I looked at my stats for where I was at at around 100,000 words read. I was around 3600 words (Lingq words…i.e. not word family’s). edit: Was just thinking about this again…I did have this many known words, but I also had done the Memrise A1 “course” (no longer available). So that probably did give me a very good advantage and probably accounts for at least half of the above 3600 known words.
Assuming you are referring to the way Lingq counts words I’d say you’re a fair bit behind. HOWEVER, this also depends on how you, yourself, define the word as learned. My definition, as it relates to LingQ specifically, is to count it as known, if I understand the word in the present context I’m reading. If your definition is whether you feel you can recognize the word and give the meaning outside of in context, or even harder to judge…can you use the word in output. i.e. you can translate from english (or whatever your native language is) and output it in the target language. If that is the case, I think your possibly not as bad off as you think.
The nature of Lingq, if you’re using it solely as an assisted reader, in my opinion, makes it better to simply judge the word as known, if you can recognize/understand it in context. This is very easy to judge. It doesn’t require any extra thought contemplating whether you can actually output the word, or whether you think you may know it just from looking at it. If I understand it in that sentence, I mark it known and move on to reading. If I don’t then I will bump it up a level (up to 3). Once it’s at 3 I just leave it until I know it based on context. If I previously marked it known and I don’t understand it in some other context, I’ll usually drop it back down to 3.
Now, if you are doing all that and you are still at 300, I would ask, what things are you reading? Are you using some of the beginner material in the Spanish Lingq library? Are you using the mini stories? These would be good places to start. Obviously don’t try to do content that is above your level.
You might also benefit from getting a book like Teach Yourself Complete Spanish. That’ll also give you basic grammar and useful sentences. You could add these sentences to a lesson in Lingq and study them there too. Or Assimil Spanish. Hard for me to explain, but you can essentially import the contents of this book from the subtitles of the mp3’s. Or heck, just type the sentences out from the lessosn into Lingq as a Lingq lessons.
I personally used Assimil German initially with Lingq by importing it. Then also review the lessons in the book which give enough grammar points to not feel so lost.
Finally, you really haven’t read a lot yet so even if you are at 3000 words by my definition above, you don’t really know much yet. Gotta keep plugging away.
How are you using LingQ so far?