Hey Lingq Community
For romance languages for example. Is achieving Advance 1 enough to be fluent or does one need to reach Advance 2? Currently already reached Advance 1 for spanish on Lingq for known words. Recently, I have noticed that new words which I have encountered seem not to be too common and important.
Personally went beyond for Mandarin Chinese but would like to not repeat that process again and go for the bare minimum for fluency in terms of knowing how many words.
Thank you
no. theyâre just scales that help you understand how much you can understand reading. Youâll need actual speaking practice to speak fluently.
I became comfortable reading books without lingq in French at around 60k known words or +/- around 4 to 5 million words read. But thatâs me⌠Other people feel comfortable earlier, but at advance 1 you will still encounter a lot of words you donât know.
edit: Iâm advance 2 in Japanese, but wouldnât consider myself fluent in reading/listening or speaking (about 30 hours of speaking practice and 1.5 million words read and 100 hours of listening).
On the other hand, you can probably stop at advance 1 and dump a lot of hours into speaking and be good enough to have conversations.
No. I am, according to LingQ, A2 in French. In addition I have done as much listening outside of LingQ as in, so Iâm actually well beyond A2. I can understand dubbed films and most podcasts and radio debates, native French films are a struggle.
However, there is no way I can speak fluently. I could have a conversation on a range of subjects with a listener who is prepared for pauses while I search for the right word. I need to start speaking.
The Krashen claim that one learns to speak simply by listening is poop.
@chytran nope, I share @azarya numbers. Considering the current LingQâs level choices, I would always aim beyond Advanced 2.
However, if you choose one specific topic that you are interested in, and stay within that topic, you would probably feel comfortable with different numbers. But you should know already this stuff.
If for fluency, you mean speaking comfortably, thatâs something else that LingQ wonât help achieving. You can definitely use a lot less active words and be totally fluent speaking. Conversational skills are different than reading skills, etc.
Sorry. Meant to say for reading and listening fluency if the amount is enough but it seems that I will need to learn more. The speaking hours makes sense and will eventually do that.
I see. Thank you for your input
Reading some newer posts I see you were only talking about literacy and listening ability. I generally feel that for most Germanic or Romance languages, you become just about fluently literate at the 40K mark or so, but it depends on the texts you are reading. If you are reading fairly complicated texts, you may still run into quite a few words you donât know at that point. Iâd say something around 60K to be pretty much all around fluently literate, but it probably depends on the person a bit too, including what rules they set in marking words as âknownâ.
I see. This makes sense. Will most likely go to the 40k mark or Advance 2 standards in this case to to convert to listening ability in order to listen to most videos. More unlikely to listen or read super complex text such as science, religion, or political related content. Thank you @rokkvi !
Getting a high known words count can be âgamedâ though. If you read a lot of articles about science, geography and politics for example, youâll probably understand a lot of words that are almost the same between all western languages (enzyme, electric, magneticâŚ, names of countries and people etc.) You could certainly quit reading in LingQ at a lower level and move on to real books and it would work, but it might take a longer time. There is also nothing wrong with mixing up reading physical books and reading on LingQ, but Iâd not abandon reading on LingQ until at least at about 40-60K known words. Like I said it depends a bit on whether you mark proper nouns (names of people and places) as known or dismiss them and other factors.
I personally mark almost everything except words from other languages as known and I try to get to 60-70K known words in LingQ, although I may certainly mix reading physical books in before that point.
There are different levels of passive fluency including understanding scientific papers and presentations, newspapers, casual day to day language and street language, in that order of difficulty where the last is hardest. Oh and then there are regional variations.
I think when you âreachâ a new level on LingQ, it means you finally have achieved the previous level, and are now reaching across the threshold to the level you are currently listed by the app as being at. So when you finally enter Advanced 1, you really are reading comfortably at an I2 level, and with difficulty at A1. And a true A1, which means LingQ telling you have now reached A2, is probably enough for functional reading fluency, meaning you can take books to the beach, even if some will still be more work than they would be in your native language.
@chytran Depends on your definition of fluent, what criteria you have to mark a word as Known, and also the content you study.
Personally, I consider myself fluent in Italian and I have only 25k Known Words (so got the Intermediate 2 badge ages ago). Italian Advanced 1 is at 29,980 Known Words. I actually consider that I achieved fluency a while back. The fluency I refer to is conversational fluency. I can listen to Italian podcasts and watch Italian TV series and know the vast majority of words and understand what is being said. I can struggle through novel paper books, but there are quite a few unknown words, so itâs not easy. So I have achived conversational fluency with the number of Known Words I currently have, but not literary fluency. If you want to achieve literary fluency and be able to read anything, then itâs worth going for Advanced 2 (or perhaps above, as others were mentioning).
Levels in any learning system tend not to be representative of real world skill. You can be advanced in a number of apps, courses and programs, but still be incapable of speaking with any level of fluency.
And even the word âfluencyâ is notoriously unspecific. Are we fluent when we can understand everything we read or hear, or does it only pertain to spoken language? If the latter, then are we fluent when we can get through everyday tasks easily, or does it require that we can easily hold a conversation on general subjects, or does it require more specialized abilities?
Everyoneâs answers to the above questions will be different, so I fear there is no solid answer to your questions.
For me, fluency requires only the ability to speak naturally in oneâs second languages on everyday subjects. I suspect thatâs a very liberal definition, and probably doesnât match what most people think of as fluency.
This is what I am referring to. Thank you for clarifying. Conversational fluency is the goal. Not much of a reader but will read when needed
That sounds quite reasonable to me. An English friend speaks English as his mother tongue, as well as Catalan, French and Spanish having gone to school in Andorra, and his second languages would probably fit your description.
Word count is an artificial measuring stick. It is more about gamifying learning and setting goals via work count, In Spanish, each verb conjugation ends up being a ton of words to count. I would measure real ability based on being able to listen or read text at normal speed first time you hear it. Reading slow is fine, it really depends upon your goals. I speak Thai fluently, and can read it slowly, but reading movie subtitles in real time is a still joke. Focusing on other languages now. Good luck.
From my experience with studying Arabic using Lingq: Advanced 1 is by far not enough for passive fluency, neither is Advanced 2. I have about 140.000 known words now and would say Iâm now somewhere at an advanced level when it comes to listening and reading. Itâs important to mention though that Iâm importing material both in MSA and different dialects (though mostly Levantine dialects). Also a lot of that material is AI-transcribed, which means that sometimes words are spelled wrong or differently and in that way also increasing the word count.
As mentioned before its an artificial way of measuring fluency, with big differences in the number of known words you need to reach âpassive fluencyâ for every language.