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.
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Wow that is impressive! When did you tbink you were ready for the novels wordwise? Like did you feel absolutely ready or did you struggle a little once you started?
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Depends on your reading level already. The words per minute (WPM) you’re able to read varies. I think the upper average is 400 WPM. If we do simple math, that would be 2500 minutes or 41 hours. However, it would be rather difficult to do that with a new language if you don’t know all definitions yet.
I think the answer is more “it depends”. The writing script of the language you’re learning, on your own reading skill, and how many words you already know.
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You want to find materials where you struggle a little, but not a lot. Reading something that is effortless is a waste of your time. I bought a few books which turned out to be too advanced. I just set them aside for later. You won’t know the level for you until you attempt a few books and see how it goes. For me, books intended for 9-12 year olds got me started. Teens and young adults are more advanced than we give them credit for.
The subject matter also affects your level. I love sci-fi, but there are a surprising number of specialized and technical words that make them more difficult. Psychological thrillers are also difficult because they use unusual words or concepts. One book on time travel was almost unreadable because of this.
Adventure stories and crime novels turned out to be the best for me. Lots of things happening kept me engaged and introduced lots of repetition of words.
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Interesting recommendation about genre based on difficulty. I’m in a strange position, I would like something more engaging, but the subjects I like may contain too unknown words. The lower level graded readers are manageable and enjoyable too, I may try to up one level. I also read some native content like tv series subtitles. I still have to read books for native speakers (Chinese), I guess they would contain too many unknown words and I would end up missing the whole meaning by trying to learn the single new words. I’d need to read the same content again and again probably, but it takes time. It also could seem less productive than reading something new. I think it would be useful though, It’s just I don’t have the habit of doing it.
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BTW, fabio, the novels i read are not “graded readers” meant for language learners. They are novels for specific age groups meant for pleasure reading. The story telling is often quite good. The Hunger Games, e.g., is a young adult series.
Rereading the same novel is definitely worthwhile. It’s not less productive at all. You need repetition. I read a novel, then another, then come back to the first one and read it again. With crime novels, there are always clues that i missed the first time through, so a second reading lets me see the story in a different light. I also know more words the second time around so some nuances and idioms I totally missed the first time through become clearer to me.
After my first 8 months of Duolingo which gave me a decent base, I never drilled on vocab or grammar again. I occasionally look up words or check a grammar point, but never study either one. Nor did I use Duolingo again (though I appreciate the 8 months of knowledge I gained from it).
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