I have currently have a little bit over 8000 linqs that I am in the process of learning, I would love to be able to put them all to known and have nothing there I hope that within time I can slowly get them down to a very low number, just kinda annoying being reminded of the amount of words that I have not learnt yet!
Personally I donât get worried about the number of lingqs (the more the better I say). At the moment I am at 15K known words but I also have around 15K lingqs. Within the latter, there are some words that I likely know by now. However, while I do do some flashcarding and my daily lingq list, I am more focused on listening and absorbing new texts.
I was like you for a while when I started. I hoped to get all the words to known. I gave up after a while. I donât think it is effective to try getting every word to known. I think more effective is to read as much as you can and just set the words to known naturally. The important words will appear a lot in many texts so you will get a chance to set them to known anyway. The less important words are not really worth worrying about.
Still, doing a bit of flashcarding and looking over your unknown words from time to time is never a bad idea.
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I personally don´t flashcard anything as I find it utterly boring. I think Steve only reviews words from time to time. You certainly don´t need to ¨clear¨ a backlog of 8k words, you´d drive yourself mad trying to do that.
If you are to review, then choose phrases over isolated words, that way you´ll get a good dose of the sentence structures and patterns whilst at the same time you´ll incidentally pick new words and the context will make them easier to recall.
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Just for fun, I will post my LingQs as a percentage of known words for my languages to see if thereâs correlation.
Spanish â Known Words: 30841 â LingQs: 12760 â LingQs as % of Known Words: 41.4%
Italian â Known Words: 17463 â LingQs: 12591 â LingQs as % of Known Words: 72.1%
Portuguese â Known Words: 10563 â LingQs: 4808 â LingQs as % of Known Words: 45.5%
French â Known Words: 6625 â LingQs: 1347 â LingQs as % of Known Words: 20.3%
What to make of this?
I think the higher percentage of LingQs in Italian shows that my level is not as high as ~17000 known words would indicate, and I thought that was true before doing this exercise anyway. I think Iâm probably a lowish B1 in Italian. The low percentage of LingQs in French is the opposite: my level is a fair bit higher than this (similar to Spanish in spoken fluency), so most of the blue words I come across, I already know. If I read more in French on LingQ, then the gap between known words and LingQs would probably close as I come across more difficult vocabulary.
So maybe the 40-45% in Spanish/Portuguese is my ânormalâ level for how much I LingQ as a percentage of my known words.
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English - 5871 - %28 (Lingqs/KN) - 673353 Words of Reading
Spanish - 7994 - %60 - 233565 WoR
German - 4206 - %31 - 126706 WoR
I agree with hellion and colin and the few others who have commented.
Using round numbers, I have 31,000 known words and 45,000 lingqs, only 5,000 or which are âofficiallyâ known/moved to white. But in truth, I think I know several thousand linq/yellow words that âshouldâ really be white, but i havenât marked them that way yet.
In theory, I could just review my linqs and keep re-reading content I have already lingqed until I learn/move my remaining 40,000 yellow lingqs over to white and have 71,000 known words. Nice number, but reading the same stuff over and over and over and over again might get boring and Iâll never get there. Plus, I wonât every get any more ânewâ/blue words that might be important.