I am reading my way to 1 million words and just want to see if anyone else has done this and if so how long it took you.
What was your known word cound when you did reach this level?
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Took me 5 years, but I’m “slow” (probably have averaged 10-15 min of reading a day). Broken into daily reading it’s been 550 words a day. So really it’s a matter of how much time a day you can spend reading.
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It took me a little over 14 months @ 4-5hrs/day to reach one million words – around 2000 hours total, not including passive immersion.
Much of that time was spent listening/repeating/shadowing plus looking up words, grammar and expressions which I didn’t understand, then handwriting them in a journal.
I score my Known Word count at 34,000. I count any word I write into my notebook as Known – wondering whether I really Know a word interrupts my concentration. Some may consider this invalid, but it’s a somewhat vague metric in any event.
I do some review and later if I encounter the word again and don’t recall it, I write it down in my notebook again and drill that part of the sentence with more read/listen/repeat.
I don’t use any of LingQ’s testing/review features.
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For Italian using LingQ, I reached 1M words read in about 10 months. I had 9,532 Known Words. I suspect this was maybe 400-500 hours of study.
I changed my approach for Russian. 1M words read in Russian took maybe 200 hours of study and I have ~1,100 Known Words.
If you look at @steve’s Arabic stats, you’ll see that after five years, he’s only reached ~700k words read, but has spent more than 1,000 hours studying it.
As you can see, it varies widely depending on your language of study and your method of study.
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Yes, it depends on the language you are learning and the languages you know. Arabic has been really slow. It’s harder to read for me than languages written in the Latin or even the Cyrillic alphabet. There are no cognates. But it is still very enjoyable.
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It depends on how many words you know already, how many times you decide to stop for searching words on vocabulary, how much you want to be focused when you read, and so on. It will be exponential because at the beginning you will be much slower than at the end.
If you consider a more realistic 60 words per minute, which is still a good speed as a second language learner, 1 milion words would be 277 hours. Then it’s up to you how much time you want to dedicate every day.
Surprisingly, more or less, this figure is in line with what @ericb100 said about his own statistics. In fact, (550 words a day)/(60 words per minute) x (365 days x 5 years) = 16729 minutes/60’ = 278 hours.
Note:
60 words per minute taken from Quora here.
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I have done around 500k words per month regularly since I started lingq 6 months ago. First with Spanish and later combined Spanish and Swedish. Spanish I could do faster now, but that speed was true somewhere until 20-30k known words. That is with first reading and then reading along with the audio, which of course is often faster than I would read. I do mostly read aloud which does make it slower so maybe it evens out. I have used about 100 hours per month in lingq. I had a high level of English to start with so both of those were easier than if I was studying some language that is unrelated/no connection to languages I know.
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Thank you all for the responses. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with the work haha and forget that im doing this for fun.
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Yeah i imagine that to be an adventure of a language.
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Do you ever use an audio program to support your speaking ability?
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800 days to reach 2.1m words in Greek.
Roughly 3,000 words a day = 1m words a year.
I notice progress every 100,000 words.
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I find separate audio pointlessly hard in Greek. I listen as I go in Lingq (this should be one uttone and shortcut; sentence+translation+audio).
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In French, I imported books and they tend to have about 200,000 words. Thus reading about five books is one million words. One book was overly prosaic with lots of adjectives, took me months. Another book was a fictional crime thriller and I could finish the book in less than a month as most of the words were known.
In Dutch, I read about 1000 words per day as it is a new language. That would then be 3 years.
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I’m reading Chinese, my level is around B1-B2, I have 15k known words, I read around 1.5 hours a day, that is 3k words, so around 11 months is 1.000.000.
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Took me 13 months to reach 1-million words in Norwegian. At that point, I had 19,000 known words according to LingQ. The number of words read and known increased dramatically when I started reading young adult crime novels that were quite engaging. I couldn’t stand reading mini stories and children’s stories. If that’s all I could read, I’d quite.