I am more than aware that there are some very skilled linguists and natives, but I just noticed a profile that has uploaded 60,000 words a day. I can honestly say I can´t see the point of the function where you can just input words without having read anything through lingq? If it were limited to 5000 words a day or something somewhat feasible to read that would be great, because it has absolutely no qualitative significance if you can just dump tens of thousands of words without having read many through lingq. Or maybe put the words read and linqs made categories the more significant ones on the leader boards to incentivise actual learning. Having “known words” as the main criteria seems to be making people just make stuff up and not really use lingq as a learning tool. If I wanted I could just dump a few phone books in but I don´t think that has any significance on language learning?
It would be a good idea before it gets completely ridiculous to limit it in some way and encourage people to use lingq to read and not to add lists there is no evidence the person understands. My opinion - disincentivise list dumps and incentivise usage of linqs and words read. They should be limited and “earned” for example, read 10,000 words, gain 500 words to add through a list. It is just stupid at this point.
It’s been known for years that some LingQ users will just accumulate hundreds of thousands of known words on the platform without actually reading or listening at all. For example I have seen examples of people getting several thousand known words in an hour or so and users who gain several thousand known words across different languages every day, but hardly ever create a single “lingq” and/or actually have just about zero read words or hours listened.
There have been many discussions on this and nobody seems to quite know why these users do this. I did get one user like this deleted once, but that was a non-paying user. When the users are actually paying for being on LingQ - there are no rules that say they can’t do this and they get to stay. This user here is clearly just spamming in known words for example: Login - LingQ
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by “upload.”
I also often upload a ton of videos to my LingQ account in a single day, just to have a good supply for the next few months. Is that a crime?
I simply don’t understand this post. Just because I load a text, a video, or even a vocabulary list, the words it contains don’t automatically count as “known words” if they weren’t already known.
No you are using lingq in the way I think most people expect you to, because you´re actually reading and interacting with the content. There is a way to dump things into your known words list by just dragging and dropping. It means you have never interacted with it through lingq or generate a lesson.
There is the argument “But I have studied for years and lingq doesn´t reflect my knowledge etc”, true to a point, but not a serious argument as you can in a few months upload the books you´ve read and go through them just looking at the blue words and double checking.
I use wikipedia, dictionaries, etc, anything is fair game if you are actually using it and not just dragging and dropping wordlists you haven´t read. I actually read them and mark them myself so I can see which words I really do or don´t understand and make sure no junk gets in.
It is very hard to believe these are genuine learners because one user have over 100k words in 22 languages and another has uploaded about 90k words in one language in two days. It might be they genuinely know these words, great, so let them use Lingq to establish this because otherwise it looks quite a lot like nonsense.
But actually that’s the problem with LingQ. If you have a paid version and a free version, most people will use the free version where you have limited lingqs. And as any normal human being would do, they would read a text without creating lingqs and have a lot of words as known words though they’re not known. I would rather focus on read words (and delete manual inputting) if I were one of their programmers and that’s it. That inputting feature is simply unnecessary.
Also it’s somewhat of a psychological or self-worth problem, because why do people care about their egos so much? Like don’t they have a life? Some coins on the internet or a digital high known words score is not going to bring you eternal happiness.
But why would anyone do something like that? It would be completely pointless. Just moving the words to the “known words” list doesn’t make them known to the person doing it.
Yes which is why it waters down the known words charts because they probably don´t know them - there is an off chance they do but I think it is just people who aren´t very realistic.
I think they just don´t understand the point of lingq or or posing, I just don´t see why a genuine language learner would do this. I don´t think you understand what I am saying, they are just copying and pasting words or something (might not be even the target language) and won´t even see the definitions/translations. It is like printing your own money.
Yes, if this person is truly so competent in languages we should be learning from them, but I asked them what their method is and got nothing back. I would love to hear them speaking these languages.
I don’t want to stoke the fire here, but for sure there are some users here, who use the LingQ program for other reasons. [I think, I wrote about it somewhere else a while back.] I actually can think of a few ways to use LingQ as a research data base regarding frenquency lists, user behavior regarding the top suggested translation or other linguistic endeavors. Or they could use the extracted data to write books or to create a language learning app or a dictionary (where you upoad all 100.000 words that you already collected into lingQ and check which words are still missing) or to teach a translation tool… And I think, that these users don’t really care about any challenges or rankings.
With that discription I don’t speak about the users, who actually join a challenge and just want to best anyone else by autocompleting 100 lessons a day - these also exist. Trolls exist everywhere…
And I want to share, that I myself created an absurd amount of reading coins a few weeks ago, just by going through each of my more than 500 lessons in just two days, because I wanted to change the format of direct speech in all of my published lessons. I remembered later, that I participated in a challenge and as a result left that one, but I guess that my challenge competitors were not happy with me for a few days, seeing my coin account skyrocket while my “known words” were stagnant at 15 known words - which is not the reality, because I officially passed the B2 exam in that language.
My advice would be to participate in the challenges with the goal to complete the challenge, not to best everyone else, because also genuine users use LingQ very differently. [And it is nothing new, that there are genuine users, who don’t have a clue or don’t care about coins and levels, because they just want to read the offered material.]
I don’t think, that I have to be better than everyone else. But I could try to compete with myself each month.
It is absolutely ok to upload massive amounts of material onto LingQ for your own learning. Nobody is critiquing what you have been doing if that’s what you’ve been doing. Good on you for being active and keeping at it.
What is being talked about here is just uploading loads of known words. People do it either by just uploading huge CSV files of words and their translations or just paging through texts without reading them and marking every word as known.
Is this horrible? Maybe not so much, since you can still use LingQ to study languages and improve, which should be the most important part. It is bad for people who are participating in challenges in a competitive way, since you can’t really compete against completely fake “learning” of this sort. It is also bad for people who have a bit of an ego thing in where they rank in terms of most known words of all time (I might be a bit of a guilty party there). It could also be a bit bad for the egos of LingQ super-users who have actually achieved several hundred thousand known words who could get accused of having used the same sorts of methods (I might be a slightly guilty party there as well). Lastly it is sort of bad in how some people may believe these users have actually achieved these numbers for real as it will give users unrealistic standards that are impossible to measure yourself against.
At the end of the day, these users are sort of weirdly surprising, perhaps weirdly pathetic even, but let’s not make them bother us too much and rather just focus on our own learning, be happy with how we have improved our ability in different languages and so on. .
Yes but the main thing it is doing is making it completely diluted. Realistically a very decent second language learner (C2 level) will know about 300k tokens (lingq´s words) in their target language especially if they know a subject well like science etc. I am making a CLIL style syllabus for myself in Swedish and importing this from Wikipedia for example, and there are countless words. I also use SAOL because at the end of the day all those words are legitimate words and it helps me see which words I already know through lingq and which I don´t. But what I wouldn´t do, as it looks like some are doing, is just directly add these words to a word list without checking them through Lingq.
I would love one of these people to come on and explain what they are doing if they have a legitimate method as I´d be very keen to learn, but the evidence and probablity suggests at best they are probably just spamming.
Do I think that the profile with a 20 languages over 100k has a certificate in all those languages above A2 level? I really doubt it. Could they pass a certificate in A2 in all those languages? I doubt they could either. But the reality is people will look at that and go “Oh, 100k words in lingq, that´s impressive because it is now an advanced learner” and then they´ll word farm and realise that is not very useful and they can´t even pass an A2 test.
To get good at a language at a solid level means being competent in things like literature for 7-15 year old´s. I doubt these people have that level and at best have a decent memory but that means very little for communicative ability. Maybe I´m wrong, but it seems they are just taking shortcuts and that doesn´t correlate with skill. If they were as good as they were representing, they could have done it legitimately by reading 2 million words in each language with their C1/C2 reading speed, and it wouldn´t have taken them very long (1 hour a day for a year, or if they really wanted they could just check the blue words before turning the page, still in my opinion legitimate).
I think disingenuous is the main issue because there is nothing to be learned from what they´re doing. “What is your technique to learn all these languages?” “Well, you just copy and paste a phone book and now you are competent in all these languages.” I don´t think it is so much about ego to be annoyed by it, I am sure you and I can easily admit there are people much more competent than we are, but it most likely isn´t them. It is like running a marathon and then someone just hops the fence and runs the last 100m.
Why do you even show interest for other people profile? Use this tool LingQ for learning a language, and do not compare yourself with others. When I import an ebook, there may be a lot of words, more than one can read in one day. So please do not suggest to limit in any way the import function.
Not the import function, the word list. It is not possible they are getting 60,000 words a day by importing ebooks. They are just dumping vocab into the word lists. Why is it important? Because people using lingq want to understand what they are aiming for. If there is a load of chaff at the top and they see the people at the top of the charts, so to speak, can´t even use the language, it implies lingq is just as meaningless as other platforms like duolingo. It is like saying to a football player “Don´t worry what the top football players are doing”. I have already used lingq to help learn multiple languages, so I don´t think that is a very pertinent comment you made. If there is a league at all, it is at least worth keeping it somewhat pruned but of course it ultimately doesn´t prove anyone´s true ability in a language, yet a large part of Lingq´s marketing is it offers a realistic record of language learning, and when people are copying and pasting 90k words a week into the words lists, it really waters down the validity and turns it into a Mcdojo where 10 year olds get black belts.
Well then this would mean that the developers require to invest their precious time in fixing the stats of the olympics. I would say ignore the Olympics. I ignore every kind of Olympics and I focus only on learning Russian. So far this was the source of my joy in understanding people on the street and in restaurants when they talks Russian. Olympics is based on nationalism and it creates a distancing between humans. But if you concentrate on learning, there is no cheating.