Celebration/reflection on reaching half a million known words

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I just recently reached 500 000 known words in LingQ in all languages combined.

Take into account though that 1) Known words in LingQ are word forms, including different conjugations, declensions, compound words etc. 2) I mark true nouns as known, which is debatable 3) Some of these numbers are from reading languages I was already fluent in or even a native speaker.

The languages I was fluent in before starting to use LingQ are Icelandic, English, German, Swedish and Danish. The languages I learned in LingQ that I was not fluent in already were French, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, Italian and Polish. So far I got to advanced 2 in all of them except Polish, where I am at advanced 1.

I have used LingQ as a springboard to be able to speak fluent Norwegian and somewhere between conversational and sub-fluent French, Dutch and Spanish. I can not speak Italian because I will almost always think of Spanish or French words when trying to, but I can read it pretty easily. My Polish is very limited. I can hardly string together a sentence except maybe to ask to buy simple things. I can read simple texts fairly easily and I get some limited sense out of news I read.

My takeaways are mainly these: 1) I think becoming literate through reading with the automatic translations offered here and then following that up with listening, if you really put in the hours, is an excellent springboard into starting to converse and eventually becoming fluent in languages. 2) Because of the gamification of trying to achieve high numbers of known words, it’s easy to fall in to the trap of overemphasizing reading, at the cost of listening, writing and speaking. 3) It’s also easy to fall into the trap of trying to read too much material with new words instead of trying to repeat lessons to consolidate your understanding. Lots of words you can gain are international words that are the same or similar across languages and while they will make your word count go up, you won’t really be learning much by marking them as known. 4) I think reading material first with translations to increase your passive vocabulary and then listening to the same material to be able to catch the words in their spoken form is an excellent way to get a good passive vocabulary. 5) You absolutely still have to eventually take that step where you start working on output and interactions, really using the language, corresponding with people and especially conversing.

All in all. I have gained a lot from using LingQ, even though I have at times fallen into the trap of chasing the known words count too much. I have also at some points burned myself out. I think it’s important to know when to switch when that happens, maybe take a break from LingQ and watch some videos instead or just take short breaks from language learning in general.

I hope this helps you who are learning languages here on LingQ and elsewhere.

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how can you hardly string together a sentence in polish when you are advanced 1 :thinking:

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I am at level Advanced 1 in Polish in LingQ. That does not say much about what level one is at in real life. That just means I have read enough texts in LingQ to have been able to mark a certain number of words as known (I think it was 38-39K or something). This can theoretically be done without ever listening to the language, writing anything or trying to speak it. It is very unwise to try to ask which level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) the levels on LingQ correspond to, because they just don’t. Since I have almost zero practice actually speaking the language and way too little listening compared to reading, I am extremely limited when I try speaking it.

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I like to read a lot myself, but coming from someone like you with more experience in learning languages it seems that focusing too much solely on just reading wont have such a great carry over to listening comprehension and speaking as much as i would have thought. When i hear 40k known words that seems like a lot, what do consider as a known word and do you have for example a ratio you would recommend for reading, speaking, writing and listening?

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I don’t think my brain can just calculate a ratio for the different aspects (reading,writing,listening,speaking) that I think works best. If you can listen to everything you ever read on LingQ I think that would be a good rule of thumb. You are right in that it’s dangerous to overestimate how much reading ability will carry over to listening comprehension and especially your ability to converse. Reading is pretty passive and you control the pace. When you listen you don’t get to set the pace at all. When you converse you both have to understand someone else and actively answer them. It’s a whole new level of complexity.

I will usually just mark a word as known if I remember the meaning upon seeing it, unless I’m just seeing it again in the same lesson and remember the meaning because I looked it up a minute ago or so.

I usually follow reading up with listening on LingQ but sometimes I let the gap get too wide. I think I only had 6 hours of listening in French or something when I had already hit advanced 1 for example. Now, long after completing advanced 2 I have over 500 hrs of French listening on LingQ alone and have done plenty on youtube and elsewhere as well as having talked and corresponded a bunch in French, even guiding several tours in the language.

With Polish, it’s not that I necessarily think my current approach is optimal, it’s just what is available to me and what I have the energy for / what I am able to keep my focus on. I don’t have a bunch of Polish people to practice with, but I will try to listen now and then on LingQ and sometimes when I shop and there are Polish people there, I will ask for stuff in their language. Usually, when I have gotten to Advanced 2 in a language, I will feel some weird relief that it’s out of the way and then feel I have no excuse not to start listening more.

There is also this: Even someone like me can get burned out from learning languages and it has happened to me to different degrees quite a few times (the work I have done to get Icelandic into LingQ has probably contributed more to that than language learning itself though). Sometimes I will know that the best way for me to learn a language would be to find someone to engage with in conversations, but I’ll just not be able to get myself to do it because I feel I’m too tired and it will be too demanding.

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  1. Sincere congratulations!

  2. May I know when/how do you count a word as a know word? My criteria is:

  1. No clue at all

  2. I have read it before, I might deduce its meaning thanks to the context

  3. I know the meaning of the word when I read it.

4/K) when I am able to produce the word by my own. If I can create a sentence in a random moment of the day, without any help, then it is on this stage. If I have doubts about its spelling, then it stays at 4. If I know how to write it perfectly, then it goes to known.

Thank you

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Knowing words and being able to decipher what a sentence means unfortunately doesn’t imbue you with the ability to form or use the same grammatical structures yourself. Polish is especially difficult grammatically, or so I’ve heard. I imagine this produces a very lopsided result when you focus on pure input.

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For me it’s something like this:

  1. No clue

  2. I may sort of have an idea so I mark it in order for my brain to note how I should try to remember it or remember the general meaning it entails when I see it again

  3. I feel I am close to being able to remember it when I see it

  4. I remember it when I see it but I might forget it again. I mark it as 4 so I can potentially also review all the words with status 4 to see if I actually do know the meaning when I see them.

  5. I remember it when I see it and probably won’t forget it that easily

In making words known, I do it regardless of whether I know how to spell them or whether I am able to actively remember the word when I think of the concept. My standards are obviously lower than yours, since I don’t connect them with output, only input.

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That is true. If I have to speak or write, it’s very hard for me to both actively remember the words for all the concepts I need and to order them into an actual sentence. Some people will perhaps feel that learning Polish (or any other language) like this, where you get fairly literate but your listening comprehension is really limited and your ability to express yourself is almost not there at all, is useless, but I think you can always switch focus to learning grammar, writing and speaking and listen more somewhere down the line and the vocabulary you picked up from reading will absolutely make it a lot easier for you.

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Thanks a lot for your answer. Despite our different approach, I do find your achievement mind-blowing :slight_smile:

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Great to see how far you have gotten on your Polish journey. It definitely takes some time, but it is in my opinion absolutely worth the effort. I feel that my speaking really took off at about 30k words and then it’s just constant speaking practice that makes you better. Still with more than 70k words I feel that I have gaps both in my passive and active vocabulary but it’s getting easier and easier to find a way around these gaps during my speaking practice.

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