I am currently learning Ukrainian and French. I like signing up for challenges, in particular the Hard Core Challenge, to see whether I focus on all learning metrics equally (or as suggested).
I am not surprised that key metrics are different in each language, but I am surprised about the huge gap for “Known words”. For French it is 546 known words (for three months). It has not changed recently. For Ukrainian it was 2730 known words (five times as many as in French), since January it is 3640 more than six times as many as French.
Are this limits the same for everyone who does the same language?
Why is the threshold for Ukrainian so high? I am aware that the thresholds for different languages are different to reach the levels beginnner 1, beginner 2, because the language structures are different. However, if I compare French and Ukrainian, Ukrainian certainly doesn’t require five or more than six times as many words.
What is the explanation for these differences in the challenges?
One thing to consider is that LingQ counts every form of a word separately. French has more inflection (different forms of words) than English, but quite likely less than most of the Slavic languages. In French, you have different forms of a verb, but apart from plurals, there aren’t really different forms of nouns. In Slavic languages like Ukrainian, every noun and every adjective can change its ending based on number, gender, and case (of which there are half a dozen, or so). That alone easily triples or quadruples the word count of what is otherwise an equivalent vocabulary.
(Or take an even more extreme example, like Turkish - much of its grammar works by adding endings upon endings to every word, so you rack up a thousand known words a LOT faster than you’d naively expect.)
I don’t know if that explains the entire difference, but it surely goes a long way toward explaining it.
Number of words you have to learn depends on your level.
Here are you profiles for Ukrainian and French
In french, you are requested to learn 42 words per week and with Ukrainian 280.
Once you French level would be highter they will request you to learn more words.
Number of words requested in challenges is proportional to those weekly numbers.
I was not aware that there is a link between the “known words” and my level. That also explains the change since the January challenge in Ukrainian, because I recently (in December) moved to Intermediate 1.
I have been learning French for a long time, but just started using LingQ about one month ago. I am there still Beginner 1, but move quickly, if I am currently reading a text, I still know most of the words.
I will have an eye on the changes in the Hard Core Challenges.
