I have a question about which strategy would be better from your experience.
I know there are two ways you can get a lingQ to known word. First is with the linQ SRS System, which I really like, but the pace on that is rather slow and I have a goal to reach 1k known words in Arabic in about 3 months. Now, I’ve heard that some people increase the status of words when they encounter that word in text again and recognize it. Now, is that a good approach? I like reading (with audio) and especially the sentence mode, and I could see myself doing this. My concern is that I could up the status on the words too quick and forget the meaning. Also, what if I encounter that same word again in the same lesson. Should there be like a minimum time in between? So that I don’t increase the word to known because I saw it is multiple times and recognized in one lesson, for example. But I also heard Steve Kaufmann talk about that you shouldn’t worry about forgetting words.
That’s a point. I see the known words as a measurement of where I’m at in the language(1k known words is not the end goal, just short term). Of course there are many other things that are important to a language, yet I still think it’s good. Do you have an answer/tipp to my original question?
What I’ve been doing as I’m going through Hebrew stories is to just think about confidence. I used to be worried about the same thing as you, thinking that if I put a word as ‘learned’ too soon I might over-pace myself. I used to only put the words into the ‘learned’ category if they were fully 100% in my active vocabulary (being able to speak on my own) rather than passive (being able to recognize the word and interpret it’s meaning in context). Don’t do that strategy. It takes all the fun out of learning because you’re no longer focused on enjoying the process and instead are only thinking about how much you understand a word. Instead, what I’ve been doing is if I can read the sentence and understand, even using the context of the sentence for help, what the word means, then I count it as learned. In other words, if I can read and understand the sentence to some degree, and I feel mostly confident that with repeated sightings of the word I’ll internalize it, I’ll throw it into learned. And hey, if you do pace yourself a little too fast with a word (I do it all the time) you can just move it down to familiar level instead.
maybe dude but I find making milestones to reach is what brings me back to the site. ofc the process is fun, but being able to read intermediate one on a language is instant dopamine gratification and it’s exciting to be able to put a new label on my skillset.
That’s fantastic advice. I’ll just increase the status when I’m reading and understanding the word in context (passively too). And you’re totally right. If I forget the word, i can just lingQ it again. Now I also do not have to worry about the word coming up too quick, becuause if I forget it, the same thing here: i just lingQ it again.
Over time I’ve changed how I do this. I now mark the word known when I understand it in the context of reading the sentence. If I encounter the word again in another sentence and don’t understand it, then I set it back to a 2 (not really any rhyme or reason to the choice of 2). Basically, I don’t want to spend any amount of time belaboring whether I know it in isolation, or worse yet, do I know it “actively” (like I could use it in spoken speech)? Don’t worry about whether you can use it. Reading and listening is not the place to judge that and really you’re just wasting time trying to determine that. You will learn and forget words many times over. Some words will stick from the beginning, but there will be words that seemingly take 100 viewings before they sink in. AND you may forget it the next time you see it. Just don’t worry about it, there will be many more words that do stick.
I generally don’t use the levels of “known” all that much anymore and kind of use it haphazardly to some degree. If I know I’ve seen the word a bunch of times I may bump it from a 1 to a 2 or 3, but that about as complicated as it gets.