Nice. I just did 3 months of Korean, 1 hour a day and achieved 3500 words, but I plan to increase my time on LingQ with Korean by an hour or two a day. I have roughly six months before I go to Korea for a month also. I do plan to get a tutor and do at home immersion the last 3 months before I go. I assume I will be close to, if not over 20k by then. And I will be using LingQ when I am there also.
I imagine it is also less than Korean: Korean seem to have twice as many verb endings and particles…
I recently hit 10,000 words in Spanish and it was not the biggest epiphany point, but I do think it was a noticeable change. But, this may have been caused by plain motivation (which is my theory for a lot of these 20k, 40k, 50k goals). I think that when we hit one of these goals, it does make us subconsciously better at understanding because we BELIEVE that we are much better, even if it is basically the same as 9800 words. We see that big number and it motivates us even more to improve.
I am taking a little break from Spanish, but hopefully when I come back I’ll get to that 20,000 word mark and reach that actual epiphany point everyone talks about!
eh, sort of, most of it is just guesswork on our part. It would be more beneficial to hear from more people who an say they have reached an epiphany point like the OP.
The only real epiphany points I noticed (or ones that I can recall) were in my first foreign language: French
First one was around 3000-3500 words. Everything clicked, and reading became a ton easier. Next one was at around 9000 words. I started being able to understand more complex words, and word stems to where I could add to my known words a lot. At 12000 words, listening seemed to really improve and things were a lot clearer. And the last one I had was at 18000ish. I felt as if I didn’t need to use LingQ anymore, and I could read without the need of a dictionary almost anything I came across, as in my native language.
After the last point, I just dabbled some on LingQ in the language and ended up adding words. It got more so to the point in LingQ where there was no content of interest for me, and at that point in time, I didn’t bother to import anything. If I ever went back to mass reading French again, I would most definitely add a ton more words due to importing.
Epiphany moments are subjective. I don’t recall but maybe one in Spanish, and that was around 6000 words. I started to be able to read and listen with no problem. Dabbled after that.
I had one in Korean already, which was kind of surprising. It was around 1500 words. Basic sentences and basic grammar just made a whole lot more sense. I’m still working on Korean, and plan to for atleast another year and will be updating progress every couple months on the forums.
Would anyone care to comment on Mandarin? I feel I’m making good progress but still far from that level of comprehension, Thanks!
I think the Lingq avatar levels are pretty accurate. Getting to “Advanced 2” seems to be a pretty good judge of where you can understand most things. Slavic languages and Korean are about 40,000, I’m pretty sure Japanese and Mandarin are 25,000. It will absolutely be much less than russian or korean since mandarin doesn’t have any verb conjugations or declensions. I would bet it’s actually much less since grammar is dictated by word order not word endings.
I’m no Chinese expert, but it looks to me like part of the difficulty is the cultural one: They Chinese dialects all seem to have endless numbers of idiomatic, historical, non literal expressions that can confuse non natives. My friend learning Cantonese said this keeps on giving her trouble.
Maybe some Chinese students can comment?
that study discusses all of that for a few pages. in the end, i’d like to be b2-c1 in spanish before i begin my next language adventure,which will be german, mandarin, or japanese. maybe i’ll set my goal at 20,000 words in Spanish on LingQ before I start the next language. i just know that i’ll be starting with LingQ, no matter what next language is.
You have a degree in French and in Spanish?
Yes.
Can you with 6000 words understand and read almost anything?
May I know after how many months of practice each epiphany point happened?
And do you think at which level I can be after practicing 3.5 hours a day on lingq?
Thank you
1st one was after about 4 to 5 months. Next 9000 words after about 7 months. After that point it seemed every couple months I had one. However this varies from person to person. Doing 3.5 hours a day for 6 months should be able to get you to a solid intermediate or upper, espcially if your native is somewhat close to English or whatever language youre learning
Thanks a lot man. Just one more question, you reached from 0 words to 9000 in 7 months?
Also how many hours a day you studied?
I cannot express my thanks to you really.
Yes I did. After the first epiphany moment things became a lot clearer and boosted my motivation. I used for around an hour a day for the first 5 months then i spent 2-3 weeks where i read and listened 6 hours a day and thats where i hit the first epiphany and everything became clear so After that for those 2 months I used LingQ 2-3 hours a day and reached 9000
I reached kind of a “comfortable” level in Japanese with somewhere around 8k-9k known words on LingQ. I stopped at 10k now and consider myself uhm… semi-fluent? If it helps, I can understand spoken Japanese just fine and reading is mostly not a problem either. (News would be a bit hard but that’s outside my interest)
P.S. Good job on the 18k
Thanks a lot. Your answers really helped me enormously.
Now I think you are able to read anything you come across in those languages and understand almost anything? Am I right?
Yes. It’s very rare to find things I don’t understand, especially in those. The things that I would find that I wouldn’t understand would be things that I also probably don’t understand in my native language.
Ahh Thanks other JapaneseLearner!!
At “18k” (I think my known words are probably lower bc of verb conjugations and kanji/hiragana equivalents) I find that for me, the difficulty isn’t about not knowing specific vocabulary, but rather, when native speakers talk really fast or slurred (eg in TV shows or anime :P), it becomes hard for me to actually “catch” what they’re saying even though I may technically “know” the words they’re using.