Are the Finnish word count goals too optimistic/low?

[Dominic_Olofsson-Tuisku]

I remember seeing this post on a forum where it said that the word counts for the different levels at Finnish were at the same levels of the Germanic languages, and I wonder, how realistic is this?

Hungarian is much higher, around

Which one is more realistic or are the grammatical differences that extreme?

[dominic_deboer]

Can you send the link to the post? I would love to see the table.

[Dominic_Olofsson-Tuisku]

Here you go fellow Dominic! If you scroll down some of the, then, newer languages are added too.

Recent Updates to Known Word Thresholds

Unofficial Known Word Thresholds for most languages in LingQ: Green figures: Confirmed Black figures: Extrapolated Comments: Russian: Somewhat smaller distance from Adv 1 to Adv 2 in % (compared to other languages) Bulgarian: Beg 1 appears too low, relatively to the other threasholds Indonesian, Cantonese and Malay: Distances between levels (in %) are somewhat smaller for the lower levels, compared to other languages. Apparently these languages use the middle category of the ‘old System’ Al…

[roosterburton]

The word count for Finnish seems quite nonsensical… It was likely placed with the Germanic languages by mistake.
If you’ve studied Finnish for a while you’ll know that each base word is morphed by 15 cases + extra prefixes/suffixes. Your base word is now 20 unique words, all meaning slightly different things. Some other challenges that affect the word count are combination words, regional accents and the spoken language.

At close to 200k LingQed words I still have no trouble finding new ones from general content.

[B.Oliver]

It seems like the LingQ team had assigned Finnish the default levels due to lack of information.

The LingQ Team had been looking at the number of unique words in some of the basic courses and extrapolated from there. For Finnish, there doesn’t seem to be a large number of Mini Stories (and none of the other courses basic courses like ‘Who is she’…)

[B.Oliver]

The 14 Finnish Mini Stories show 648 unique words.
The same English Mini Stories show 428 unique words.
Based on this information we can extrapolate the goals and end up roughly where Romanian is currently:

Beginner 1: 760
Beginner 2: 2280
Intermediate 1: 9120
Intermediate 2: 18240
Advanced 1: 31540
Advanced 2: 45980

This is only a very rough estimate for various reasons (extraplation based on rather limited data; Translations in different languages might not be completely equivalent; Beginner Texts may not reflect higher levels that well …). So it may very well be possible that the appropriate levels should differ significantly.

Some expert judgement could certainly help (considering the many cases, prefixes/suffixes etc. in Finnish) → e.g. an educated guess of some other languages where Finnish should have roughly similar / higher / lower word count goals.