So, what’s the official position on this?
Are we meant to ignore names and other proper nouns (e.g. city names) or not?
What about names that also have meaning as words, as can happen in Chinese?
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I Ignore everything that is
- a Name
- A city
- A country (unleyy it is different than in english or german)
- and any words that are identical in english or german
that way I make shure that my known word count is not inflated
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I wish it were that easy!
This symbol 还 is actually several words, including being a name. However, LingQ only allows for one LingQ per symbol, with a single pronunciation and status. If I’d run across 还 first as a name, it would have been ignored and then need to be added back in along with whatever meaning I happened to run into at the time.
I’m sure the people who designed and built LingQ had something in mind for how to deal with things like this, and I’d love to know what it is so I can at least attempt to use the software as intended.
FWIW, there is also no way that I know of to review the list of ignored words/phrases so that it can be cleaned up. That makes it pretty important to do this properly from the beginning.
We have officials?! 
I sometimes add Lingq’s that refers to city names or such, so stuff that is rather specific, but mark them as known. For individual names I usually don’t do so as they on one hand occour often enough to be somewhat rememberable and on the other hand (in Korean) come with a title, so they are easely recognizable as names even on first encounter. With city names this isn’t the case and sometimes it can take some time to find out it is such a thing, so just marking it saves me some time in the future.
It may affect the stats and the known word counts of new lessons, but that is only a matter if you bother with that.
Why are you asking?
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Short of an AI analysis to assess the context I can’t imagine how you could devise rules for this that work across all languages. For writing systems based on the Roman alphabet then if LingQs could distinguish between an initial capital letter or not then this would deal with many instances of the issue, ie where a proper name appears in the middle of a sentence. But there’s still a problem when it’s the first word in a sentence. (Not seriously suggesting/requesting this as a new feature since I largely ignore the word stats also. And there are definitely higher priorities to address like the multi-word issue in Vietnamese.)
Actually there’s a related and slightly amusing/puzzling issue with Vietnamese, where children, especially girls I think, are given names of qualities thought to be attractive like perfume or water. So I sometimes receive messages translated by Google Translate (click of a single button in Telegram) like ‘Smell visits today’, which I have to try to decipher. Hương is the relevant name here, but Hương (first word in a sentence) or hương (forgot to capitalise first letter) translates as perfume, but also odour or smell.
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I’m asking because it’s really not clear or obvious, and it’s very difficult to change later because there’s no way to access the list of ignored items. The designers must have had some intent in mind, and that’s most likely the best way to do it.
I use the new word counts and percentages heavily, often sorting courses by % New Words and going through the course in that order.
One of the biggest benefits of LingQ (to me, at least at this stage) is being able to quickly and fairly accurately identify appropriate content for my level.
As far as I know, I don’t think there is any official stance on this.
Not limited to proper nouns, my opinion is that if the meaning of a word in context is unclear, and its meaning is not explicitly explained within the text but instead relies on dictionary knowledge, then it should be treated as a learning target.
Regarding proper nouns, I consider whether they are used without explanation in the context in which they appear. If they are used without explanation, it means that they are self-evident to the speakers of the language. I believe this kind of knowledge should be included as part of what is necessary to acquire the language.
If I later feel the need to add an ignored word to my learning targets, I can do so when it reappears.
If it doesn’t reappear, there’s no need to learn it.
Statistically speaking, the outcome will likely be the same whether a word is ignored or marked as known. I think the sorting is based on the number of blue words.
Ignored Words:
- Commonly used personal names
Example: Donald - Character names appearing in fictional works
- Place names that are rarely mentioned elsewhere
Learning Targets:
- Country names, capital names
Example: France, London - Major city names or state names in the regions where the target language is spoken
Example: California - Names specific to famous literary works that everyone knows
Example: Cinderella - Words with unusual spelling that correspond to well-known figures
Example: Archimedes, Gutenberg - Brand names or company names considered common knowledge to speakers of the target language
Example: Hershey - Words commonly used as personal names but that also have other meanings
Example: Jack, Rose (Note 1) - Words with the same origin as those in the learner’s native language, with similar pronunciation or spelling
Example: tennis - テニス (Japanese: tenisu), 온도 (Korean: ondo) - 温度 (Japanese: ondo), 水 (Chinese: shuǐ) - 水 (Japanese: mizu) (Note 2)
Notes:
Note 1
Based on this, “smith” should technically be treated as a learning target. However, since it hasn’t appeared even once in the context of meaning “blacksmith,” it is probably marked as ignored for now. I’m looking forward to seeing it appear as “blacksmith” so I can add it to my learning targets.
Note 2
By the way, my native language is Japanese.
I’d like to add that Japanese speakers generally don’t know how to spell proper nouns in foreign languages other than Chinese.
Additionally, Chinese often has significantly different pronunciations.
For example, Xí Jìnpíng (習近平) is written with the same characters in Japanese, but it is pronounced as “Shū Kimpei.”
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From my impression the designers have a heavely English based view on languages, as can be seen in all the languages that differ strongly from it. So I wouldn’t expect that to be the case. There is definetely a basic concept, and that alone is more then you often have with other “learning apps” like Duolingo, but it’s not that every aspect has been taken into consideration. If so, why would they hide it from there users?
It also depends on the languages, both the one you learn and how it relates to the languages you already know. For example, it is easy for me to identify names in Spanish, as they don’t differ that much from the ones I know as a German who can understand English. I guess it wouldn’t be a big deal for any european language in general. Last names often can have a different meaning, but they are either coupled with the first name or a title. So I can ignore them first and if they appear later on not used as a name, I can still add the meaning (or vice versa). In Korean the names are obviously very different from european ones. However, I made the experience that names usually aren’t used for anything else. In addition, they are usually coupled with a title, too.
That makes sense. What I wonder though is to which extent names would actually mess with that numbers. So, how high is the percentage of names among the words lingq’d. And would the difference between lingq’ing them and ignoring them might not just come down to a slightly different percentage among those lessons that are fit for learning? So for example, if your sweet spot when ignoring them is around 10%, for example, lingq’ing them might just increase that number to 11-12%, if at all.
What I’m trying to say is that the effect of that decision might be so minor, that investing a lot of thought into it might not be worth it. 
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The other thing is if you use the unknown word count to figure what is your next lesson then it does not matter, as names are unknown words too and you have to identify them as names. You can also assume that you have in most stories some names occurring.
In the end it is the decision of the learner, what to do with names. You can just ignore them and change the status when they occur in some context as normal word. Or just add them to the known words. And of course you can also change their status again when you encounter them with some other meaning.
In the end the number of known words is just a number that should go up with your activity. As long it goes up you are making progress.
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im Chinese, and I can tell you that I have never seen anyone in my entire life, no matter online or in real life, that one’s surname is 还. Just don’t memorize it as a surname.
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I am still experimenting with methods for learning Chinese. In Chinese, learning the correspondence between characters and pronunciation needs to be done alongside learning vocabulary. For this reason, I cannot treat a word as “ignored” simply because I currently see no need to study its meaning.
Instead, I leave words in a “status 1” state if I judge that their meanings don’t need to be studied immediately. In this regard, I find the LingQ system quite restrictive. It would be better if users could keep words marked as “blue,” but the administrators stubbornly refuse to allow this.
As for English, I used to treat words ‘commonly used as names’ as “known.” However, as I progressed, I realized it was impossible to determine what is common and what is unusual. Because of this, I decided to ignore all such words. Now, I mark them as “ignored” whenever I encounter them.
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