@sraevsky: Not sure that anyone is disputing why this feature works for you in the particular scenario you describe. But it needs to work for everyone, whatever their language-learning status and familiarity with LingQ. So the most straightforward solution is surely to retain this feature, but to set the default as off. Experienced users can then enable this - potentially confusing - feature if they choose.
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You are right. The default should be off. Lingq is a language learning site, not a ‘Yeah, I already know the language’ site.
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I have about the same known words as you in my target language, Russian. Your experience on Lingq with your target language is very different to mine, so it seems in part somewhat language dependent. The majority of blue words I come across are still unknown to me, so paging moves to known is not helpful for me.
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Interesting. My target language is Ukrainian. I believe there are more English cognates (my native language) in Ukrainian than Russian, so that could explain the different experience.
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My native language is English as well. I don’t think cognates explain our different experiences, but I don’t know what the explanation is and I’m curious about it. Do you spend alot of time studying Ukrainian outside of Lingq? What are your Lingq reader text settings, in particular page width? I used ‘Double page’ width. Unknown words in Russian are still mostly indistinguishable from gibberish for me.
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I have spent a fair amount of time outside of LingQ listening to and reading Ukrainian. Recently, I estimated that I have read 600k+ words outside of LingQ (and 1 million+ words in LingQ) based on the physical books I’ve read. I’m not sure what my computer settings are for LingQ; I almost exclusively use the Android app, and almost always in sentence mode.
Sometimes unknown words are easy to guess when they’re not cognates simply due to the context of the sentence plus some root word that I recognize. Of course, many words are also gibberish to me too.
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Thank you for the explanation. There are some real differences here and probably explain why ‘Paging moves to known’ is of use to you, but not to me. I don’t currently spend any time studying outside of Lingq. I use the desktop version of Lingq. I use double page rather than sentence mode, so would be paging through alot more words. There is no page width setting in the app, but this wouldn’t affect sentence mode anyway. For you, the function is more ‘Next sentence moves the words in this sentence to known’ rather than ‘Paging moves the words in these pages to known’.
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Yes, that’s a good way to think of it. Thanks for the discussion!
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The thing with the known words is it isn’t going to be 100% exactly the amount of words you know. It’s more of an indicator to your progress and gives you a rough idea of how much you know. For instance, I have about 9200 known words in German, but that doesn’t mean I can sit down and write all of them from memory. It just indicated that throughout my German study there were 9200 words I felt I knew confidently enough to say I know them, or that I didn’t need to look up their meaning when reading it.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Just enjoy the process of learning and don’t stress over the number of known words.
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This is understandably a perpetual topic of discussion on here, and I certainly sympathize with a first-time user being surprised.
I have to ask though: isn’t there a first-time user tutorial that walks you through how to use LingQ and specifically tells you what happens when you page away from a blue word and how to de-activate it if desired…? I thought there was.
Not really. There are a few introductory lessons, all of which are in the target language though and not very detailed. Not to mention they are probably old and not up to date.
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Huh! 
The tutorial I remember may be only on the mobile apps…? If so, I would suggest LingQ add it to the browser ASAP!
The only tutorial I saw was in the the target language, which made it hard to understand for me, and even after figuring out what it was saying, I still did not understand how to use “lingqing” at all. It talked briefly about “linqing”, but it did not tell me when to mark what number on what.
Plus I observed that the “known” words already included ones I did not know, and just gave up on understanding that part, and just ignored that part.
Later on I came to understand a bit better how it works, and I think the “move to known” ruins it for beginners, because then it is incomprehensible what “known” means.
But even with more understanding, I never saw a clear guide on how to use the numbers, or what to do with names.
So I just ignore those numbers and known versus unknown.
I did just recently read a post by someone who said, paraphrasing:
Use “known” to mark ones you don’t want to see definitions shown in sentence mode.
That is the first really easy, understandable system I have seen. I like that.
But I don’t really care that much if it shows me definitions of ones I know too, so I still don’t feel very incented to try to decide which ones to mark as “known”.
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