I learned 46 words today (status 3 to 4). Why have my known words gone up by 36?
To put it another way, what do I have to do to increase my known words by 100 today?
When you move words from status 3 to 4, your Known words increase. Likewise, if you move status 4 words to 1,2, or 3 words are removed from your Known words.Also, when you click the Update button for each lesson in your WorkDesk, all unsaved words are considered Known and added to your Known Words. The bulk of your Known words are added using the Update button.
I understand that - I think. What I don’t understand is why the known words count only went up by 36 when my learned lingQs went up by 44. This was first thing this morning, I hadn’t done any other activites, and I hadn’t downgraded any words, just upped the status of 46 words by +1 on the vocabulary page.
I think the counter isn’t counting every learned lingQ that it should be.
By the way I have noticed that if I check a bunch of words on the vocabulary page, then select a lingQ and delete it, the checked words uncheck themselves and so the status of some words that I have checked doesn’t get increased. This is a bit irritating, but doesn’t explain why the counters are out of sync…or does it?
Hi Helen,
We’re pretty confident that the counters are accurate. I’m not sure which period is covered by 1 day. It may not match the day in your time zone. The thing is to not focus too much on following your stats every day. They are an indicator of your activity and are more meaningful when looked at over longer periods than a day.
Hi Helen,
the count of known words is weird. At some point I had a negative overall (all time) known words status for a language. As if trying to learn that language was somehow stealing words from another language.
darbanville,
That sounds a bit weird. I can’t see how it’s possible to have a negative all time Known Words total. Was this when you first started a language or after you had been studying it for a while? Did this happen recently? This should not be possible and sounds like a bug.
It happened about a month ago after I first tried ‘batch moving’ a page of words out of my vocabulary list from 4 to status 3 when I first found out that was a possibility. Unfortunately I had a lower known words status than the amount of words I moved to status 3. Therefore I came out negative overall. This I believe is possible because sometimes when I update a text after saving phrases the text in the green field high in the screen tells me that I have for instance ‘added -17 words’. This happens a lot when you save words and then phrases in a short text.
I am sorry I don’t know how to explain it more clearly… 
It is possible to add negative known words from a text if you have saved words that you previously indicated as Known. We have found some bugs recently in this area that will be fixed in the next few weeks.
We will be reviewing all of our statistics, looking at our calculations etc., when we get through the many important new features that we are now working on. For the most part, and for most people, the statistics work. They provide an ongoing indication of activity level and progress. However, we know that there are bugs and flaws. We appreciate you pointing these out. This will help us when we go to upgrade this area of our system. Letting our programmers remain focused on their existing task list will ensure the best possible LingQ environment in the shortest period of time.
Your patience is appreciated.
Steve, your allways very patient with us unpatient users. But I know that software developement is not easy 
You do good work on LingQ and I’m sure the system get better and better.
Thanks Vera. I appreciate it.
Not focus on my daily stats??? I hope you’re not calling me an obsessive. I get enough of that from my husband. He is threatening to set up a support network for “LingQ widows and widowers” and is wondering if Mrs Steve would like to join.
I am not getting stressed about any of the little features of LingQ, it works better than it would if I had coded it. I was once a full-time bug-fixer and it was the worst job I have ever had! Some bugs were really hard to even figure out what they were doing and when they occurred, never mind finding the code causing them. If memory serves, two kinds of bugs that had me chewing the desk were: getting a list that stretches over multiple pages to display correctly when you hit “next” or “last”, and getting the list counters to downdate tidily after deleting an item.
As far as i’m concerned, I don’t mind if you don’t do anything to lingQ. But if I find something that looks like it might be not too hard to find and fix, I will mention for the record in case you are planning to do any fixes.
Of course you may, for all I know, be planning to completely redesign certain sections. In which case fixing little wobbles in the existing pages would be a waste of programming effort.
We appreciate all the suggestions and bugs you find. Rest assured we will gradually work our way through all of them unless we redo certain aspects which will, of course, reintroduce more bugs so the cycle continues…
Good luck with the widows and widowers support network!
Last night I accidentally hit update before I was done updating my vocabulary list. (I’m brand new to LingQ). Is there a way to undo this accident?
Hi ncosker,
Take a look at this thread, Is There A Way To Zero Out My Known Words Count - Languag...