I am learning Farsi, and as I continue to add LingQs, I wonder whether some of the LingQs that appear in Blue (new words) are indeed already known words. I tried to use the search function on the Vocabulary list to verify this, but I wasn’t able to use it successfully. I do know that LingQ will consider a word new even if it is a variation of an existing LingQ (not sure what the linguistic term is), for example, a plural form, or a different tense. Has anyone else wondered whether their LingQ known word list is accurate?
Thanks for your response! Yeah, I’m ok with exporting the list. I’m just wondering whether you suspect that the LingQ known list is accurate or not? Thoughts?
LingQ’s are essentially strings, so an ordered set of characters. So if you open a text, words shown in blue are those strings that don’t match any of those already existent in your list. I fairly doubt that the list contains doubles or stuff gets marked as blue although allready in your list. The respective datatypes and algorithms to work with strings and perform the tasks required here are part of the standard libraries of any high level programming language I have come across thus far (I’m not a programmer, though). So I fairly doubt the LingQ staff had to create this on their own.
If a language tends to contain lots of different forms of the same words (many cases, tenses, plural forms, grammatical gender, a high level of agglutination, …) you will come across blue marked forms of words you already know for months every know and then.
Thanks for your thoughts! Yeah, I did end up seeing this with one of the words on my LingQ list. In Farsi, there are so many slight variations of the stem word (plurals, additions of pronouns etc), that they sometimes feel like duplicates, when in fact they are not! Thank you! I am deciding not to add these as knows, because to me, it’s a not a new word.
Occasionally, LingQ is buggy and doesn’t add a word you’ve already seen to your LingQ list. I have the settings so it automatically adds all blue words to known when I go to the next page, and occasionally when I go back to re-read a text there will be one blue word in the middle of the page that LingQ somehow missed. But this will be one word out of very, very many.
It’s fine to add slight variations of a word to your known word lists. The way LingQ is set up with its Beginner 1, Beginner 2, etc levels is it is expecting you to have high word counts due to including words like that. Otherwise you would need far less than around 9,000 words to get to Intermediate 1.