LOL. Good one.
Can you explain?
I checked the German wiki for word lists. The respective wiki article refers to this list (among others): https://web.archive.org/web/20091015234803/http://wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/Papers/top10000de.txt
Besides it containing different variations of the same word, acronyms and even single letters, one thing you find very often are names. Besides the questionable necessity to know them, they are not even common in a sense one may think of. I choose those examples just to point out that the approach mentioned by the OP is probably not as useful as it appears at first.
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Ahhh ok, I see. I figured this was somewhat what you were saying, but taking it a step further in my brain, like some chunk of the words were taken from an Angela Merkel speech. Or some book named: " Mustafa, Brenzlauer Berg and Angela Merkel. LOL.
Yeah, I agree, some of the lists one has to be a little careful of whatâs in it, or what the source is from as it may not be as relatable to what one may need for their own usage. Even if the source is something like newspapersâŚwell, you might get a lot of words about war, politics, etc. Many useful words of course, but probably not the most common in everyday speaking.
Yes I know there are of course words in there like Angela Merkel, and some individual letters. I just ignore them.
My OP was made because it is nonetheless very helpful to get oneâs known words raised swiftly so as to make the % of the unknowns shown across oneâs overall resources more accurate much faster than wading through vast amounts of material.
The lists are not a substitute for reading widely, or a way to become fluent.
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The purpose of my OP was not to suggest that one can become fluent by learning a word list.
The point is that they can shave off months of normal access of reading materials like novels and newspapers and audio, not because reading those things is unnecessary, but because to do all that when you already KNOW the words that you are encountering, means that you are not able to select materials as accurately because the % of unknowns includes perhaps thousands of words one already knows. I have Masters quals in German, Portuguese and Italian, and a BA in French, and other qualifciations in other languages, so I want to get my Lingq profile as fast as possible to the point where it can show me which resources are going to be offering me new vocabulary rather than thousands of words I actually already know.
The point of the post was also to flag it up as just another approahce out of a multitude of approaches that might work for different people at different times and with differing levels of success. If it helps anyone, then great.
You can tick off maybe 5,000 words in a matter of a few hours, rather than months (if you already understand those words on sight), thus geting your lingq platform more attuned to your level.
Hope you see now what my point in posting was.
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You have explained this method and your reason for pursuing it very well, and have convinced me it can be useful. Thank you again for sharing.
The one thing I still donât understand is this: you say you want to reach âŚ
⌠but what is making you âstopâ?
Edit: I guess the answer is obvious:
But then you also write that you:
Together, that makes it seem that you donât like stopping to pick up new words, but that you also want to efficiently find resources that offer you new words. Do you see why Iâm confused?
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The way I understand what Alandickey wrote he wants to find real new word not new according to Lingq but really new to him. So his method removes the most frequent words. Therefore he can focus on the words he really doesnât know. So in his reading he doesnât loose too much time and motivation on words he knows and which have not been set to âknownâ in Lingq.
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see why you are confused yes - but the explanation lies within my adhd. Every time I see a blue word I tend to stop, because it is blue. I shouldnât, but it distracts me and causes me to lose the storyline. Once I have got rid of many of those, then I can read with greater ease.
It is also the case that I read outside of Lingq you see. I have noticed that at certain numbers of known words, reading hard copy became significantly easier. It is very time-consuming stopping within physical books to look up words.
It is also that I have a plan to reach 50k in a smallish number of languages, because I know from French that one notices a real lift in reading comprehension and reading speed when one reaches 15k, then again around 30k and 40k and again at around 50k. I feel that things are now easy enough to read at 50k and I have about half a dozen books by the bed that I am now reading with enjoyment and without interruption.
I want to be able to do the same in a small number of languages. The sooner i learn the HF words and the sooner I can better select texts with really unknown words, the soone I will make the progress that counts and can read phsyical books for pleasure and with little pain.
I donât konw if the above explains it well enough but it makes sense to me. -
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Exactly. I donât want to be seeing marked as unknown thousands of words I already know.
I am not a beginner in certain languages. It might be a different situation if I were a beginner.
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Thanks I will try an find the academic list. I have imported the subtitle list (10k) and the list based on books (10k). Interestingly there are several imported books in my library with a %new word that are a lot more than the list. The freq lists are at 30+% new words and I have some native books that are at 75% new words. Interestingly even some native book meant for children are at around 40%+.
Once I mark out all the known word in the lists the sorting would be hopefully a little more accurate.
I am also going to try a high freq list from ANKI shared decks. Those are already cleaned up (name and other junk words removed). It will be interesting to see what %new word they show up as.
Anyway I think this is a creative way to see how my known words compare to a freq list. It is nice to see those % goes down as I read more books.
This list is also useful since I consume content and learn from outside (games,movie,apps, class, browsing,forums,kindle) of lingQ too. It is not convenient to mark those words I encounter outside of LingQ as known inside lingQ. Instead, I can go through this list every once in a while and any word I recognize I can mark as known. I have already noticed many words that are blue but I know very well because I didnât start lingQ as a beginner. This will make the stats more accurate.
It makes sense now, thank you for explaining! I was being a little dense, I admit.
I know you are not really asking for suggestions, but I do have one ⌠or maybe it is more of a question (like, âwhy not do it this way?â):
In my very first reply, I wrote that you can change the blue highlighting style to something less obtrusive. Now I have realized that you can actually turn off the blue highlighting entirely. So, if your goals are to read without being distracted by blue words (like you can do with a hard copy), but also to be able to look up words easily (like you can do with LingQ), and your main complaint with LingQ is being distracted by blue words you actually know ⌠then why not turn off highlighting entirely, and only click on words that you want to look up in the moment of reading (regardless of what color they are)? Of course, you can leave âpaging moves to knownâ on so that your known word count increments appropriately, if that matters to you. Sounds like the best of all worlds? Unless I am again missing something?
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I think you are maybe missing something yes.
It is much more time-efficient to spend 5 hours reading through the 10,000 highest frequency words in a language, in the order of their importance in the language, in order to find out where oneâs most important deficiencies lie, than to spend a year reading thousands of pages to cover perhaps all or perhaps not yet all of the most important words. There are of course some weird items in such lists, but the importance of HF words in terms of allowing a person to find suitable comprehensible input canât be overstated.
By ensuring I got a couple hundred more words in the HF list that I did not know in one of my languages, I pretty much immediately felt a lift when I started reading a book. I had done the looking up in one learning exercise, and so am not stopping and starting all the time over a long period of time. Task-switching is a huge issue for me as I have ADHD. I donât find task-switching efficient. But I do find it hugely important after learning the HF words to read widely as then various words keep cropping up and are recognised and consolidated. This to me is much easier than not being recognised, being looked up, attempting to carry on with a text, but having lost the thread.
You must do whatever helps you - we are all different. I can assure you that I personally must have saved months of labour and frustration by this approach but it may not work for you or meet your needs at all.
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I see the full picture now and thank you for explaining again. It is fun to hear of different ways LingQ can be used to learn a language. Iâm anticipating returning to my Korean soon after a long hiatus, and I find some motivation in these discussions. Best wishes to everyone!
how can i get the english words list for wiki? I canât find it.
I have a few comments not directed at the Alan, but just in general because I think it needs to be said:
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Language is a skill, not knowledge. Even if you knew the dictionary definition of 10k words, it still doesnât mean youâre good at using the language. Maybe itâs not everyoneâs goal to be good at using the language. Furthermore, knowing the definitions doesnât make you a good (or fast) reader, it doesnât make you good at hearing the words spoken in a sentence at normal speed, it doesnât allow you formulate comprehensible thoughts in the language, and it doesnât tell you anything about grammar.
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There are different levels of âknowingâ a word. Just because you have a good idea of the dictionary meaning doesnât mean you canât learn it more solidly. And in fact, one part to becoming a good reader or listener (aka knowing the language well), is to recognize the word quickly and effortlessly. This brings me to my third point below.
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The single most important metric on LingQ is total words read (not known words). A lot of people obsess over known words and that shows lack of experience or aiming for a goal that doesnât really contribute as much to truly learning a language. If someone instead focuses on reaching 1-3M total words read (or more) then you will be picking up tens of thousands of known words along the way unless youâre reading material that is way too easy all the time. Being able to read something interesting, quickly, and easily should be the goal. If any one of those three things isnât happening, then the reading material is probably not right for you. The great part about reading material that feels relatively easy is that you can read it quickly. That means that youâre getting lots of repetitions of ALREADY KNOWN WORDS which can make them even easier and quicker to recognize (extremely important!). Also, if the reading is easy, then you can also do reading + listening which will drastically improve your listening compared to just reading or just listening. This is basically the sweet spot in terms of consuming language because it allows you to look at and away from the page intermittently depending on how easily you can follow listening without looking at the words.
A little bit about my experience:
Russian: I grinded hard to 55k known words (1.5M words read) in couple years by spending 2-4 hours per day reading material that was above my level. Before finding LinqQ, I memorized 1500 words via flashcards (English to Russian) in a month. I learned something important about memorization: itâs kind of meaningless and doesnât teach much about the language.
French: I casually read my way to 30k known words (1.6M read). I never studied flashcards and probably never will.
Spanish: Similar path and numbers as French.
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One could always buy one of Refoldâs anki decks and then use lingQ. Something I may do in the future. They have the top 5K most frequent words with native audio, to get you jump started in the language.
The great polyglot Kato Lombâs approach:
âŚher favourite method was to obtain an original novel in a language completely unknown to her, whose topic she personally found interesting (a detective story, a love story, or even a technical description would do), and that was how she deciphered, unravelled the basics of the language: the essence of the grammar and the most important words.
She didnât let herself be set back by rare or complicated expressions: she skipped them, saying: what is important will sooner or later emerge again and will explain itself if necessary. (âItâs much more of a problem if the book becomes flavourless in our hands due to the many interruptions than not learning if the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.â)
So we donât really need to look up each and every word in the dictionary: it only spoils our mood from the joy of reading and discovering the texts.
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