Hello. New user of LingQ here. I am curious about the strategies people use about creating LingQs (or not) to different conjugated forms of the same verb. Specifically for languages for which the conjugation is very regular and knowing the infinitive form of the verb is enough to be able to derive the meaning of all the conjugated forms, if you already know how the conjugations work (and of course assuming that you already know how the conjugations work in that language).
I am learning Turkish right now and am already familiar with the various conjugations (tenses, moods). But I’ll take an example from Spanish to illustrate. Suppose I encounter the word nadamos (we are swimming), a form of the verb nadar (to swim), and I want to learn that verb so I create a LingQ for nadamos. But later I encounter a bunch of other forms (nadas, nadaste, nadabamos, nadaremos, etc, etc), which are fully understandable if I just know nadar. (Again, that’s assuming I know how conjugations work in that language).
LingQ treats each form of the verb as a separate word, which may lead to a lot of duplication as far as learning the meaning of a verb is concerned. So what do people do? Do you create a separate LingQ for each, or do you create a LingQ for the first one you encounter, and then mark the others known (even if you don’t “know” the meaning yet), or something else?
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To be honest, the more I use LingQ the more I agree with this LingQ words idea.
It’s very simple, I treat every word independently and I agree because sometimes, with the same verb, there is a type of conjugation that doesn’t click with my brain. In other occasions I immediately recognize or learn every conjugation of the verb everywhere.
It’s actually very helpful to see different types of conjugations and treat them independently even if you need to recreate a LingQ for each one.
The only boring part is that you need to recreate “the same” LingQ but you can always speed-up the process if you keep your vocabulary page opened and copy/paste from your vocabulary (if you remember you entered a translation for it).
The more I understand the different verb conjugations the more I create LingQs accordingly with the same tense translation.
The rule is simple. If you understand it in context mark it as Known. Otherwise go with your guts and feeling and you’ll be always right. Imho.
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I will lingq nadamos as we swim, and then if I am comfortable enough to mark the other forms known, I will; but for some reason nadabamos looks funny, then I will leave that one on 2 or 3, or I suck at the imperfect, or generally the we conjugations give me problems etc. I started on lingq as a complete beginner with both my languages. So I lingqed everything, but If you are at a higher level, and know all these forms just mark them all known. Just lingq things that you need a quick dictionary look up, or words that you are still working on. This is just how I use lingq, and others will post below. Good Luck and Have fun Lingqing!
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Agree with David. Just LingQ the different forms. They all have a base word, but they are separate words. LingQ just treats them as different words…and truly they are different words.
As Hagowingchun says, if you recognize other forms of this verb, then just mark the word known.
If you want, you can create your own definition that has say the root form in parentheses and give the definition behind it. Or perhaps including the subject… “(nadar) - we are swimming” for nadamos. (Probably someone has already done this even).
So you have different ways you can reflect things if you so choose, but fundamentally don’t fight the “LingQ way” of counting words imo. I agree with David, it is better and if you try to fight it you’ll be wasting all kinds of time unnecessarily.
This may be your concern…I think when I first joined LingQ I really felt this need to compare LingQ’s way of counting words to the “normal” way that just counts the base form. I think mostly because I maybe wanted to have an idea of what stage I’m at, or how many words I need to know. After a while I just said screw it. It doesn’t matter. There are a number of goals you can use…LingQ essentially has them somewhat built in with their levels - x # of words = Beginner or Advanced or whatever, although one can argue if they are “correct” for a given level or not. All these things are though are guides and/or goals that aren’t completely accurate anyway regardless of what form of word counting you’re doing. By accurate, I mean they don’t tell you much necessarily other than that’s how many words you know. i.e. two people may be at 10,000 words, but they know some words I don’t know and I know some words they don’t know (and it could be a significant number depending on the content they’ve read or listened to).
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Thank you guys for your ideas. That makes sense. I should have chosen a simpler example to illustrate the idea maybe. Suppose I was learning English and I know that plurals are formed by adding an “-s” suffix usually. So if I encounter a new word “beers” (plural of beer), I create a LingQ for it. Then later I encounter the singular form and if I kind of remember the meaning from the previously LingQed “beers”, I can just mark “beer” as known. The only minor drawback maybe is that the review system will quiz me on “beers” instead of the simpler root form. So optionally when I encounter “beer”, I can create a new LingQ for it and “retire” “beers” to known. This last step is maybe overkill, would not matter in the grand scheme of things.
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You can set some of these to “ignore” if you want. I assume then it won’t show up in the vocabulary for review. I don’t use the LingQ review or SRS so it’s not a concern to me, but understandably it would cause these “duplicates” like you say. Since I don’t use SRS, most of the time I’ll just mark the plural version of the world to known (or 1, 2, 3, 4…) and not worry that it’s “inflating” the numbers.
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It’s not a big deal. I’ve just checked on my German, I have 34500 known words + 42500 LingQ created. And I’m probably half way through. Don’t overthink it too much, at the end you have a lot of work do to. Do only what matters.
In that example, I encounter “beers” and I create a LingQ. Then I encounter “beer”, what do I do?
I’ve just seen “beers”, so I don’t trust that I remember the word correctly in the long run so I create another LingQ (now it’s quicker because I’m almost sure about the meaning and I know what to write or select from the choices if available).
After a few days I encounter “beer”, what do I do?
Do I recognize it? No? I create a LingQ. Yes? Well, I mark it known and I don’t care about “beers”, it will appear one day.
This doesn’t have to be rigid, sometimes you act in different ways depending on the feeling you have. Trust your feelings. Imho.
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