Sometimes I forget to study my saved words. I do not always have time to study them right after I lingqed them. When I do study them, I make them ‘known’. Mostly I study words by reading other texts. And actually I don’t really care if they are highlighted in yellow or not. As long as I can understand everything, it’s fine for me.
I find Babylon the most useful dictionary to use for Russian, and go to Google Translate when that fails. I rarely use Lingvo any longer. I find that if Babylon does not have it, usually Lingvo does not have it either.
I never delete LingQs. My accumulated collection of LingQs is a record of the words that I have tried to learn. They are in my vocab list just as they are in my brain. I cannot force myself to learn them be deliberately reviewing them. However, I find that when I come across them highlighted in yellow a few times, in an interesting context, they start to stick.
It is also gratifying to see them in yellow when in already know them. It gives me a feeling that my vocabulary is growing. I rarely move words to known. I am quite happy to leave them yellow.
I review words in the vocab section on a random basis, sometimes by order of importance, sometimes alphabetically, sometimes by tags, sometimes based on searching for certain prefixes or suffixes. When I do that I often go in and edit my captured phrase in the list view of these words, before reviewing them again in flash cards.
Reviewing a few words like this also helps to make me more attentive to other words that I am not reviewing.
I think that the more LingQs you create, and keep, the sooner you will master vocabulary, and the sooner vocabulary will move from passive to active.
I’ve been doing 2 or 3 sessions of flashcards from the main page per day. I’ve had less than 25 for 2 days now, so I had to add a heap more. Also, I’ve just started my 5th collection, because I need to add many more LingQs and learn the words.
327 known words…not bad for a side project that’s 10 days old!
I can see the point of saving some of them now.