Hey, as a non-native English/German speaker, I don’t really have this issue in Spanish. I wanted to know how you all deal with words like “to go” or “zu gehen”.
As far as I understand, it’s not the same to say RUN! (corre!, imperative) as to run (correr, infinitive). In Spanish, those would clearly be considered different words, so I assume Spanish learners usually mark them as separate entries.
Given that, should we do the same in English or German and mark forms with “to…” / “zu…” as new words? Or do you think that counts as “cheating” just to inflate our word count?
And if that’s the case, should we also avoid marking conjugated forms altogether (run, runs, ran, etc.)?
I’m really interested in hearing your opinions, because honestly… I’m not sure what the best approach is.
I would recommend only marking “run” as the verb. It means the same as “I run every day.” and “I want to run every day.” The “to” just makes a verb the infinitive and you just remember that.
I agree. But given that approach, then shouldn´t we also skip the conjugation form? runs is the same as run, just conjugated in a different way. Ella corre, nosotros corremos.. both mean to run.
Frankly, it’s up to you. You can mark “to run”, “to eat”, “I run”, and “he runs” all as separate marks. But I think it would be better if you only mark the ones that you’re having trouble remembering.
For example, if you have trouble remembering that “he/she goes” is the spelling and not “he/she gos”.
I don’t have a problem with that; in fact, I recently took a C1 English exam. However, I wanted to know whether to mark them as known words or not. The same thing happens to me in German (though I’m a beginner there). To be honest, sometimes I see people with 60,000 words and I’m like… damn, do they count one word and all its forms, or what?
Likewise, contractions like “I’ll”, “he’ll”, “he’d”, “she’d”, would also all be known words. Otherwise, it’s just too difficult to “x-off” all that stuff. It’s just easier to mark all valid forms as known and only ignore invalid words or names. In fact, some people include names as “known words”.
If I tried to manually link every conjugated form back to its infinitive, I’d spend more time organizing my library than actually reading! I find that after seeing ‘ran’ and ‘runs’ enough times in context, the brain just naturally connects them to ‘run’ anyway. The stats might be slightly inflated, but the progress feels much more fluid.
So I’d say this depends. In English the use of contractions isn’t too great but in French their use is much more widespread. In general I certainly try to LingQ irregular aspects of language, since they rely on memorization, and less the regular parts, since once a rule is deeply ingrained enough all further examples of it are kind of useless. English contractions go into the irregular column, as I see it, while French ones might go in the other, unless you want to create double LingQ’s for all nouns starting with a vowel for when they are prefixed with things like l’.
Ultimately it’s up to you as an individual what helps you progress; the learned words counter is only vaguely useful to indicate the trend of your progression. I for one ignore all names of people and place, and most abbreviations, since most names in most languages aren’t really used for their literal meaning but to refer to something specific to the text you are reading.
