I know about 4.500 russian words, and in the website it says im in the intermediate leve, however i feel im still a beginner, and still have difficulties with intermediate1 texts.
I think since russian declinates words, in order to learn the language you should know around 80,000 words (at least thats the number of russian words that steve knows in his profile, and he looks fluent on the language).
But in other languages (spanish for example) you need around 20,000 in average to speak good the language.
So, i think if you speak 4,500 out of 20,000, then yes that should be an intermediate level in any romance language like spanish, or frenchâŚ
But my question: is it an intermediate level if you are speaking 4,500 words out of 80,000 that you need in average to be able to speak fluently?
If not, i think Lingq should fix that, and in languages with many declesions like russian or chezch, give the intermediate title once you have completed around 10,000 words or something like that.
I would like to know what people think about the subject.
Your estimation is not quite objective.
Steve met these 80,000 words in different Russian texts, but I doubt that he knows them all. And itâs not even necessary.
The main thing is: how do you know your words? I can guess about 20,000 French words, but I can only with a lot of efforts speak French, especially for the abstract topics. Itâs because I know the most French words passive. Itâs possible to me after some thinking to guess their meaning in the text, but itâs diffuicult to recognize them by listening as we have no time for thinking by listening, and itâs even more difficult to reveal, to reproduce them in the speech where we also have no time for thinking.
Besides, the Russian words habe differnt forms- more than 10 forms for every verb in different tenses and 12 forms for every noun by declension in Sg and Pl - so you have to devide general quantity at least for 6: 4,500:6= 750 words!
But if you really know 4500 fundamental words (not the forms) and you handle them actively, it means you can reproduce them by speaking and understant by listening - you have a real intermediate level und you will understand 90% of all converrsations and 70% of the newspaper articles.
So you can check yourself!
Thanks for sharing your point of view, i agree with you.
But as you said i really need to know 4500 fundamental words (not forms) in order to be intermediate. So 4500x6(forms)=27000.
So in lingq database i should have around 27.000 words in order to be considered intermediate. Thats why i think is wrong that the system is giving the calification of intermediate when i i have 4500 words in my database (in fact most of them are just forms, its not even 1.000 fundamental words,)
You are right, but I understand: itâs dofficult to have one system for all languages.
What to do - to learn more and to practice more as vwell.
And never to give up: when you have no success today, it will come soon!
The number of the known words calculated on LingQ is not our goal. The target is understanding and speaking. The number of the known words just motivates us (at least me) to move forward and to observe how it grows.
I think the level is very subjective and cannot be correctly measured in digits.
Keep in mind that the known words levels are not the same for every language. LingQ requires more known words for a language such as Russian:
That said, I wouldnât mind seeing more levels. As Ress has pointed out, they can be motivating.
My level in Japanese according to LingQ is Intermediate 2. I get the impression that the LingQ levels roughly correspond to the CEFR levels so that would mean âB2â in CEFR. Iâve never taken a CEFR test but if I had to guess, I would say my level is more accurately described as âB1â. If my experience is common, I would guess that the levels for Russian are a bit off as well. Here is a quick description of the CEFR levels if you are unfamiliar:
@cgreen0038 - The Known Words total should give you a good idea of your passive knowledge in a language. Of course, if you donât speak much or seldom write, you will probably feel more comfortable with reading and/or listening. We probably all consider words as âKnownâ at a different stage, some being more liberal with the definition while others may be more strict.
If you have 10,000 known words and read a lot about computers and technical things then you may not have as high a level as someone who has 10,000 known words and reads a lot of philosophy or literature.
When it comes down to it, weâre probably all our own best judge of where we sit on the spectrum of fluency, and itâs difficult for any sort of test or metric to measure that level accurately. Iâm not sure if there is a magic number for known words targets, though hopefully the current targets serve the purpose instead of giving people a sense of where they stand and also serving as a source of motivation to keep learning.
@alex - Yep, computers and technical things would definitely describe a good portion of what I read. I would say my known words count most accurately describes my reading ability⌠when Iâm doing other language related tasks, Iâm not normally looking at some text on LingQ. Regardless, even when reading familiar subjects, I would consider myself to be at a B1 level. I can tackle much more difficult texts with the aid of LingQ but without it, I think B1 is accurate.
Anyway, the level comparison wasnât intended as a critique. I was just trying to gauge how the LingQ levels corresponded. I do find the levels and word count motivating. Sometimes it is hard to feel like youâre making progress and I can look at my LingQ stats and see that progress. Also, like I said, I wouldnât mind seeing more levels in the future because of the motivation. I wouldnât worry about categorizing them in the library separately though⌠that would likely be too difficult to determine. Maybe just a âAdvanced 2+â category in the library.
@cgreen0038 - Certainly, that all makes sense. We did try to get an overall sense of words in a language by taking similar texts and looking at the number of words in them, but itâs tough to come up with a really accurate list as Iâm sure you can imagine.
I donât think we would add an Advanced 2+ category, just because it would be difficult to assign that level to lessons â it may end up being too arbitrary. That being said, we could add more levels to the Avatar to reflect the progress of users who have passed our current limits, or perhaps look at some other way to encourage users to progress further in their languages. Suggestions are always welcome
@alex - I think we are describing the same thing. I was just suggesting Advanced 2+ to be a renamed Advanced 2 in order to reflect any levels added beyond Advanced 2. I imagine that would keep people asking for where Advanced 3 lessons are or whatever the added levels would be called.
Interesting discussion. I have done a bit of French and a bit of Russian on LingQ and I did notice that the number of new words in each new lesson went down a lot faster in French than in Russian.
