Lingq Avatar word levels

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1

Could someone tell me how the word targets in Lingq are arrived at? For example the word count for Spanish Advanced level 2 is 33,200 words in lingq

2

You can see the targets for each language on the Avatar Help page: Avatar Help

3

This is one of my (only minor at the moment) petpeeves about LingQ. Two points will explain why:

  1. Nobody at LingQ seems to have any idea how the targets were specifically arrived at across the languages. You’d think they are supposed to mirror the passive vocab you would need for each of the respective levels in the CEFR, and I think that might have been a motivation or the general idea, but that’s not the case. Based on studies of English, you seem to need between 10 and 15,000 words of passive vocab to be potentially “fluent.” In Master Steve’s experience in the Romance Languages, it’s between 20-30,000. I can personally attest to this, at least for Spanish. I think they have some form of calculation (algorithm or otherwise) to loosely base the numbers for other languages. Also, they changed the numbers a few years ago and Spanish went from 32,500 to 33,200. Said calculations bumped it up somehow and I remember Mark commenting when I asked that they also wanted to make the intervals of levels more attainable for people doing a 90 Day Challenge. I have to check, but I think the idea was that you could move up a level every three months. I remember getting the impression that the numbers may have become further divorced from some actually metric of achievement. I’m going to keep an eye on this thread to see if someone has clarification. Personally, I think some person just needs to take a bunch of lessons from the respective languages and figure out a “conversion rate” ie X number of words in English equals Y number of words in Spanish. From there we might actually get a better sense of how many words someone “needs.”

  2. The unhelpful avatar level page Zoran posted and what actually happens are incongruous. Ignore the word “achieve” when it comes to levels and just remember this: If you have 33,200 words in Spanish, you have COMPLETED Advanced Level 2 and REACHED Advanced Level 3.