I’m just curious if people here include the names of people in their known word count, or if they ignore them so that they are not counted. I have up to now been hitting ignore on all first and last names, with an exception for names of famous people (world leaders, historical figures, etc.) and names that are also regular nouns or verbs, etc. (e.g., the names Fisher and Baker in English vs. the occupations fisher and baker). I do include place names (cities, countries, regions, lakes, etc.).
I’m wondering if I should start including names of all people I come across in articles. The main rationale would be that you have to have a certain level of comprehension to even recognize that the word is someone’s name (e.g., if I were to start learning Korean from scratch tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out names of people unless they were written in English). The main rationale for not counting them would be that one could easily inflate their known word count so that it wouldn’t be a great indicator of comprehension and mastery.
No, I ignore them. Even city names tend to be the same if it isn’t a bigger city. You maybe want to know that London is Londres in Spanish but Coventry is Coventry and it makes no sense to me to say that I “know” the word. The same with product names. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter but I like to believe that my known-word count is somehow representative.
I ignore maybe maybe 90% of all names. I think at the end of the day though it doesn’t matter all that much. Our known word count is something that just gives us an idea of where we are in the language. What each user considers a word “Known” is subjective so I think you should do whatever you feel.
I do random, depending on how I feel. As @MarkE said, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter much. If you have 100K known words, a few thousands here and there is not a big deal.
If they are in other languages I ignore them.
If they are proper of the language I’m studying I include them (if I recognize the difference btw).
Same thing with cities, if it’s big or famous I include it, if I think it’s not a big deal I ignore it.
I ignore surnames, although it’s not so easy to understand if a word is a surname or not, mostly at the beginning.
In German I ignore many words because it’s the language I’ve been studying now with LingQ. The other languages that I know already and now sometimes I improve them in LingQ, I don’t care much. I don’t want to stop the flow of reading by clicking ignore here and there as I don’t care much about the number of known words either.
It depends. In Russian I am at a very low level and I hit ignore on all names so they are not counted. I do this because I am anyway going through the texts almost one word at a time. In German I am at a much higher level and can read very fluently so I don’t bother interacting with blue words unless I am saving them as lingqs.
I also would add that it’s completely your own emotional decision because once you start with ignoring words you will NEVER be consistent:
Do you ignore words that are falsely written? I do, but I doubt that I notice all the typos and from German I know that one word written wrongly may mean another word. So I just make it more complicated.
Do you ignore names? I do, but especially with last names I have to check if they mean also something else. In German last names tend to describe professions.
Do you ignore words in English (or any other languages)? I do, but sometimes these words form an active part of the vocabulary of your target language.
I ignore people’s names in general. Likewise for most city/country. However, sometimes, particularly for landmarks or special names for agencies or companies I might create a link and give a description. For example I might link Alexanderplatz which is a famous square in Berlin. So I might lingq it and describe what it is and where it is, but I’d never mark it known. It’s just to give context to what it is if I were to come across it again.
I try to streamline the process as much as possible.
The only cases I routinely ignore words is when I come across words written in the latin alphabet or if I’m served up a junk/non-word because lingq’s Japanese parser couldn’t figure it out or I encounter a typo.
That’s because they’re quick and easy to identify, maybe a little less so with the junk words, but I feel like the effort is worthwhile to keep my vocab list clean.
If I don’t know immediately how to categorize a blue word I just default to making it a level 1 lingq.
When it comes to names I decided I’d treat them as words, I could have went either way really, and might have decided to ignore them if I was learning a different language, but with Japanese it’s not always immediately obvious when you’re dealing with a name, or how to read them because of the writing system.
My vocab count on LingQ was always going to be inflated anyways unless I were to cross reference every blue word I came across to see if I hadn’t already added a conjugation/inflection/variant.
IMO it’s easier to just assume a certain degree of inflation and treat the known word count as a somewhat arbitrary unit of progress with a loose correlation to actual known vocabulary.
I do that. Sometimes I think I shouldn´t have. I think it has reasons for and against it. Knowing common names in a certain language is actual knowledge of the language. Sometimes the names of places will also be unique in certain languages (Germany, Þýskaland, Allemane, Duitsland etc. for Germany). When names of places remain the same across languages (Toronto or Nuuk) it´s not real knowledge. It´s also not like marking the names of Japanese or Arabic people as known when you are learning Swedish is going to be actual added knowledge of Swedish etc.
I mark all names as “known” but it would be more correct to follow the train of thought I just described, just takes a bit more time and thought. You could also always argue to which degree you should care about the known words count and how accurate it is.
Then only way to get the known words count accurate was if LingQ made an extensive effort to categorize words very accurately and counted them based on that. Even then you could argue a lot about how you would count words with more than one meaning - do you have to know one meaning to know the word or all to count the word as known or should you get more known words for knowing all the meanings?
I do not mark names as known, unless it has a different name/spelling in English and not LingQ’ing the name is blocking my comprehension of something.
I have shifted to wanting let them be known simply because the act of ignoring them takes (a small amount of) time, and that time is not providing me value anymore.
This very question is actually why I haven’t started using the “Off” setting for highlighting style yet, but I will soon. When I make this change it will inevitably start including English/loan words and names as known words, and that is okay. It is just a subjective measure anyway.