I feel a little sheepish at asking this but I’ve not found somewhere where I can view how many LingQs I have in total for my languages. I’m number 1 for Dutch, so I can see it on the rankings on the friends page, but for the other two, I’m nowhere near there. Any ideas?
Just as a side note, if there is not way, perhaps it would be best to put the person’s figure underneath the rankings in bold. Just a nice little guideline.
You can add the totals from the progress snapshots for the ‘all time’ category. There isn’t a number anywhere else that I know of (unless you are in top ten or whatever).
Duh, I should have realised that. I’m only after the numbers for each language. Thanks kcb!
This is one reason I think there should be an extensive ‘tips and tricks’ section. There are things I’ve discovered only after having been here awhile.
Yeah, that and a more extensive statistics area. But the tips and tricks section would be rather important. Many people are asking questions on some very basic functions. Steve recently did some good videos on general importing, studying on LingQ, but those videos don’t break it down enough for some people. Many people don’t know they can right click, make folders, change settings, etc on their computers. There’s a definite need for some really detailed instruction. (How to make a known word, search the dictionary, copy & paste meanings, etc).
Maybe we could make a thread somewhere and plan out a series of videos which addresses the very, very basics and moves to advanced stuff.
You can see your total number of LingQs on the Account page. Also displayed is your total number of imported lessons.
Any suggestions regarding navigation, etc. are welcome. New members are met with the What is LingQ video (- YouTube). Tutorial view is also available to help with detailed instructions on using the lesson page.
The number of imported lesson on my account page is 633. This is definitely wrong.
LingQs: 10639
Geimporteerde Lessen: 307
Yipeee!
Yeah, that’s a good conceptual video, Alex. But, that sure doesn’t look like LingQ. hehe I’d happily record a series of short videos/single larger video from my own computer, with detailed steps. Like: How to start a language, how to import, how to add a LingQ, how to switch languages, etc. You’d be surprised how this stuff would confuse some people. Of course, I’d not record any audio, so that it can be recorded upon by people in various languages. I’ll start a thread on it, to see if people would like to give some ideas.
Veral, maybe you’ve reached infinity and the system couldn’t deal with that idea, so it restarted! 
Just wanted to say that I realise that Steve has covered some of these things already, but usually not in great detail. The bigger problem is that most of those videos were done 2+ years ago. LingQ has changed enough for people to get confused over the renaming or movement of a button, for example.
Sounds like an awesome idea Imyirtseshem!
I’ll get working on some basic ideas and post a thread about it either tonight or tomorrow.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the information you can get out of the statistics LingQ gives you. There’s a few things you can do with importing word frequency lists, for instance, that can give you a clear picture of your receptive vocabulary profile and where the gaps are.
It all seems a bit nerdy for a forum post however, and I haven’t got round to writing it up as an essay for the LingQ Posterous blog.
Vera, the Imported Lesson number showed in the Account page concerns your privately imported lessons, not the ones you shared.
Imyirtseshem, you may want to wait till this update we’ve been hearing about rolls out.
skyblueteapot, do you mean importing a word list and then looking at the percent known? That would be interesting. I’m sure there are many possibilities along those lines.
kcb, you can import a word list as a lesson and you will see the percent known.
BTW I often import words that I have collected from my reading. I first pass them through a spell check to add any accents and correct spelling. The captured phrases are not there but it gets the words into LingQ.
I sometimes wonder whether we should not collect the most frequently saved words or phrases here at LingQ and offer them for people to import in this way, even though they are not, of course, gleaned from the learner’s own reading and LingQing. I think this might be of interest. I even think such lists could be of interest to others on the web and attract some members.
“Most commonly saved Czech phrases at LingQ” Each list could have 25 of these, and we just keep putting them out. Just an idea.
I have found a modern list of the most common words used in the Russian language (from Leeds unversity, as I recall) and I have imported the following as Russian lessons:
the most frequent 500 words;
the most frequent 1000 words;
the most frequent 2000 words;
words in the 2001 - 3000 bracket;
words in the 3001 - 4000 bracket;
words in the 4001 - 5000 bracket;
5001 - 8000 and a few higher brackets.
That way I can look at the words I have learned, broken down by frequency.
In about 3 years reading authentic texts as I pleased on LingQ plus 2 years of learning Russian from books I have managed this:
I learned ALL the first 500 words
about 90% of the first 1000 words
about 75% of the first 2000 words
about 60% of the first 5000 words
about 50% of the first 8000 words.
Points to note:
Even reading nearly 2 million words of Russian, there were high frequency words I didn’t come across. A lot of these were military or scientific words, and I mostly read children’s fantasy, so it’s not surprising really. Picking your own materials may leave you with significant knowledge gaps, which a careful analysis of word frequency lists can point out.
I spent a lot of time at low intermediate learning words of very low frequency, which I feel now was not a good use of my time. I learned them because they appeared in my authentic texts, and until I got my hands on frequency lists I had no good way of checking they were low frequency.
I have created about twice as many LingQs as I have learned. Looking at a sea of tens of thousands of unlearned LingQs is daunting. Narrowing down your vocabulary learning session to, say, the most frequent 2000 words, cuts the session down to size and gives you the reassuring feeling that the words you are spending time on learning are really important. (If you hadn’t spotted it, on the right hand side of the vocabulary page there is the option to filter by a specific lesson on your workdesk).
Now I don’t need to create a LingQ for every new word I come across, if I don’t feel like it. If it’s important (according to my frequency-based criteria) then I’ll have lingQed it already, when I went through the frequency list and lingQed all the new words on it. All the remaining blue words, therefore, are either different forms of the frequent words, infrequent words, misspelled or made up words.
Because Russian is a language with a lot of endings you tend to LingQ the same word, over and over, in various different forms. That makes it hard to estimate the size of your vocabulary. I just have to look at my “top 5000 lesson” on the vocabulary page and count up the number of words at level 4. That’s the number of Russian words I know - plus all those really infrequent words learned out of “Dracula” which don’t really count for much.
When I’ve learned all the top 2000 words I will carry on with the 2001 - 5000 words.
When I’ve learned all of them I might go on to learn the 5001 - 8000 words. Or I might not. It seems that, beyond the most frequent 5000 words, the power of statistics isn’t so strong. You might spend your time just as profitably sourcing your new vocabulary in the materials you actually enjoy reading.
LingQ does give you frequency information, on the vocabulary page, although I’ve never seen it written down exactly what those little stars correspond to. I would be interested to know how the “word importance” algorithm works.
In theory, this approach should be applicable for all LingQ languages. I think…You just need a good set of frequency lists. I’m using these from the University of Leeds: Large Corpora used in CTS
Thank you for the link to the frequency lists.
Helen: Yes, thanks. The lists look to be very useful.
BTW, what children’s books have you read in Russian that you enjoyed? Maybe our interests overlap: I enjoy adventure stories and science fiction. Two recent favorites: Плутония, by V. A. Obruchev, which is pulp SF, and Кортик, by Анатолий Рыбаков, which is a boys’ adventure story. Books for slightly younger readers I like as well, and I do enjoy children’s fantasy. Lots of classic English children’s fantasies have been translated into Russian, and there are probably excellent stories of that sort written in Russian . . .