professional applications in the foreign country where the language is spoken. I would think that a teacher working in that professional environment might be one of those instances where one need not only be fluent, but also very advanced and mistakes wouldn’t be tolerated. In such instances, a “near native” like proficiency is probably called for, but this is the exception, not the rule.

Out curiosity, where did you come up with your numbers? I’m interested in both the ones you say you have and that you will need.