Is extensive or intensive reading faster for vocabulary acquisition?

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For me, listing to the audiobook at the same time is how I increase my reading speed. My reading-only speed was 100-110 or so wpm and I thought this was too slow, so I decided to get the audiobook. Now I’m listening to the audiobook on 1.4x (205 wpm). However, I have to reduce the playback speed to 1.3x (190 wpm) or lower when my concentration is low or I’m tired though.

Exactly. Let’s run a rough calculation.

My extensive reading speed: ~200 wpm
@GMelillo’s ‘semi-extensive’ reading speed on LingQ: ~100 wpm
@GMelillo understands 100% of unknown words, as he looks them up in the dictionary
Let’s assume I can only guess 30% of the unknown words from context

If we assume the texts have the same number of unknown words and you need to be able to understand the word to learn it, then the increase in the reading speed would not compensate for the reduction in unknown words understood.

Eg. If both people read for 10 hours and we assume on average 1 complete unknown words per 100 words:

Me: 200 wpm * 60 mins * 10 hours = 120k words read
→ 120k * 1 unknown word / 100 words = 1.2k unknown words
→ 1.2k unknown words * 30% = 360 unknown words with meaning understood, so therefore are able to be processed and started in the learning process

@GMelillo: 100 wpm * 60 mins * 10 hours = 60k words read
→ 60k / 100 * 1 = 600 unknown words
→ 600 * 100% = 600 unknown words with meaning understood

Obviously it doesn’t exactly work like this, because you don’t really need to understand a word to start learning it, but it goes a long way.

So in this example, we can see that @GMelillo’s ‘semi-extensive’ reading with a dictionary on LingQ would be more efficient to learn completely unknown words. However, if we use my reading speed on LingQ (55 wpm, so about half of that of @GMelillo’s), with this rough calculation, it would not be! In other words, reading speed is a major factor. Furthermore, studying material on LingQ, you are highly likely to have more unknown words than that during extensive reading.

In this rough calculation, we can also see that the thing to do to increase the effectiveness of extensive reading is to try and find texts, where you can understand more unknown words from context. Eg. Read translations of books you’ve already read in another language, or non-fiction books on a subject you already know, etc.

Furthermore, what extensive reading has going for it is that because it’s much easier to do than semi-intensive reading and likely to be more fun, you may just end up doing more of it. I.e. studying an extra hour per night.

But the real benefit of extensive reading is drilling in the words, which you’ve already started to learn. For this reason, it’s likely to be more effective once you are better in the language, as there are more words, which you are in the process of learning (eg. I have 35k lingQs which I’m still learning).

That’s what I think when I’m writing a definition for a low-frequency word, which I’m never going to see again…

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I imagine the answer would partly depend on one’s level.

I still can’t read French well enough in terms of vocabulary and grammar to read on my own with satisfaction. So I stick with LingQ.

My reading is speeding up and getting more comfortable. At some point I will be able to “extensive read” without feeling I’m wasting my time.

I remember when I was in 6th grade, my reading took off and I could read science fiction novels. Then I was able to pick up much vocabulary from reading. I never looked back.

I’m hoping that will be the case for French within six months or so.

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Currently I read “journal en française facile” (Easy French News) for an hour in the morning to pick up low frequency words. I don’t do the Levels of Known. I just mark the new words as Known. If I sense they are not words which will stick, I write them down with meanings (and gender for nouns) in a notebook.

Over the following days, I read back through my notebook, refreshing those words until they stick.

Then I switch to whatever novel I’m reading and read it intensively in Sentence View, not just for meaning, but also for listening and pronunciation. It usually takes me a minute or three to get through a sentence.

By the time I finish a sentence I’ve learned all the words. Though if not, I put such words in my notebook for later review.

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About Levels of Known…

I imagine it’s a useful feature for some, but I find clicking through the levels, then trying to decide whether I really Know a word takes me out of my flow. Likewise trying to decide if something is really a Word or should be Trashed.

Unless something is a sound effect or gibberish, I mark everything as Known and keep moving.

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Don’t mistake my preference for lingq-ing words and taking quick peeks at the dictionary with a love of process for the sake of process. I aim to reduce time-serving activity to a minimum. I don’t agonize about secondary and tertiary definitions when I create lingqs. Nor do I stress getting fine-grained English language equivalents for every Italian word I lingq.

To take an example from Italian that comes to mind, I understand that “dibattersi” and “dimenarsi” and “divincolarsi”, when they refer to bodily motion, mean something similar. They are in the same general semantic area. But since I’m not using Lingq to help me produce English language definitions of those words, I’ve never gone in and made sure that any lingqs for those words accurately parse the differences between them. And despite the fact that I cannot necessarily produce nuanced English language distinctions between those words, I certainly have forms of those words as known words, because when I see them in context, with my feel for the way the words are constructed (I see the roots “battere” and “menare” and “vincolo” and that gives me some rough intuition to go on), I feel perfectly fine reading right through them.

For me reading with Ling is something like assisted-extensive reading. I want the lightest interference from the platform consistent with the help I need to stay in the flow of reading. Imagine if when you were extensive reading you could look up any time you felt a little confused and there would be an assistant instantly showing you the appropriate short, rough definition of any difficult expression on an index card. With a glance you look up, get oriented, and get right back to reading. That’s how I read with Lingq.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, @nfera, but by dropping the reading out loud I could get reading speed up to 183 wpm, while still interacting with my lingqs. This light, hit and run lingqing while very vaguely subvocalizing mentally is how I’ve read the majority of the ~2.5 million words of books in the last year.

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@GMelillo With your reading speed of 183 wpm on LingQ, then this seems like minimal time waste using the LingQ system? Or do you have a high offline/unassisted reading speed? If not, the semi-extensive reading with LingQ is worth the drop of reading speed, as you, like @S.I, keep the LingQ time-waste to an absolte minimum, trying to keep every second down. In other words the semi-extensive reading with LingQ is more efficient than extensive reading, if you can get down the time-waste faff of using the software, as it’s impossible to guess the majority of unknown words from context alone.

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@nfera I’ve never measured my reading speed in my native language, or really thought about a comparison to whatever the average might be in reading speed, but I have always been a big reader. So I’ve got a lot of practice.

I’ve also never thought about whether my reading method is especially efficient, but I have been self-conscious about not letting aspects of the LingQ platform drive my behavior into pathways that strike me as wasting time. I hate typing on my phone and so I decided early on that there was no reason to muck around with definitions already present if the definition someone else created is close enough to help me understand the sentence I am reading right now.

I have caught little mistakes in the definitions some times. But think about it: am I really going to learn in these mistakes? I look at the definition, get a sense of the context and move on. I hardly ever remember some English definition of the Italian words I am seeing, so a slightly off-target definition isn’t going to get me too far off track, any more than a slightly off-target inference in context would get you off track when reading extensively without a dictionary. And if a small error in a lingq isn’t going to cause problems for me, why waste time correcting it?

One thing I do is with word sets like “dimenarsi”, “dibattersi,” and “divincolarsi” is when a set of words rises to consciousness because they are in the same semantic area and are vaguely associated, or because they are spelled similarly but have different meanings, or are just easily confused, I throw them in a spreadsheet. I might look up a definition when I put them in, but I don’t make any notes or write any definitions in the sheet. I just have a long list of easily confused sets. When I update my spreadsheet, which is keeping track of my corpus of words read and TV shows watched, and helps me see if I am on track to meet my yearly goals, I often glance at my list of word sets.

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I think there is a difference between quickly look up words in a dictionary to write the general meaning of a word and read an entire dictionary definition of the same word.

It depends on the goal of a person too. A translator or interpreter might want to become very good in one language only, and so would read a lot more entire definitions. Others can just quickly look up words, write down a series of possible definitions and move on. You don’t have to stress out about it because there will be thousands.

I usually write down everything when I use LingQ, that’s why I use LingQ, but I quickly add all/almost all possible translations and move on.
When you encounter the same word over and over, you start to get the meaning of it and you can forget and delete any sort of translation. Just relying on your associations.
Then, if you find that word in a very weird scenario that you didn’t consider, you can look up again. But is it worth it? It depends on your goal with the language!

The only definitions that I have started to read constantly on a daily basis are definitions of words on my own language. Yes, because we study other languages but we are not excellent on our own. There are tons of words and various meaning that we don’t know in our own language.
I’m surprise on how many details there are that I wasn’t aware off.

This is why when they tell me that C2 is difficult, I reply that’s just an exam. It has nothing to do with mastering a language. For a translator, C2 should be just the minimum requirement to start to know a language. For a polyglot, C1/C2 should be the level of maintenance to avoid losing the language so soon when starting a new one.

If I wanted to become a serious writer, I could spend my entire life on improving my writing style on my own native language only. So, what are we really talking about when we think about languages?

If we are honest, we should start thinking about the level we want to reach as second language learners. If we want to manage more languages, then we need to lower our expectations.
We still can do an excellent job but we need to stress out a lot less and just do our best.

Imho.

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I have also thought about this question and usually aim to do the following when reading on LingQ:

The first time I encounter a word I LingQ it with 1 by quickly selecting a relevant translation (typically just the top one). If there is no relevant translation, then I link it with “?” as text.

The second time that I encounter a word (i.e., when I encounter a word marked with 1), then I mark it with 2. I may add a detailed definition, but I may also leave the “?” or whatever default definition I have already chosen.

The third (and fourth, fifth, etc.) time that I encounter a word (i.e., when I encounter a word marked with 2) then I aim to select a proper translation, even if that means opening an external dictionary and manually entering text for the LingQ.

However, this is only in theory and in practice I don’t strictly stick to this system. If I feel that a word is highly relevant for me or remember hearing it outside of LingQ, then I may look it up in the dictionary and create a detailed LingQ the first time I encounter it. Sometimes (e.g., when reading a novel that I am really enjoying) I may also have a strong desire to understand every word and thus use the dictionary more, simply because I want to (without thinking about language learning efficiency).

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Thanks everyone for the responses. It has really made me think.

I came to the conclusion that having access to a dictionary would be the fastest method for vocabulary acquisition. The issue is reducing the faff that comes with a dictionary. This is especially evident on LingQ with respect to words with few to no Community Definitions. For Italian, this is the case for medium- to low-frequency words, which is mainly what I’m encountering as an upper intermediate bordering on lower advanced. I’m very much considering if LingQ is the way to do it.

For example, using something like Language Reactor on talking heads YouTube videos seems to handle this issue better. With dual subtitles, you can quickly glance down at the translated English sentence to get an idea of what the definition probably is. This means that generally I don’t have to pause the audio to get the definition. Or if you’re fast, you can click on the word to get the two or three definitions of the word. Only occassionally, if there are two or three unknown words in the one sentence, would I have to repeat the sentence. In other words, I can cover much more wph than with LingQ.

If anyone else has any other ideas how this issue of the LingQ definition faff can be solved, I’m all ears. Buying an eReader and a bilingual dictionary plug-in might be the way to go. Hmm…

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I find that extensive reading on an eReader is a nice complement to LingQ, but (at least with my 10 years old Kindle Paperwhite) it is not a viable solution for reading while listening. Dictionary lookup is too slow to be able to get into the same flow as on LingQ (e.g., I think that it would be impossible for me to listen to the audio book and not pause while looking up words). But when there are no good community definitions, then I guess that the eReader is actually faster than LingQ. It would be really nice if LingQ could include a normal dictionary lookup in the sidebar, so we don’t have to rely on community definitions.

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I assume you mean a dictionary someone out of the “LingQ” popup? because there you can choose any online dictionary you like. An extra click, of course, but not too far off, although probably difficult in the context of R+L without much pause.

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You can try like Toby (noxialisrex) has suggested in past posts (or maybe during his video interview with Lingq a couple years back)…While R+L he’ll just take the first definition, right or wrong and not worry about it much. If he sees the word 3 times THEN he really takes a closer look at the definition. Or something to that effect…Maybe he’ll comment on the thread a little more.

For myself, I’ll more often than not use one of the first ones that pop up…but if it doesnt’ fit, I’ll look it up and then I try to look through the rest of the users entries to see if someone has one that matches what makes sense in the sentence. A little slow, but less so than typing it out for me (on the phone). Another option might be to read a lesson in a similar fashion to Toby…i.e. fast. Then come back to some of the words that you gave quick answer for (i.e. ho through all the yellow words…which by the way can be a very good review as well…just hopping from yellow word to yellow word and reading just those words in context).

By all means, use Language Reactor too. I use it for movies or tv shows on Netflix. It’s great, and entertaining. Maybe after you can import it into LingQ and just LingQ all the new words (don’t necessarily read the whole thing again, unless you want to).

I think it maybe just makes sense to spend some time that is more “extensive” and some time that is more intensive.

For example, I’m reading a book right now, or maybe a news article I import into LingQ. I’m reading those in sentence mode, checking out the sentence meaning when I don’t know some of the words, or if it’s complicated. LingQing, maybe re-reading the sentence. Then I also have been spending time doing reading + listening at the same time with minimal look ups…Mostly I do this with the Easy German podcast…which as a patreon I have available a transcription player which follows along (similar to what LingQ has in their “immersive reader”). At the top though it also has 10 or so words + meanings in that particular passage so you can quickly look up for some hints. Worse case if you get really lost, then there is a “translate” passage button for what the particular speaker just said. Very convenient. Also, if just listening to their podcast through a podcast player, they don’t have the transcript going at the same time, but they do have those 10 or so words that show up with the meanings in the podcast player and change every 30 sec or so. Easy Italian may have the same thing if you are interested (of course patreon membership required most likely).

Other than that, you are essentially doing a similar thing with Language Reactor. Or you could take articles online, open up in Edge Browser immersive reader and just do some R+L. No lookups. Just import later if you want to run through the unknown words.

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Just thought of something else I do a lot…read online news or articles, but simply using the google translate plugin (auto popup). DeepL has one too, but the google translate one is a little better for quickness. Just read with that. You can click a word, or highlight a phrase (or multiple sentences) and get a very quick translation when needed. You can go through an article very quickly. Then if you want you can import into Lingq and just quickly go through the blue words.

I personally go in and manually update my stats when I’m doing stuff outside of LingQ as I like to keep some form of record of what I’m doing outside. It’s often just an estimate and I ratchet down the time of things like “movie listening” as it’s probably just 50% or less of the running time.

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I guess my take is the optimal way to learn is when you are just beyond your comfort zone. This is probably just a re-telling of “N+1”, but anecdotally I see a lot of truth to that. Now depending on what you’re learning and what you already know, this is often not achievable or can be very fluid.

To help the balance, there are a lot of things you can do to make something more comfortable, e.g., using LingQ! I’ve said this before, but the magic LingQ is it makes interesting content, more accessible, faster.

By (re-)starting my language learning journey by watching the same movie 50+ times, reading things I was already familiar with, and choosing a handful of words to create a very careful definition for, I suspect I was naturally creating an environment that was more comfortable and therefore more optimal for acquisition.

However, over time you will become comfortable with the things you are doing and need to make changes. I did this by R+L’ing and increasing the speed (up to around 1,5x), not worrying about LingQ definitions except for when I knew it was coming up several times, etc. But as R+L isn’t really reflective of “real life” I moved more towards podcasts, reading or listening, conversations, etc.

Now I am mostly comfortable in any scenario, and have to really seek out opportunities to get input that might be difficult to understand. /r/place was a good opportunity for this because the voice chats were very chaotic and most people have laptop microphones making the audio very messy.

So to bring it back to the question of this topic, I’d answer “it depends”. Depending on what you’re reading, your experience, knowledge and circumstances, any of those options may be the best for you, but as you become more comfortable it will shift towards extensive reading.

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I feel like the answer is simply it depends. Back in the day when I read paper books before e-books had taken off I would look up words for the first couple chapters and write them down then just read the rest of the book through pretty much. I guess this is kind of a compromise but really the majority of my reading was without a dictionary and I just skipped anything I didn’t understand. This was quite effective for German for me and I was in my early 20’s. I think it would have worked just as well for Spanish and French.

I would say that the farther the language is from your native language the less this works or at least the less it worked for me. Studying Japanese I had to look up almost every word or I would get lost to where everything felt useless (if I got lost with German I just kept going and somehow it was ok I guess). I’m also an older learner now. I learned Japanese in my late 30’s and I’m working on Korean in my 40’s. I think it makes sense that I have to slow down more just like everything else I do.

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For those who are interested, I just finished my first book series in Italian as extensive reading, which was Harry Potter, of course. The first three books I read, but I found that my reading speed was very slow, at about ~100 wpm. I decided to get the audiobooks to read while listening as a method of increasing my reading speed, while also getting in some listening practice at the same time. At the beginning, I was listening to the audio at 1.1x (~160 wpm), but as I became familiar with the voice of the narrator, etc., by the 7th book, I was listening to it at 1.65x (~240 wpm).

Upon reflection, I am considering how much I improved over the course of these million words read as extensive reading (while listening). The answer is I can’t say for sure. Apart from trusting the process, that more comprehensible input = improvements in understanding, I can’t say any specific, measured gains in vocabulary. I went through some of the vocabulary lists of New Words on LingQ just now and found that most of the New Words I still did not know. Nearly all the New Words I marked as known were just different forms of words I’ve known for months or longer. So it appears that I learnt very few completely new word families over the course of these million words extensively read (while listening).

Why? I’m not sure, but considering I read 70%+ of the book series while listening on increased speed this might be reason. When I was listening at such a speed, I didn’t have time to stop and reflect on the meaning of a particular unknown word. Perhaps this was only because of the material that I chose and my level - that is, there were many unknown words, rather than say one every now and again. But obviously I understood enough to be able to play the movie in my imagination. But if you compare this to reading-only, you can control your reading speed to spend more time on decyphering the meaning of unknown words.

That said, I definitely soldified many words, which I already knew, familiarised myself with alternate forms of words, which I already knew, and perhaps learnt some of the words, which would’ve been yellow/‘learning’/lingQs (I can’t say for certain), as well as increased my listening comprehension. But for learning completely new word families, I think I learnt very few from these million words read. Or maybe one million words read as extensive reading while listening with my level of comprehension and such a speed is not enough to really judge the results.

Edit: May be a flawed analysis as being able to recognise a word in a list, devoid of any context, means a very high level of familiarity with the word, compared to encountering the word in a sentence with the context of the story.

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That’s what I meant by this

If unknown words are equal to the known ones in the sense that they’re flying by with the same speed and intensity of the attention paid to them, why would they stick at all. Don’t know how it works for those who manage to acquire vocab through this technique.

But as the natural (even more than)-SRS it works fine and deserves to be among the best tools for making the language learning process to be more engaging.

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This is a very honest answer. We have so many cognitive dissonances in our mind that is not so easy to admit we don’t know.

You are studying Italian, funny thing, from Italy comes the answer to fast food: slow food. Maybe you should start to embrace it in learning languages as well. It is part of the language after all. :laughing:

I also give you another perspective: what you learn fast you forget faster. Each thing has its own time to be metabolised and processed. I know we are obsessed with speed and doing more and having more words, or languages, or skills but…

Unfortunately, many of these things are very difficult to measure because there are too many variables to consider, otherwise it would be nice to know what it would be to crunch 10M words fast and 8M much slower on the same amount of time. Who would come out with the best overall language management? Difficult to say but I root for the slower.

I have considered that different things require different speeds . For example, if I just want to increase blue words I need to increase speed (but as you said, the result it is just on the ones we have already some sort of association and few others). If I want to focus on yellow word I need to go more at normal speed. If I want to focus on orthography or sentence structure I need to slow speed down because my mind needs more time to process multiple information. Even worse if I want to focus on the writing style (impossible without doing other studyings).
If I slow down too much my mind wander and doesn’t maintain focus so for each task I cannot go too fast or too slow.

This also can change on many different factors and for each person it could be totally different.

For each language I read/listen to in this period, I use different speeds for different targets depending on the day. It is just like adjusting the music volume knob at the right position depending on the music, day, device and so on. Fine tuning our learning.

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I just don’t think that it’s their sole way of learning, and it just doesn’t always get expressed that they are also doing some more intensive learning, or SRS, or reviewing words at the end of a chapter or book.

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