When you say that Chinese is the easiest, to me that sounds like you prefer Chinese to the other two. I find Latvian impossible because I didn’t really want to learn Latvian. I just wanted to learn it because I like Latvia and Latvians…that’s not enough.
I really think that we need to feel this obsession towards a language in order to master it since it’s a ridiculously long thing to do. I don’t know why but I felt the need to give my unwanted input here.
@ genix79: You bring up some good points, when it comes to state of user hints for Korean, but as you have experienced, constantly editing hints can be drag. I go through phases when I edit a lot of hints, and some days I just lingq a lot of stuff that I know are iffy, but I don’t have time and energy to edit them.
But with time, as more of us do this, editing lingqs here and there when we can, more and more hints will be clarified and edited. Most of the the more popular lessons, like the ones in th Iyagi series have actually a lot good hints because that’s what most people work with, I think.
For Korean, this is pretty much the only place where we can find as many good hints as we do, so, as I always say, LingQ is what we make of it.
I feel like the material is out there to bridge beginner and intermediate levels in Korean, it just may not cleared for Lingq to include it in their public library. But between the “My Korean” series, which is available here, and the Berkeley Korean, which is copyrighted, but uploadable from Berkeley, you’d pretty much be covered to reach the level to start working with TTMIK Iyagi.
Maybe I misunderstand you. I though you were saying that I pass over words that I don’t know, or move a bunch of words to known that I don’t really know? That was my interpretation of what you said. Maybe that was not what you meant.
In fact, in all of the languages that I study, my known words total is either equal to or larger than my saved LingQs total. I learn most words incidentally. I believe that most of us acquire at least as many words incidentally as we do through deliberate study. There are a number of reasons for this, especially in Korean,
If we know certain words, we can guess at the meaning of related words. This is especially true in Korean where endings can change the meaning of core words. Once we know the endings, and a lot of core words, if we see a core word we know in a new combination with an ending we know, we already know the meaning of that word. The same happens in other languages, especially inflected languages.
What is more, in Korean, many Hanja based words are combined to form new words, but if all the Hanja words are known, it is not difficult to figure out the meaning of the combination word. A lot of the lessons I study are about current events, and these kinds of words are very common.
So just to be clear, I look at every word, and only pass over it, or mark it known, if I know the meaning.
The difficulty I found was getting from TTMIK, which is still early intermediate, to the kind of podcasts that I have spent most of my time with. I would have liked something in between.
Yea. For me, I’ve done it enough to know that it works and I’ll improve with time so I’m happy to slowly trudge through tough material without getting discouraged, just picking up words as I go.
Sorry - I did not mean that you pass over words.
You do have the Hanja knowledge to aid you, as well as knowledge of other languages which have influenced Korean over the years. So I expect that you would be well-equipped to retain Korean vocabulary better than many people.
However, for a poor interpretation of a statistic, you’re adding 1 known word for every 8 words read. I’m adding 1 known word for every 25. Sorensen (whose post kicked off this sub-thread) is adding 1 per 38 words read.
I’m putting forward the notion that marking things known is highly subjective and so comparing known words from one person to another doesn’t tell anything.
Your criteria for adding known words is considerably different to my own. Were I to adopt the view that you’ve taken on this, I would have a lot more known words. Probably still not as many as you do, but our statistics would be more comparable because our views on what constitutes “known” would be better aligned.
In the end I am very mindful that, as you say, we can understand or know more than our statistics would give us credit for. It reminds me of a comment I read on reddit once wherein a poster spoke about Duolingo users fussing so much about completing trees and yet still being unable to use or understand the language in the context they would like.
My end goal for Korean is dictating the approach I am taking. I took the time last year to do as comprehensive a review as I could of the progress I had made on a variety of fronts. This resulted in a shift in my understanding of what was working in my language learning.
The way I see it is: as I review my progress and course-correct according to my goal, even my accumulation of base stats is going to vary considerably compared to other people whose goals differ.
Chinese is pretty good. It has a lot of annoying homophones, though. For example, the character and word 英, “yīng”, can be the first part of the word “England,” it can also mean “of or relating to England,” “hero,” “flower,” or “youth.”
What the heck?
英国–England
英雄–hero
英語–English, the English language
英才–genius
石英–quartz
We use these words in Japanese.
Just wanna address two things: 1) the “words read vs. known words” statistic. I feel this may help in the beginning, but as you reach intermediate and advanced levels, this metric becomes less and less useful. The more words you know, the more you can read, but the less new words you encounter and mark as known.
In certain cases, two people learning Korean might be learning two completely different languages, because of the different backgrounds they bring to it.
Yeah, you’re right - which is why I said “for a poor interpretation of a statistic”.
There are a lot of issues with comparing statistics on LingQ in general.
I re-read all of my material at least twice. So if my words-read matched another user, the difference in breadth of material covered would be a factor were the other person to rarely re-read the same material.
The best thing the stats can tell is how a person is using LingQ, which goes back to my original comment in this sub-thread.
There are other reasonable guesses one could infer from the stats but that can become confused really quickly.
At any rate other users stats don’t worry me much. I used to be quite concerned regarding the daily goals in LingQ because it was clear I wasn’t meeting my known words quota - not by a long shot - yet I was exceeding other stats such as words-read.
However I realized the goals were based on how Steve views the use of LingQ, and as my ability to understand Korean grew, I realized that my inability to meet my goals was not an indication that I was deficient in my language learning…
rather the goals themselves are somewhat arbitrary as is the ranking ‘Intermediate’ or other terms.