Does anybody know 100,000 words in their target language? That would be the ultimate mastery, especially in a language like Chinese where there is no conjugation, so you don’t have one word being counted as different words with its many conjugations.
There was an Aussie who got 100,000 in German. Hardcore.
What is their username?
That is very hardcore. How is conjugation in German?
Steve Kaufmann is dangerously close with Russian, but of course that’s heavily inflected. I think that with knowledge of the grammar you can derive around 80 “words” from a single Russian regular verb, including declensions of the participles. (And not counting any forms of the perfective aspect of the same verb, as there is no steadfast rule to derive it from the imperfective.) Different folks will use different criteria to move a word to ‘known’, so it’s not too meaningful to compare each other’s word counts. All said, though, 90k+ is still impressive.
Conjugations are different words though because they mean different things.
Suis and Est might be from ‘etre’ but they mean ‘am’ and ‘is’.
Donné and Donnerai might come from ‘donner’ but they mean slightly different things because they give extra meaning to the word.
Just because you recognise ‘Je donne’ doesn’t mean you will see ‘Elles donneraient’ and know exactly what it means.
Etc.
The words that ‘don’t count’ to me are things like in French having ‘apostrophe’ and ‘l’apostrophe’ etc. Lots of them in French really. My real known words if we take this into account are probably in the 4000 area, if that.
If someone got 100,000 known words in Chinese, where there is no conjugation or declension, my mind would be BLOWN! According to a website, the biggest French dictionary contains 100,000 different words, so this would be unlikely, considering that different conjugated forms are not regarded as different words.
I know nearly 11,000 inflections in Russian, which is still 11,000 more than I knew six months ago. Only 5.5 more years to go until I know 100,000. But as there are 80 inflected words per verb, my total words known will be about 1,250! The maths don’t quite work, so I will probably know a couple more than that.
1 Like
I don’t even know if I know 100.000 words in my native language ^^
I have seen a user who reached 100k words in German here. It seems to me I followed her. But I can neither find her nor remember the name.
Most people probably don’t, but in Lingq words in different forms (different conjugations or declensions etc.) as different words. So it will say you know more words than you actually know. I was refering to Lingq words.
Pretty impressive. Keep up the good work!
There are often many forms of the same word. This makes it easier to get to high numbers in German. The main thing is that in German, they combine nouns to make super-nouns that are written together. So instead of writing ‘computer table’, they might write ‘computertable’. When reading on LingQ in German, there is basically a never ending flow of new combinations, and this makes it possible to get to really high numbers.
Something like Gingko
Yes, something like this
Okay there are two people who know over 100,000 known words that I have come across on Lingq. Ginkgo58 and mja201. Both of these are accomplished in German.
I see.