Does anyone else do this? I find myself marking english based Katakana words in Japanese as known in LingQ right away. When I’m doing lessons and I happen across one I’ve never heard before but I know the meaning right away. words such as “ビール, ワイン, バス”.
Would you consider this known? or would that be considered cheating? I know the meaning but I don’t exactly know the pronunciation or the spelling right away.
If the katakana is so obvious and so easy, i just mark it as trash. I only treat katakana as a word to study and memorize if it’s not immediately obvious. However sometimes words "バス” wouldn’t be immediately obvious to me without context, so things like that would be tricky to explain to others on when to trash and when to memorize
I mark katakana words as “known” if they derive from English and the meaning is clear. That might not be accurate: the word might be used differently in Japanese, and is often pronounced differently. But those things won’t be an issue until I attempt output (writing and speaking). For now, a “rough idea” is good enough for me.
In a sense, I am treating these words as “cognates”. English shares a large number of cognates with French and Spanish, which make understanding sentences in those languages easier. But when doing output, you need to use the correct word.