I am such a beginner still in Mandarin. It was interesting hearing about Steve’s latest podcasts in which he talked about adding 100s of words per day in Turkish. I can recognise words but at most had been putting 2 recognised as the absolute maximum since I would struggle to reproduce the characters, understand all the possible meanings and may not know all the complexities including radicals. Naturally I wouldn’t say I ‘know’ any word until I had a really fluent understanding of the language. Am I perhaps being too perfectionistic? Steve seemed to be saying that converting words to ‘known’ was a big part of his process.
I speak Spanish pretty well. Even with Portuguese I am very conservative with the rating. A word like ‘sobrevivência’ is obviously very similar to Spanish but until I put the accent correctly, I would not give myself more than a 2 for it.
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When to mark words known is entirely subjective and everyone has their own criteria. So, comparisons with others have limited use. Some people want to be able to actively use a word before they mark it known, others may be content with simply being able to guess what it means in context. I’ve always liberally marked words known, because there is no real downside, I can always click a (white) word again if I’m unsure and if I really want I can demote it again to yellow.
When I still studied actively, I reached similar numbers to Steve, except for the very beginning. There is a large amount of ‘churn’ in the Chinese languages on LingQ because of the imperfect word segmentation which often produces character combinations that aren’t dictionary words. Typically just recombinations of common characters that happen to stand next to each other but have no other relationship.
In the grand scheme of things the number of known words on LignQ is meaningless in my opinion. The only statistics I’ve ever found useful are words of reading and listening hours. Listening hours being the only one to really correlate with my sense of progress. The number of known words just keeps increasing the more I read, FWIW.
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Thank you @bamboozled for your thoughtful response. You are right that it is subjective but asked due to Steve’s last couple of Podcasts - there are already other forum posts about these. There seemed to be a technique he uses in collecting new words. I will definitely keep reading and listening and try to be patient.
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I am just a beginner, in contrast to you I have been relatively conservative adding words to “known”, effectively I only do so if I can: recognize the characters, know what they mean and know their approximate pronunciation (I’m taking the “John Cena” approach of not worrying about tones).
This way I feel I get a fairly accurate depiction of what I actually know (not much).
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I do this as well, Ignoring combinations of words that aren’t really words. While imperfect, it seems to have the benefit of making the % New Words stat correlate pretty well with the difficulty level of new content. Who knows what problems I might be causing for myself down the line, though.
