Lingqing words in cases or conjugated words

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I just started using this site and have a question about lingqing words that are first encountered in a specific case or conjugated. For example, I started reading The Brothers Karamazov in Russian and the first time the verb знать (to know) occurs, it is in the conjugated form знаю (I know). Now IMO it would make much more sense to add “знать - to know” to my vocabulary list than to add “знаю - [I] know [v. | impf.]” (or worse: “знаю - to know”), but I don’t see any functionality to do that. Am I missing something here?

Manually researching the infinitive of every new verb I encounter would be an option, but it seems to defeat the main advantage (for me) of this site, which is the efficiency with which new vocabulary can be added.
How do other language learners (especially Russian learners) handle this?

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That’s just how lingq counts words. It’s actually a tough problem to decide what actually counts as a word and what doesn’t (what if verb is regular vs irregular, what counts as a compound word and what is just two individual words kinda put together etc.) So the word count for most languages isn’t an accurate word count, it’s more of a relative marker to measure your progress.

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My advice would be to just embrace the Lingq-way. IMO, it’s easier and quicker this way.

Let’s say it only kept track of the root verb. How would you decide when you “know” this verb? It has X number of conjugations. Can you mark it known only once you learn all the conjugations? Even ones you may not use ever? Or may you know present and past of the verb verbatim, but you still struggle with some other conjugation? Maybe I don’t even know what all the conjugations are to even say I know the verb or not?

If we keep track of it as LingQ does, then I can say I KNOW this given conjugation of the verb. I may still not recognize the subjunctive form and that’s ok…I leave it as a yellow word that I still need to work on understanding and recognizing.

re: Manually researching the infinitive…This is easy in LingQ. First of all, for many of the verbs there is auto tagging…you may already see the infinitive form as a tag for many conjugations of the verb you encounter. If not, one of the dictionaries that is typically there for most of the languages (and I’m sure Russian) is the reverso conjugation dictionary. That will give you a quick glance a the infinitive. Frankly though, I think you’ll start to see it’s mostly not necessary. You’ll start to recognize many of the conjugations as you read as being part of some infinitive you already know.

You will pile on vocabulary with LingQ if you use it as it was meant. Assisted reading and listening. When you encounter a word you don’t recognize, click the first meaning, or look at some of the other meanings others have supplied and click one of those. Or if none of those seem to suffice with the given context, then do some research if you so choose. Also, if you use sentence mode and use the full sentence translation, that will give hints at the meaning too.

Hopefully that helps? Maybe it’ll still feel uncomfortable for a bit if you’re used to something else.

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I personally only mark non-conjugated verbs as known. When I come across a conjugated verb such as знаю, I simply ignore it. I want my number of known words to be as accurate as possible, so why cheat myself?

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Thanks for the in-depth reply. I care a lot about the quality of the SRS flash cards, so this is a bit uncomfortable for me. Sorry if I’m being pedantic. Do you find that all the cases and conjugations clutter up your vocabulary list when practicing?

Also, do you find that this approach works as well on the mobile version? IIRC there was always only one meaning available on mobile which could potentially lead to problematic flash cards like “знаю - to know”. I have run out of my free 20 lingqs (not decided on premium yet) so I can’t test if and how often this is a problem on mobile.

I had noticed that it’s possible to easily research the infinitive while checking the meanings of a word. But is there a way to actually lingq the infinitive instead of the conjugated form so that my SRS flash cards contain only infinitives (and maybe some selected conjugations or sentences)?

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Thanks for the reply. Counting words this way seems like an interesting choice to me, but it does not bother me. What I was concerned about was how well you can study with the resulting flash cards. I’m used to putting only infinitive forms of verbs into flash cards, but am willing to try out the lingq way if others say they had a good experience with it.

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Thanks for your reply. This seems like a good way to keep the vocab list concise. But a problem is that you might take a while until you come across a non-conjugated form, so you’re not advancing your vocabulary as quick as you could.

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“Do you find that all the cases and conjugations clutter up your vocabulary list when practicing?”

Yes, which is one of the reasons I do not bother with the vocabulary list and the SRS typically. I also just don’t find reviewing vocabulary particularly interesting.

Others do like reviewing vocabulary with lists and SRS and it is not so easy to use LingQ in this way. One problem is of course the grammar aspects. I think the main reason different word forms are not counted together is that it is too big of a technical challenge when so many languages are supported. Another problem is the huge number of words you will encounter when reading on here. You cannot review them all.

Here is one possibility. You can tag individual saved unknown words and then filter for these in the vocabulary section. You could for example tag all the unknown words you want to review (e.g. infinitive forms of verbs) with something like “review” or you can do it separately for different types of words, as you want. You can add as many tags per word as you want. You can then review them in the vocabulary section. You can also export them to Anki very easily if you want to use that for SRS.

Anyway, the free version of LingQ is mostly useless. If you can afford it, maybe best would be to sign up for a month and try it out properly.

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In what way is it “more accurate”? According to whom? And what benefit is it to be more accurate according to these specific rules? Am I actually not more accurate by recording every form, especially since different forms can be vastly different from their root word? Does it matter if I say I know 2000 words vs. 10,000? Even if we both say we know 2000, I may know a far different 2000 from you because what I’ve read is different than what you’ve read…so even comparing the two of us is not a true comparison.

What about geese? Do you record that? The root, singular, is goose. Quite different.
Fox. Foxes? Do I lingq geese because it looks different, but not foxes because it looks similar? Or neither? How do I learn these other forms?

By the way, feel free to do what you feel is best for you. I just wanted to challenge the thought process on this. I think for language learning purposes it makes sense to count all the forms. What might be nice maybe, especially for those that are keen to know their word “family” count would be some link to the word family count.

If it’s of interest, Steve’s done a number of videos on this topic. Here’s one:

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No worries. Everybody has their own “thing” and what might work well for some may not work well for others. Or some may feel like they what to do something to help learn, like SRS. Believe me, I get it! I was in your shoes before.

In regards to SRS. I don’t do it. Occasionally, I’ll mess around with it, but I simply don’t find it helpful anymore. Before I came to LingQ, I used memrise (SRS based app if you’re not familiar with it) and went through their entire A1 “course”. By the end of this, what I was seeing was that your vocabulary list to review soon becomes very unmanageable. If I take a day of, or heaven forbid, a week off. I have hundreds of words I have to review before I can move on. It simply takes too long and I have too little time a day as it is (I’ve probably averaged 10-15 min of reading a day and 10-20 min listening overall…although nowadays I do more like 30 min - 1 hr listening). I started watching Steve’s videos and learned about LingQ and decided to go all in for a little bit with the reading and listening thing and soon found I was learning vocabulary way faster when I didn’t spend all my time reviewing things. Also, one soon finds that there are tons of words that they have difficulty with and this adds to the pile that needs to review and becomes overwhelming at some point as they spend all their time reviewing. I could sit there and review 100 difficult words for the next two months and not learn any new words, or I could learn 500-1000 new ones that do sink in, and oh well, there are still these 100 difficult ones and probably a few more. No worries. Eventually they’ll be learned in context, as I have the others. It will just take longer. In the meantime, I’m piling on other words that I will retain and possibly will also help me to start retaining the difficult words because I can gleam their meaning from context of words that I do know.

So, yes, my vocabulary list does look cluttered. So I can certainly understand the point as it relates to SRS usage. Perhaps that’s where some tie back to the word family might help and be able to SRS just based on word families. Of course, for languages like German where you can have a half dozen or more separable prefixes for some verbs…what really is the “word family”…some of the meanings with these prefixes are way different than the “root”. What about examples where plurals are quite different than the singular? (Goose vs. Geese) or other oddities in various languages.

In any event, if you had just the infinitive in SRS. How do you really study that? Especially when you are learning languages that may have a ton of conjugations. If you have an example phrase or sentence with the flash card, which form do you put? The infinitive? How do you review the other forms?

To me, the “review” is coming across all of these words in different contexts, or if I re-read a lesson, in the same context. I don’t NEED to do SRS. To me, it becomes a hindrance rather than an aid. Perhaps if I had more time I would see differently, but there is still the aspect of how do you keep SRS from overtaking the majority of your language learning time compared to activities that I think are more fruitful (reading and listening).

I don’t want to necessarily turn you off from SRS either…some people really find benefit, but you have to be strategic about it.

Actually, the best review in my opinion, is to go through lessons again and either re-read it, or just jump from yellow word to yellow word and read it in context and try to get the meaning. You can breeze through a review like this, and you have the benefit of the context, if necessary.

I agree with Colin…Do a month of LingQ. Or possibly write support and ask if they can give you a 100 lingq’s. I’ve seen them do that occasionally. I personally decided to do a month at the time and really spend time learning how best to use it without the limits.

Sorry for the long novel:
tldr: SRS gets long and cluttered regardless. SRS review list gets too long. Reading and listening provides review already. SRS at beginning stages may be good (memrise, lingq, duolingo). Figure out SRS strategy to handle long lists of review.
Try one month of LingQ without limits to see how you like it.

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The anki curse, once you start, you can’t ever pause it. If you’re not careful, it’ll take over your life. I fully agree about seeing the words in different contexts or re-listening to a story, especially at the beginning, I think that’s better than doing flashcards. Like Steve says, find the right mix of novelty and repetition.

But at advanced levels I do find flashcards with whole sentences to be useful (sentence mining). Since I don’t really want to read the same novel a 2nd time, I can instead artificially induce repetition, but only of particular sentences of interest to me.

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Oh, I guess I didn’t read your post closely enough, my bad… I don’t use lingq’s flashcards, so I’m not able to help you on this one… Instead of doing flashcards for a single word, have you thought about doing a technique known as sentence mining? You put whole sentences on cards to capture the context of the word or phrase. It’s easier to remember a word if you see it in context rather than just isolated… Just an idea, do whatever works for you!

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This makes sense, and I’ve been thinking about this a little too. I think I feel like this could overwhelm as well…i’ve got 20,000 unlearned Lingqs.

I sometimes do some repetition by just going through the lesson again…not reading the whole thing, but jumping from yellow word to yellow word. I look at the word, if I know it right off, I’ll mark it known. If not, I read the sentence and maybe surrounding sentences and try to guess again. Then I skip to the next yellow word. This way I’m not reading the whole lesson again, but am getting a similar sentence mining. Kind of a lazy man’s sentence mining.

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Just looked up sentence mining. This seems to solve my problem, in addition to putting conjugated words and cases on the ignore list. Lingq also has this “related phrases” suggestion at the bottom that’s helpful with sentence mining.

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Yes, I’ve started a subscription for this month to properly try it out. Putting some words on the ignore list or giving a specific tag to all the words I want to review seems to solve my problem. Lingq also has a “related phrases” suggestion to make better use of conjugated words and words in cases, so that the flash cards can keep some grammatical context.

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I think it’s a shame to ignore all but the dictionary versions of words (e.g. infinitive form of verbs). In Russian you will mostly not be seeing those version of words so the advantages of having unknown words highlighted yellow will mostly be lost. You can of course click on them still when you are reading so it’s not such a big loss.

On the other hand, you should of course do it the way you want and you are probably better off doing it the way you feel is correct and effective.

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I just looked up sentence mining after you and others recommended it. This also solves the problem of flash cards taking conjugated words or words in cases out of their grammatical context. So I can put the sentences or word groups into flash cards and put the words themselves onto the ignore list.

Concerning the “anki curse”, it helps a lot to be selective about what you put into your flash cards (the motivation for starting this thread) and to maybe adjust the time intervals used by SRS apps like anki. Most people just use the standard time intervals, but there seems to be not much research into what time intervals are most efficient. It’s also helpful to only put little but consistent effort into SRS. So if you feel particularly motivated at some point, don’t do much more flash cards than usually. Otherwise the system will adapt and when your motivation or available time goes back down to normal levels, there will be masses of “half-learned” words for you to revise.

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