I’ve gone through a couple of archived lessons and marked over 500 “known” words as “not known”. On my statistics bars, my “known words” for the week is -500, as I would expect. But my total “known words” in Russian in the info section higher up the pages hasn’t gone down.
When I finally get round to learning those 500 words, will my total “known words” go up another 500?
Once a word is Known, there are only two possible places for it to go. Either it can be saved as a LingQ or it can be ignored. Ignoring a word should remove it from your Known Words total.
It seems you might be trying to make the words ‘New’ again, but there is no way to move a word back to New once you have interacted with it. After all, by very definition it isn’t new anymore 
By double clicking an unknown word, you aren’t actually moving it back to new, rather you are just temporarily allowing yourself to interact with the word as if it were new.
Hope this all makes sense!
The point is, however, that a white word (known word) that I LingQ anew should be subtracted from my “known words” list. Let’s look at this next week.
I’m baffled now as to why I marked them all as known in the first place. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
@skyblueteapot - Helen, how are your Known Words totals now? I’m just trying to figure out if this is a caching issue or if the calculation is simply not working. This shouldn’t be possible given the way we calculate Known Words now.
Still doing it. It UPDATES instantly, but downdates not at all.
Downdating?
So, if ever you mark them as known again, you would presumably be updowndating them?
Erm…I mean, it increments (goes up) when I mark a word as known, but doesn’t decrement (go down) as it should when I mark a known word as unknown.
I could keep marking the same word as known and then unknown, and get a really large known word score.
I have the same discrepancy, and it was caused in the same way skyblueteapot caused her discrepancy: by changing several words’ status from +4 back to +1. My badge shows (incorrectly) that I know 36,054 words in French, but in my profile the Progress Snapshot shows (correctly) that I know only 34,552 all time.
This happened several months ago, so I can’t remember which words I decremented. Therefore I can’t test whether moving one of those once decremented words back to +4 increments either the Badge words (falsely) or the Profile words learned all time (correctly).
I must add that I’ve learned to live with the discrepancy. When I started the French lessons, seeing the number of words that I knew was an excellent motivator. However, now that I’ve been at this for just over a year, I pay little attention to the number of words that I’ve learned. I am glad, of course, that the number continues to grow, albeit more slowly than at the beginning.
It turns out it is a caching issue and it should now be fixed…! Your Known Words totals on your badge should be correct now when you make Known words unknown and should match the number in the progress snapshot widget. Please take a look and let us know if this is not the case for you.
Almost.
The Badge shows 34,595.
On the Profile page, under Info, under Learning (Known Words), 34,595 is also shown.
But, in the Progress Snapshot, the total given is 34,597. I did a Ctrl-F5 several times, but the 34,597 did not change.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember whether I changed any words to +4 since last we communicated.
I’ll check again tomorrow and see what it looks like.
Plus, I changed my Account Setting so that anyone can see my profile. Which lets you see all my vocabulary totals, too (I think).
At any rate, thank you for your help.
That’s looking good. My known words have dropped by 2000. I’ll keep an eye on them as I up and downdate today.
Thank you.
So the problem was that the system was counting those words twice. It’s good to know it is fixed now.
I was curious to see a list of the words I know (I expect a huge amount of proper names) but I can’t find where I have to go to do so, it seems to me we can only export our Lingqs. Any help, please?
A list of Known Words is not available. Since many people have thousands (many even tens of thousands) of Known Words, allowing members to access these lists freely would put a significant strain on the server in having to deal with so much data.
It’s probably safe to assume that around 10% of your Known Words will be proper nouns, etc.
Thanks Mark! That was bugging me, too. Looks like it’s working fine now.
@alex: Really? I am quite surprised, even if someone had half a million of known words (which is unlikely, but possible) a .txt file with the words should be still quite small, like a couple of Mb… And you must have those word lists for every user already stored somewhere…
I officially ask for that improvement, even if goes right to the bottom on the priority list.
I know you are able of that and much more guys! 
We’ll add it to the list 