Hi all - I posted this in Reddit, before I realized that there was an awesome community directly in the lingQ forum. I"m using lingQ to study Greek, and was wondering:
How do you all handle word variations/word conjugations? For instance, sometimes I see a word, and I say, “ok, that’s pretty close” to “xyz”, maybe it’s past tense, or a different “case” in the language. I then get the word right, but I didn’t know it, so I guess I “guessed” it correctly based off of input/context/previous knowledge.
I’d like to know how other’s have approached these words. Flash cards? Try to work with the word? How do you count these words towards total known.
Thanks LingQ Community!!
1 Like
When I click on a word LINGQ mostly gives some grammatical information about the form, and in case of a verb, LINGQ mostly also gives the infinitive form. As for the total word count, LINGQ counts every single form as a word.
1 Like
Ahh – thank you for the help. I was trying to best figure out how to approach similar words that are conjugated.
Super insightful.
1 Like
By the time you’ve familiarized yourself with the basic grammar (conjugation, declination etc…) those “guesses” will be more and more valid, thus you will be pretty sure that string xyz is the past form of an already known string abc for example.
My personal approach is that, once I have added a LingQ for two or three forms, I ignore all other forms. It’s just tiresome to add tons of definitions for the same word over and over again, especially if the suggestions provided don’t make sense or don’t contain the meaning in the specific context, requiring me to type them all myself. This is probably less so with Greek as it is an european language, but in Korean and Japanese for example this happens very often. And the way the grammar works in those languages means that there are dozens of possible variations. Creating a LingQ for all of them just slows you down without any meaningful benefit.
Thank you for such a thought out and thorough answer. I really appreciate it, and as I was struggling to identify how/when I should tag a specific word however, now I think I have some context given your process.
Thank you very much and best of luck on your language journey!
2 Likes