Okay, I’ve been wondering this for a while now…I know it’s been posted somewhere before, but I’m not sure where…
At Lingq, I’d like to study German and Russian–I like Ling’s system and the variety of material. But as far as the word tracker goes…I mean, couldn’t it be more accurate? Like, in languages like German and Russian, which often have like six forms for many words, different endings of words are counted as different words. For example, the word for “first” in Russian can be первый, первая, первое, первых, первым, первыми, первом…that’s six forms of the words “first” yet they’re all counted as separate “words”! In German, it’s like erster, ersten, erstem, erste,…so much.
I know I’m perhaps being a bit longwinded, but I don’t know, it’s been bugging me for a while. Is there anyone else who feels like this, and are there any plans to make this more accurate? Just wonderin’.
We track each form of a word as a separate word. I often save different forms of the same word family in order to get different examples, and to get used to the different forms. We know that 30,000 words in Russian may only equate to 6,000 words or so in English. It really does not matter. The known words score is just a general indicator of your progress. The subject has come up before but I think most people accept that this is we do things. Changing this is not on our list of things to do.
I actually think it’s better to count every unique word as a different word. For example, if you are more than a beginner in Russian, it may be easy to see those differences. However, if you are a complete beginner in English, it would be difficult to recognise that be, is, am and are are variants of the same word.
I like it since I can tag different cases or tense forms that give me trouble. I also go to the Vocab section and go through words in alphabetical order and then batch move them to 4 sometimes. I guess we could go either way. The big thing is the different examples that you can look at for the different forms of the words. No system is perfect and nor is any learner.
Exactly, Rob. Now and then I realise that the word I just saved (but didn’t recognize) is an inflected form, so I find this extra “reminder” really valueable.
Do I really “know” the word if I can’t even recognize the various forms? I say no.
