wow i’ve really wanted to know how german was for a english speaker i’ve never tried it i’ve only studied latin languages
For native English speakers, the most difficult thing about learning German is probably going to be how much more grammar German has than English, which is by far the most simplified language I know. Icelandic actually has fairly the same grammatical structure as German and it´s grammar is somewhat more nuanced and complicated, so it was not a huge problem for me.
I noticed I´ve pretty much used two definitions/ideas of being fluent in this thread, one being able to converse about almost anything without effort and then just to be able to have a fairly normal conversation. I´ve been at the former point in German, Swedish and Danish, but sometimes when it´s been a while, I do have to think a bit here and there. With Icelandic and English, it always just flows. With my estimate of a month in France and being fully immersed in the language, I don´t think I´d reach the former definition, just the latter.
Probably I have a stricter definition of fluent which involves all aspects of the language.
Basically a C2 level (which I repeat has nothing to do with native).
It means, as you said, talking without any problem about any topic. Even if you don’t know all the vocabulary of that topic you are able to find workarounds and explain yourself in any situation.
And your conversation is grammarly correct, which means to me to be able to write and understand the language structure. To be able to explain yourself in the present, past and future and sometimes use more complicated structures or to be able to find the right workaround.
And of course, listeing and reading should be at the same level as well.
And the pronunciation should be correct, which doesn’t mean without any accent but correct and easily understandable for the native listeners.
Of course, we have stronger and weaker point on the overall use of the language but the discrepancy shouldn’t be so wide.
And considering that our brain learns by step and needs many pauses to metabolize what we are learning and not losing it, that’s why I though for 1 year more. There is all the grammar to metabolize and make it as part of the conversation.
For example, in French “l’accord du passé composé” is a big topic, very difficult to grasp for French people as well and that affect the conversation as well. It takes time to digest these things. At least for me.
Inspiring!
Thanks for replying. I understand what you mean about finding content outside of LingQ, especially in languages such as Dutch and Norwegian. I. have also had the experience of reading old Dutch and have noticed lots of words that are no longer used today.
No Belgium connection but there is a Dutch one. My wife is from the Netherlands and she inspired me to learn the language. I’ve luckily managed to import lots of her ebooks into LingQ which have made the experience enjoyable.
I looked at TheSwedish Polyglot’s profile - very impressive! I wonder how he manages to acquire new words so quickly. For example, in French he has managed to learn over 60,000 words after only 500,000 words of reading. Possible reasons I can think of:
-Prior knowledge of French
-Lots of reading outside of LingQ
- Perhaps something similar to your experience with Norwegian/Swedish where knowing another language like Spanish has given him a head start.
French for me has been a bit of an experiment. I’m curious to see how well I can learn the language simply through reading on LingQ, lots of listening and then eventually speaking. I have never really spoken any French except simple stuff like hello and goodbye. I think it will be cool to see how quickly I will be able to speak comfortably after lots of input.
Interesting with the Swedish Polyglot. I didn´t look that deeply into his profile. His known words stats are mostly just what inspire me. They are very impressive, but also achievable for me, given enough time.
The only way to get 60K known words after 500K words of reading would be to be fluent on a high level in the language already and find extremely varied content. Even then it seems quite strange to be honest. I very, very much doubt there would even be 60K unique words in 500K words of text. I´ve read 1,43M words in French so far and (adding known words and lingQs minus lingQs learned) they have had 57K unique words. If I do the same for his French stats, it´s 73K unique words in just over 500K words (3,6 times as many unique words per word as in the texts I´ve read).
I have to admit that it looks fishy. He seems to have a lot of impressive and hard to fake stats though, dozens of hours of speaking for example and he´s also got dozens of hours of listening and seems to have done quite a bit of tutoring. I don´t care much either, I´m just inspired to eventually have similar known words stats.
I think if you get to fluent literacy in a language without speaking and writing, you will have trouble when you have to form your own sentences, whether it´s in writing or speaking. You will have the vocabulary somewhere in your mind though so it will save you learning all these words and you´ll understand much more, especially if you´ve also listened a lot along with your reading. Then with time you´ll get better and better at retrieving your passive vocabulary, also in the way you actually form sentences (grammar).
The reason I haven´t been speaking is just that it´s a little more demanding to make it happen. I can go on the computer any time I´m not tied up with anything else, but to speak I have to arrange it with another person and they also need something in return, since I´d only speak with a native or at least someone highly fluent (don´t want to pick up errors from other learners). I am going to start doing it anyway sometime this year at least, give some French speakers Icelandic lessons in return for them helping me with my French for example.
I did also look at his known/read stats for other languages, Swedish and Norwegian and they seemed pretty normal for someone who starts reading at complete or almost complete level of fluency. His Norwegian stats are similar to mine for example. Maybe he was just really, really good at finding varied content when he read French, but he must have been fluent in it already from the start.
I didn’t mean to accuse the stats of being fishy, I do believe that they are genuine. I just like sometimes to compare my stats to other people’s to see if there are any differences.
Another thing which is quite a bit different in comparing myself with the Swedish Polyglot (and with many other people) is that my number of learned lingQs is quite high in comparison to my known words. This would imply that most people are able to guess the word on first sight better than me. Also bear in my mind I never add phrases to my known word count by creating a lingQ phrase and then changing its status to known.
So out of the roughly 60,000 words that he knows in French, only 6,900 were learned along the way(learned LingQs), the remaining 57,100ish words were considered known on first seeing them.
I’ve had a similar experience with being inspired by other LingQ members. The first guy who really impressed me has the username sphaisell. His stats in Spanish are awesome and he went through a phase of writing weekly blogs on LingQ which were really nice to read. He doesn’t seem to do much LingQing now though which is a shame…
I completely agree.
In truth I haven’t been speaking for the same reason. I love how easy reading is. I wish I could find a way to write more, I feel like if I could become addicted to writing the same way I am with reading and LingQing I could really make some progress in improving my grammar and ability to recall words.
I have been trying recently to keep a diary in dutch but it is hard to make the habit stick. Have you ever tried to do lots of writing in one of the languages you have learned?
There is a writing exchange on LingQ, if you to to community → writing exchange, although it´s not intended for massive amounts of writing. I´m starting to use it a little bit to get corrections, although I do use google translate to correct some spelling before I submit my writing there. Login - LingQ
You could also try writing with some Fench/Dutch speaking friends over Facebook messenger, Skype, etc. I´ve done a bit of that in French.
In the languages I´m actually fluent in: Danish, German and Swedish I almost always use them if I´m writing to/with my native friends on the internet. I probably write more English on the computer/internet than Icelandic.
His stats might be inflated by importing vocabulary lists,
I don’t consider this cheating, but a different strategy.
I’ve heard him speaking spanish, and I confrim that he speaks very well,but it’s a solid B2 not a C2.(some people might disgaree, but its my opinion)
I think that many people underestimate B2 level.
Passive vocab is always greater then active, but in order to turn it into active one must encounter given word in different contexts, a lot of listening is needed as well in order to nail good pronunciation.(and output of course)
Ok, is importing vocabulary lists allowed and does LingQ have a feature for it?
I did work as a programmer for about 12 years so I know it would be possible to do something like that if you just figure out how that data is sent to LingQ and program a web client to do it, but I´d tend to think the people of LingQ would not be happy about anyone doing that (as well as it being pretty pointless, unless you really just want to brag about your stats without studying).
Yes, I don´t think there is anything unusual with someone being able to reach 60K known words by reading and still not speaking that fluently or even struggling to speak at all if reading is all they´ve done.
I think the main thing you need to do to turn passive vocabulary active is to have had to dig up the word in your own mind to use it, preferably many, many times. I´m sure there are countless words in French I´ve seen numerous times in all sorts of contexts and I´d understand on paper right away as well as in spoken form, but then if I had to convey information to a Francophone and needed to say that word, I might not find it.
When I was rewriting an English text I wrote in French (it´s in this thread) so Davideroccato could see what my written French would look like, if I had to write quickly, without much pause and by not using any resources, I could tell I couldn´t remember certain words I´m certain I´d know if I saw them. I couldn´t remember the word for “dive” for example, although now that I look back I do and ironically it´s almost the same as the alternative word “plunge” in English. But things like that happen a lot when you are caught in the flow of the moment and you don´t have much time.
Wouldn´t you know it. Now I felt I couldn´t quit Norwegian and move on to all the other things I need to do because somehow I felt I have to get the golden apple for activity, clothe the avatar fully and get all the background items. What is wrong with me? This is the bad side of being slightly on the autism spectrum. The good one is that you can get insanely dedicated, but the bad is that it can get out of hand and you can get obsessed about trivial things like this, where you just have to have all the pieces in place.
I´m really supposed to be finishing the corrections of the Icelandic mini-stories and then there´s real life…
In the top right hand side corner you can find plus sign, one of the options lets you import csv files.
I’m no saying he is 100% importing word lists, but the texts he is reading are very peculiar and word frequency ratio very low.
kristiansand known words count for spanish is the most impressive I’ve ever seen, but his 28 million read words count explains such a high number very easily.
I think I noticed the “import vocabulary” option sometime before but thought it was just importing vocabularies for LingQ to be able to translate words and wouldn´t affect your known words count.
Well it seems to me he was fluent in many of the languages he studied on LingQ before beginning, he´s Swedish I would have to assume and he has Swedish in there and he must have been fluent in English as well. His French known to read word ratio means he pretty much had to be at least literally fluent in French as well.
Maybe some of his stats are inflated in some way too, but I´d assume he´s still a very talented and experienced polyglot by the look of things. Like I said, I like to look at his stats as a hard but achievable goal, ambitious but not unrealistic, like trying to get to Richard Simcott´s level.
Kristiansand has obviously put an insane amount of time and effort into LingQ. Been here since 2013 and tops all time known words for Spanish and Norwegian. His stats in Spanish are insane and, like you point out, hard earned: 28M words read, almost 1.7K hours of listening, 1.2K hours of speaking and over 1M written words. It also seems he learned Spanish pretty much from scratch with 91K LingQs made out of the 119K known words. He must be one of the most active people on LingQ ever.
Thanks for sharing! I feel I have the same problem of spending too much time with LingQ and not much with the famly. Especially because of these days of quarantine, in which I have nothing else to ocupy myself with but learning German. And congratulations for your impressive achivements!