I exaggerated with 120.000 I just do not know where is the C2 threshold for me, somewhere in between 80-100-120k, but Advance 2 milestone was more like a confirmation of B2 reading & listening ability. At least for me. Only now I feel like I’m nearing C1 in passive knowledge.
Sorry, my writing caused confusion. Steve said in one of his old videos that at 30-35k in German you can start speaking quite comfortably. In my head I interpreted what he said as “Your speaking level will be B1/B2 at 30-35k”, since at the time I saw that video I was at 25k and I felt to have reached B1.
I think marking compound words and and conjugations is totally fine. On LingQ, we count individual words, which I think is a better way of doing it than marking root words. And that is part of the reason why the thresholds are in the 20-30K range, because you need to mark that many individual words in oder to truly understand the @10K root words that they’re based on.
The reason for this is some languages have more cases/declinations/conjugations than others. Thus it´s much easier to reach these high numbers of known words for such languages. German has different and diverse forms of the same words because of cases/conjugations to a larger extent than French does, although the fact that LingQ will also count homme, l’homme and d’homme as 3 words does push the “known words” number up quite a bit for French. So yes, you are right that the LingQ bars for each level in each language are sometimes off.
For anyone comparing read words to known words and trying to figure out what is normal and what is believable, this is not a simple thing. You can´t just compare your ratio to someone else´s and say it´s unbelievable if they are vastly different. It depends on many factors, among which I could at least think of the following, all of which the higher, would increase your known to read words ratio.
How much of the language did you know before studying it on LingQ? 2) How much alike is this language and other languages you know (and to which degree do you know them)? 3) How talented and experienced are you in language learning? 4) How well can you concentrate when you study? This both relates to your ability (talent) to concentrate and whether there are distractions like background noise (are you alone at home in peace or doing it on the train on your way to work?). 5) How good is your memory? (Technically this is really a part of number 3 anyway). 6) How much are you listening, speaking and writing the language and how much are you reading it outside of LingQ?
Now I was already fluent in 5 languages (Icelandic, English, Danish, Swedish, German) in November when I started using LingQ and I knew enough French to read a book like Le petit Nicholas. I studied French and then went full on into Dutch at the start of April with almost no experience and about 600 known words from looking at it briefly in LingQ.
My French is now 46K known words having read about 1,43M words
My Dutch is now 26K known words having read about 470K words
How can my Dutch known words ratio be so much higher than the French, even when I had learned no Dutch prior, but plenty of French? Well mostly cause Dutch is like an alternative form of German with some English, Nordic words and French words thrown in there. I almost knew it before studying it.
Are my know words to read word ratios strange or unbelievable? Only if you have fixed ideas of what is normal in that category I think.
Actually, I was a little sleepy when I wrote that post and there are some mistakes in it. The biggest reason why German will have more “words” to learn than most other European languages is probably that German likes to make compound words, where many other languages don´t f.e. “Familienkrise” (DE) but “family crisis” (EN)
Also, that fact that I have a much higher know/read word ratio in Dutch is not only because of how similar it is to other languages I already knew, but also because the ratio will probably drop after you have learned a high enough number of words. There ratio of unknown words will simply start dropping the more words you know. You will also pick up commonly used words first for the most part, cause they will appear repeatedly in your reading material. Then there will be less and less common words and more rare ones that you don´t already know, making it harder to learn them, cause they don´t repeat much.
Thanks for the input, that’s indeed very motivating. Your feedback also perfectly fits my own experience at LingQ: massive exposure is the way, keeping hammering content exposure is the key to language acquisition.
Moreover I completely agree with you regarding targets, they seem to be totally off when it comes to inflected languages, especially slavic languages. I reached the 30,000 milestone in Russian today and I feel nowhere between C1 and C2 comprehension level, even though I start to understand more and more. My comprehension ability drastically skyrocketed during the last months, reaching 700 to +1,000 known words a day. I guess we should shoot for around 100,000 words for an actual C1 comprehension level in Russian.
In my opinion LingQers’ experience and feedback are more accurate and relevant. A way higher word count for upper targets, namely Advanced 1 and 2, would be more precise and motivating. I get extremely motivated by seeing people reaching high milestones and describing their language evolution, it really stimulates emulation.
I don´t understand how your activity rating can be over 44K, looking at your stats. Mine was about 13K when I learned about 1K words a day for 3 weeks straight and listened a fair bit too. Wonder how it´s calculated.
Thanks for sharing this, I like how you think because you’re searching for real conversion on what you do which is exactly what I’m trying to figure out now for my learning process.
I’m at 500 words for German, so I need two zeros 00 more for reaching you. ha ha
But to be honest, I’m not even interested in the numbers but just in the conversion process and in reaching the level I want for each language I practice.
So, keep sharing your strategies and intuitions as they could be really interesting to read.
I think as you approach a very large number of known words (for Russian that would be, say, above 60K - steve has about 90k and that’s enough to crack top 10 on the leaderboard) the new words added become less and less meaningful. In many books, news article, etc - especially if you upload them yourself - there will be proper names, words from other languages, acronyms, etc. Eventually most of your words added will be from these groups, rather than simply rarer words from your target language.
This is absolutely true. The law of diminishing returns starts kicking in pretty hard once you get into the neighborhood of Advanced 3, which I think is Advanced 2 + 10K words – something like that. This is why I decided to “Graduate” from LingQ after I reach certain thresholds, which for German was actually at 50K known words. Though of course one can keep going with it further, especially if they’re working with specialty materials and vocab. But I feel that for reading books, which is what I’m primarily concerned with, there is an actual benefit to switching over to unassisted reading at a certain threshold. (Much like turning off subtitles on movies.)
Also, with all these word counts, it should be pointed out that adding proper nouns – names of people and places – to one’s known word count can significantly inflate one’s numbers after a while. I know some people do this, but when you read books, the number of genuine unique TL words you encounter will diminish, but the number of unique proper nouns can remain constant from book to book – different locations, different people etc. So, if you mark proper nouns as “known,” at some point after 25-30K, a larger percentage of the known words you’d be marking would start to become proper nouns, and thus can inflate your word count pretty significantly after a while.
All that just to say that, yes, after 40K of conscientiously marked individual words, those diminishing returns will start kicking in for sure.
Hey Oxygen. If you don´t count compound words, names, conjugations, declinations etc. your word count will not make sense if you compare it to that of others who mark all of these as known, which I suspect is the case for most ppl on LingQ. People also have different standards of when they mark the words as known. Some will do it as soon as they sort of recognise them, others only when they really know them well. I couldn´t possibly tell you if it´s strange how your word count is so much lower than Serge´s when it you both seem to describe yourselves as being on a similar level. Many of things may play into it and you may not actually be on similar levels in reality.
Mark, the funny thing is also that I looked at the person with the highest amount of French words and it´s a native French speaker. Not so much learning French as just documenting how many words they know in their native tongue. I remember that the person who was #1 in known French words previously had 80K+ words, then all of a sudden the current leader with the 100K+ words started on LingQ and very quickly got to the 100K (think they had 30K+ in a week once).
I have 9,646 known words in Italian having read 343,733 words.
For Dutch, it’s 8,382 known words having read 397,636 words.
I’m a native German speaker and I also speak English fluently, but I’ve also been learning French and Spanish for many years, but I’m certainly not fluent in them. And yet my Italian ratio is better. Why? Dutch doesn’t have as much material, so I’ve been using Intermedia 2 or Advanced 1/2 material for quite some time whereas I’m still using Intermediate 1 material for Italian. Lessons tend to be shorter (I review words more) and easier. Also, I’m usually reading literature in Dutch these days. If I know what a word means, but the spelling is outdated, I just ignore the word.
I find that I understand the majority of Dutch words in writing the first time I see them.
Interesting that you mention outdated spelling and that would explain a lot. I quite often come across Dutch words in old literature like Anna Karenina or Don Quichot that google translate doesn´t have a translation for at all or has a translation that can´t possibly be correct for the text I read it in, but I understand the word because of how similar it is to a word in another language I know.
I came across this text in Anna Karenina for exmple: “… was een grote, knappe jongen, met op zijn hoofd een Schotse mute, …” and mute (NL) is just translated to mute (EN) / stumm (DE). But to me this was obviously just some Dutch version of the German word “Mütze” (cap in English) and even more obviously you don´t carry a “Scottish inability to speak” on your head.
I actually completely overlooked one thing that relates to read / known words ratio and it´s how much you review your lingQs, probably because I almost never do it myself. That should of course push the ratio up the more you do it.
Funny, I’m currently reading Anna Karenina, too. I read somewhere that they had a spelling reform in the 1930s or 40s, that would mean that it’s not very likely to find free classics using modern spelling.
Yes, even when I adapt the spelling of some words, I don’t always find them in dictionaries. I don’t recall which work it was, but one work was full of them that it almost became too much.
But even if I understand them just fine, if the spelling isn’t the same, I’ll only mark it as familiar, in the past, I’d only mark it as recognised. Do you mark them as known then?
The version of Anna Karenina I´m reading is not the one available in LingQ in Dutch. I found that one in a course called “novels” and it doesn´t have all the chapters. What I´m reading now I found on the internet in a pdf and I´ve been importing parts of it into LingQ by copying the text. That translation is not the same as the one available in LingQ and they certainly do not match.
I mark these words as known, to answer you question. I mostly try to mark words from other languages with the x - do not count or show, but I usually mark personal names and names of places as known words. That in itself is not necessarily completely off if you thank about it. With personal names, at least you know it is a name and even a little more about it. I know that Klaus is a name, it´s probably and German and almost certainly a man, to name an example. With names of places, these can be unique to the language or they can not be. It seems ridiculous to mark “Washington” as a known word in German, French, Dutch, Norwegian etc. but what about places that have unique names in different languages, like for example: The Netherlands(EN), Nederland (NL), die Niederlande (DE), les Pays-Bas (FR), Holland (IS) - die Niederlande … New Zealand, Nieuw-Zeeland, Neuseeland, Nouvelle-Zélande, Nýja Sjáland.
Even compound words, which I will mark as known all the time, can have different meanings than the sum of the words they are made from, like how “Ohrfeige” (DE) does not mean ear-fig. If you think about it you also sometimes lose known words (especially in languages that don´t do compound words so often) when two words or more in sequence don´t mean just the meanings of the separate words combined, for example you don´t necessarily know what a “hot dog” is when you know the meanings of “hot” and “dog”.
I see, thanks.
Yes, I also tend to mark loan words with the x, unless I don’t know the meaning. I learnt that “fast food” is used for a fast food restaurant in French. Since that wasn’t transparent, I added it. With personal names, I ignore them if they are identical to versions I already know. I’ll ignore José in Portuguese because I already know it from Spanish, but I’ll add personal names where I didn’t know before what they mean. Country names I add if they differ from German.
I agree about compound words, in Romance languages also because you can’t be sure how exactly they’ll word it. Even if the compound has an equivalent in e.g. German, they’ll word it differently.
I think you put a lot of thought into which words you mark in which way and are quite concerned to measure your known words correctly. Seems like a very German thing to do to me.
I don´t put that much thought into it, since I´m here to learn, not so much to precisely measure how many words I know and how well I know them, although that is a nice bonus to monitor progress (in literacy at least). I just accept that the total number will be somewhat inflated and is not to be taken too literally.
Nonetheless I sometimes find myself getting carried away a bit in a competitive spirit in trying to get as many known words as I can. That probably gives me something of a positive bias in when to mark words as known, but mostly I feel it makes me neglect listening in favour of reading.
I can’t reply to your other post, so I’ll do it here:
Haha, no, I’m not really that consistent, actually, I often hesitate between recognised and familiar enough and I’m not always consistent when it comes to making them known. But I do like the stats and I don’t like to inflate them as they help me stay motivated even when I feel like not progressing at all. But I also noticed that being too strict started to have a negative effect on my motivation, so I haven’t found the right balance yet.
I prefer reading over listening, too, so I have to make sure I don’t neglect it.
I just do not know where is the C2 threshold for me, somewhere in between 80-100-120k, but Advance 2 milestone was more like a confirmation of B2 reading & listening ability. At least for me. Only now I feel like I’m nearing C1 in passive knowledge.