How is it possible to commit over 700 words to memory in a single day?
I expect to reach intermediate level within 6 months time but there are people who reach that level from scratch in 3 weeks, surely this is impossible?
Therefore i’m wondering whether its more efficient to relax my understanding and grammar attention to the context in each lesson and just purely ingrain the words through a ridiculous amount of reading. e.g 10,000 words a day.
What i am asking is, does it really work that well?
In my opinion, when you are seeing this you are probably seeing someone who already knows the language at least to some extent and maybe are new-ish to lingq. I highly doubt, unless someone has amazing memory skills, they are learning that many words. They’d be fluent in less than a month. DOUBTFUL.
edit: I didn’t answer the second part of your post. I think lingq is extremely helpful in acquiring new vocabulary. I’m moving at a much faster pace than I was with anything else. I think you’ll find some days where you mark a bunch of words known. Note you may not have learned all on that day…example I may pass over a word over 2-10 readings (or more) before I’m willing to mark it learned, but I could have a day where a lot of those words that have taken me a few days to learn all fall on the same day so I have 50 or 100 “learned” in a day. Or I may come across a verb in a different tense that I “know” from reading the base of it and the typical verb ending so I mark it known right off the bat.
In short, don’t worry about what other people are doing. It’s interesting to some extent, but you don’t know how they consider the word learned or not, or if they already know the language and thus it seems like a miracle that they are learning that much at once.
Don’t be in a rush to mark a word known imo, but also don’t hold back. If I know the word in context of reading and I feel I would understand the word in another reading source I mark it known. I don’t wait until I know I can reproduce it in speech. (i.e. translate from my mother language to the target language). To me Lingq is a source of marking what you know from reading and listening.
It is not the case of super-memory, it is a case of super-cheating. People mark words as learned just to win the Challenges. Yes, it is strange. I was pretty annoyed by such behavior at some point
And I still am!
There are some benign explanations:
Pre-knowledge of the language. It is OK to start LingQ with some previous knowledge of the language. But certainly not OK to participate in the competition.
In the German language after some time, I see more and more of the same words in different forms and combinations. It feels like 1 to 10 now - one “base” word results in 10 “known” words.
I’m at 73th day of “Insane” streak now - I study hard. If I read the whole day I manage to get 200 LingQs and 150 known words, 350 in sum.
Maybe there are super-humans out there, but I believe these figures to be a physical human limit)
I think it depends on mostly which language you are learning and which you already know. Most of the days I’m reading 10,000 words, sometimes I’m lingqing two hundred of them as new. I’m learning polish - so when 10 words stuck, I can come across 20 forms of these 10 words easily (20x10). Then I recognize and know their meaning (aka “known” words). But this is “only” passive vocabulary - I still can’t use them when I want to. Often I recognize polish words I already know from other languages (french, german, english or latin). The more languages you know, the higher is this number. It’s all relative.
I can’t say how many “really new” stems or lexemes I’m learning each day, but I think that I would never have been able to absorb so many words without reading a lot (really: a lot). I’m not able to learn 100 new stems a day… no way… And I would say: it’s impossibly to reach an intermediate level in speaking, listening and writing in a language that is part of a language family that is new to you. There are polish words I have seen a few hundred times but I still do not know what they mean because the slawic words are looking so strange to me… But it’s getting better…
Sergey, I agree on the challenges! I saw your post the other day. I think I may be in the same or a similar German challenge. I “gave up” over the weekend when I saw some of the results, so now I’m not really worrying about the others and just trying to do more than I normally do during the week. I agree many may be cheating, or already know the language. Heck, I just read an English article on lingq and I learned 148 words in one minute =)
I’m at day 86 of an absolutely …crazy streak…I’m reading and learning the whole day - I had 6 weeks off an so there was enough time to learn Viel Erfolg beim Deutschlernen!
Are these challenges really so important to you? I noticed that sometimes I’m on the 1st place and sometimes I’m second in the polish language challenge, but I would never learn or read more because of the challenge itself
I always compare LingQ to my friends who use Duolingo and only learn about 5-10 words a day. I tell them how this website is for the more serious learners who learn 50-100+ new words a day and they think that amount is impossible. Maybe its just my perspective, but i think at my level ~2100 words in Russian that i cant just delve deep into reading 10,000 words a day because it’ll get way too hard, way too fast. I only get about 100 words per difficult lesson of mine, i cant imagine doing 100 lessons to reach the 10,000 goal.
Maybe the more words i know, the easier it will be to read alot more. hopefully.
Me personallly? No. I only joined it on a whim. Just somewhat curious to see how my rate faired against others, but it certainly seemed clear to me that many of the leaders appear to already know the language for the challenge. Regardless, it doesn’t seem like it’s in the spirit of its intent in the end, so I’m just using the challenge as a little more motivation to spend a little more time than I normally would for myself without concern for the others.
If you’re learning a language similar to one you already know very well then you will be able to add lots of known words very quickly. For example, I’m at the beginnings of learning French, and I added over 200 known words just today while only reading about 2500 words because I have a large vocabulary in English and Spanish.
Also, once you’re at an advanced level in learning a language, 10k words read per day isn’t that ridiculous. Maybe an hour worth of reading. At that point you can still learn words very fast (100+ per day) because your vocabulary snowballs. You encounter lots of blue words that you can immediately mark as known because they are variations of words you already know. This is especially true for verbs in Romance languages.
To be honest, you may be able to remember hundreds of words at the start, but then shortly after it becomes too much for your brain to process and everything goes down the drain.
Concerning grammar, many times i tried to study it, but i always end up forgetting, ended up giving up on it completely and just spending time reading, and briefly checking the grammar when it feels necessary.
I’d say the biggest factors to how much you can remember is your level of interest, and how much you read and how many different contexts you see a word in. I would probably die out of boredom if i would read random mini stories or news articles for a few hours just because it has a “good” unknown percentage or for rereading just to make sure the words stick .
If you have lots of time to spend and feel like you can tackle more advanced content, i would definitely recommend picking up a book that truly interests you and read like crazy ( also really helps if you already know more or less what the book is about if you read it in a different language before or seen the movie(s)) . I started with the harry potter books about a week and half ago, now over halfway the third and feel like it has become significantly easier to read, and end up reading faster because of it, making it more enjoyable in the process. I always want to keep going to know what comes next, and before i know it, i spent the whole day reading. Pls help… i can’t… stoppp
I can tell you that with Russian it definitely gets easier to pick up new words as you advance. I now can recognize a new word, as often as not, from its roots and affixes. Also, because the language is so strongly inflected, I still regularly encounter blue words that are simple inflected forms of words that I’ve known for a long time.
I Agree I was doing one of the French Challenges here at LingQ, and I was working my butt off to try to be at least top 10. And I see some people are learning like a 1,000 words every day. Of course they aren’t necessarily cheating, but they definitely knew a lot of the language before they started at LingQ (Which is great!) but don’t join the challenges please.
I would probably recommend reading young adult realistic fiction books instead of Harry Potter though. With HP you run into a lot of “nonsense“ adjectives that aren’t worth knowing.
I totally agree with you, for starting out, more realistic books may be easier to read, but so far these words haven’t come up often enough to be problematic, maybe i just have a bit higher tolerance to ignoring some words, and in the end i get almost the full experience if had i read it in a language i’m more comfortable in.
HP was just the first thing that came to mind, i also saw all the films and remember how much i enjoyed them, so interest played a big role.
I bought Harry Potter because it seemed that so many others read it as one of the first books in the new language - but I still can’t read it in Polish. I think HP is not a good book to begin with. I would give Dan Browns “Angels & Demons” a try - the authors style is very repetitive. This one I was able to read.
I mostly agree, but 15k (500*30) or 21k words known is nowhere near “fluent”.
Getting 500ish words known per day is not that difficult, but at a regular reading pace it would take roughly 5 hours for me which is hardly sustainable. You are certainly right tho in that virtually everyone who achieves that pace knows a great deal of the language already since nobody actually reads all that much on this website in my experience
Doing 500 per day is a pretty steep curve but still possible. I wouldn’t call myself great in any way and was able to do over 10k in a month (these were not words that I already knew outside of LingQ). I was probably reading 6+ hours per day (at a varying degree of effectiveness) and only took a hand full of days off that month.
Disclaimer: this was about 70% Russian and 30% Spanish. So overall highly inflected vocab.
I second what Khardy said and would also add that over time your brain simply just gets better at processing information and memorizing. This improvement also helps accelerate the process.
