Hi I was just wondering what different people considers as a known word when using lingq.
Your native tongue vocab. I also include names unless for some reason it happenS to also be a word in my target lanhuage
I originally confused this with learned words and ended up having to switch them
To me it depends on how strict you are with words. Some people move a word to stage â4â or even âknownâ if they recognise it when reading. I would never do that. My criteria is:
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No clue at all
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I have read it before, I might deduce its meaning thanks to the context
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I know the meaning of the word when I read it.
4/K) when I am able to produce the word by my own. If I can create a sentence in a random moment of the day, without any help, then it is on this stage. If I have doubts about its spelling, then it stays at 4. If I know how to write it perfectly, then it goes to known.
This is, once again, my criteria. I do not care if people are obsessed about the number of known words to show off. Hope it helped!
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I set it to known if I understand it without context. I use Anki for words that I want in my active vocabulary.
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Like toomanysusans, words that I want to be able to produce on my own, I add to Anki with example contextual sentences if I donât already know it. I also add words that keep turning up and for whatever reason, I just cannot remember the meaning, even in context.
For nouns and some verbs, I enter the word in Google images and if there is an appropriate one, I put that on the front of the Anki card instead of the English.
If itâs not a word that would probably not come up in the day-to-day, I mark it known when I can understand it in context. I only have two settings - âlearningâ and âknownâ.
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Do you mark the word as a known word when you understand it for the given context even though there are other semantic meanings that you yet dont fully grasp?
I am quite strict with defining a known word. I see people with tens of thousands of known words across multiple languages after relatively little study time and I think it makes the system of LingQs kind of pointless. I think you need some clear criteria in order for the scale from 1-Known to have any use or meaning. I think some people might consider my approach overly strict.
For me (German and Swedish):
1 - I donât know the word at all. I donât know how to use it and can at best have a guess at what it roughly means.
2 - I recognise the word and know its meaning to some extent.
3 - I understand and recognise the word but am not entirely sure its grammatical implications or what contexts itâs used in etc. which means that I am not so confident using in myself actively. This is a word that I might try out in a conversation or text.
4 - I understand the word fully and it is perhaps even part of my active vocabulary, but there might be some sort of grammatical caveat or second meaning which I havenât quite learnt yet.
Known - Words which I can understand and actively use idiomatically and without much issue.
I have probably somewhere in the range of 1500-2000 hours of learning German and 1.4m read words, but only 5000 âknown wordsâ - it would probably be more like 7000 if I were to go through every single saved LingQ. Most of my saved LingQs are still in the range of 1-3 and I donât set them to known until I am comfortable using them and understand their grammatical requirements.
It also depends on the language. An individual German verb/noun (in my experience) has a lot more grammatical âbaggageâ than Swedish nouns/verbs, so I am more liberal with Swedish and have a much higher ratio of known words to words read.
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When I started using LingQ, it would mark all blue words Known if one paged to the end of the chapter. A terrible UX choice breaking standard guidelines â classic bad LingQ design.
After much understandable complaining in the comment section, LingQ grudgingly made that an app setting one could opt out of.
In the meantime I decided to mark all blue words Known when I saw them. I write all words and lingqs into a notebook for later review. Thatâs how I keep track.
Known Words is a fairly arbitrary statistic. As Steve Kaufmann himself says, itâs easy for a word that one decides to mark Known to be forgotten later.
Later I noticed how much smoother my reading flow was without fiddling with the Known Words meter constantly. The only statistic I care about is Words Read.
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Yes, but then if I realize that thereâs another contextual meaning later (if I see it in a different context and donât understand it) I will mark it back to un-known with both definitions.
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You used to not be able to turn that off? What you annoyingly still canât turn off is all unknown words being marked as known when you finish a lesson (if Iâm not mistaken) - I have to leave all of my lessons read to the end but incomplete.
I started getting a lot more reading done once I turned off the setting that highlights words in the text, so that I only see the status of the word once I actually click on it. My strategy now is to quickly browse the list of LingQs on the RHS of the screen before I start reading to see if there are any words I can mark as known, then I just focus on reading without clicking on any words unless it is something that I do not understand at all or affects my ability to follow the text.
After experimenting a bit Iâve now settled on a simpler system: if I come across the word while reading and I know the meaning I bump it up +1.
Max +1 per âsessionâ â often a certain word might appear 2-3 times within a few pages, only count that as 1.
Like others I have stopped trying to tie any threshold in active vocabulary.
No special treatment for alternative semantic meanings â this happens so infrequently I donât think worth complicating for.
Finally, will also drop a word -1 if I come across and it âfeelsâ like Iâve forgotten / become less familiar and the rating is too high, but this also is a relatively rare occurance.
I think thatâs true, though I havenât noticed lately because I always mark blue words Known immediately. That was part of my plan.
Anyway to help avoid this Known Words waste of time. Go to Profile/Settings/Reader:
General
Paging moves to known [Uncheck box]
Auto LingQ creation
Show vocabulary in sentence view
Show Known Words and LingQs screens at lesson complete [Uncheck box]
Note that LingQ has made these options the defaults. New users are unlikely to discover these options until they get annoyed enough to complain.
LingQ believes user should play the Known Words game. I see LingQ as a tool to take the friction out of Comprehensible Input, not to give me busywork while Iâm learning.
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I know for everyone marking a word as known means something slightly different. For me marking a known words just means that when I am reading and I come across this word I known what it means. It doesnât mean I know how to use the word in conversation or I will recognize the word when I am listening. And doesnât mean I necessary know all the meanings of this word. because some words have tons of meanings.
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Iâm pretty loose with my consideration nowadaysâŚ
I mark it known if I understand the word in context, regardless of the level it was at.
For words I donât know in contextâŚIf I donât know it in context and it is blue, I set it to 1. Next time I encounter the word (in a different session), if I still donât know it Iâll set it to 2. Next time I encounter it (in a different session), if I still donât know it Iâll set it to 3. From that point forward if I donât know it on the next iteration I just leave it at 3 until ultimately (hopefully) I recognize it in context and then Iâll change it to known. This way I have an idea of how many times Iâve encountered the word. So I might ultimately work on #3 words with SRS potentially. I wouldnât bother with #1 or #2 words.
If I encounter a known word in context and I donât know it, Iâll set it back to #3. I donât always do this, but most of the time I do.
Early on with LingQ I felt like I spent way to much time trying to think at what level I âknowâ the word. Do I know it if I recognize in context? Do I know it if I can use it? How would I even gauge if I know I can use it (output it spontaneously). So my method above takes next to no time. I either know it in context or I donât. No wasted time thinking about something that isnât useful in the process of learning the word anyway.
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Thatâs a very good question⌠I wonder the same thing⌠and what criteria they use to place you in the reading challenge rankings. Even when I finish 100% of them, I always seem to end up around 30th place