What is the average number of words you can learn a day?

Open Forum in English
21

@ colin,

It depends on what you mean by " from scratch". The Romanian words are recognizable but not necessarily identical to the Romance vocabulary in French, or English or Italian. Here is an article from Radio Romania, which has a lot of recognizable Romance words. If you study the Patterns series in our library at LingQ, which uses more day to day vocabulary, you may find fewer recognizable Romance words.

Audierile în cazul fraudei de la liceul Bolintineanu continuă
Astăzi, 14:13
Comentează
de Cristina Ghioca
20 dintre cei peste 30 de elevi audiaţi până acum nu au putut preciza dacă s-au dat bani pentru a influenţa comisia de la bacalaureat, spune avocatul directorului liceului.
Share on email Share on facebook Share on twitter Share on digg Share on linkedin More Sharing Services
1

Foto: Arhivă
Peste 30 de elevi au fost audiaţi până acum la Poliţia Capitalei, în cazul suspiciuni de fraudă la bac de la Liceul Bolintineanu, a declarat avocatul George Moloman, avocatul directorului de la liceul Bolintineanu, Costica Vărzaru, care a participat la audieri.

Potrivit acestuia, douăzeci dintre elevi au spus în faţa procurorilor că au dat bani pentru clopoţel, banchet şi închirierea de robe şi album foto, dar niciunul nu a putut să precizeze dacă s-au dat bani pentru a influenţa comisia de la bacalaureat.

Avocatul a mai spus că au fost doi elevi care au spus că au auzit că s-ar fi dat bani, 100 de lei, dar nu au putut să precizeze de unde au auzit, unde s-au dat şi pentru ce.

Audierile continuă la Poliţia Capitalei, transmite redactorul Radio România, Daniela Mănuţă.

Notele de la bacalureat au fost afişate la licee şi au fost postate pe site-ul ministerului educatiei.

Au promovat 55,4% din elevii care au susţinut examenul de bacalaureat, cu 11% mai mult ca anul trecut.

Creşterea se datorează diferenţierii subiectelor, spune ministrul educaţiei Remus Pricopie.

Premierul nu este de acord cu generalizările privind fraudarea examenului

Premierul Victor Ponta i-a felicitat pe toţi cei care au promovat examenul de Bacalaureat, informează redactorul Radio România, Cristina Grecu.

El a arătat că nu este de acord cu generalizările privind frauda şi nici cu cele potrivit cărora toţii copiii sunt prost pregătiţi la bacalaureat.

Victor Ponta a anunţat că aşteaptă luni explicaţii de la ministrul de interne, Radu Stroe, în legătură cu acţiunea poliţiei de vineri, de a lua cu autocarele elevii pentru a fi audiaţi.

El spune că dacă s-au făcut abuzuri, cei vinovaţi vor fi traşi la răspundere.

22

Colin, I should add that Romanian has about 70-75% Latin based vocabulary, which is less than the other Romance languages, but more than English. It is a bit of an outlier.

23

So if they are recognizable, does that mean you would have quickly set them to known when you first came across them?

24

Colin, I go through a lesson using the keyboard, hitting Enter to save the blue words that I don’t know, and clicking “X” on the non words. Then I click on the “Move all remaining new words to the Known words list”. I sometimes go back and save phrases. Otherwise I read the lesson on my iPad.

25

@Paule89

I agree with many of Steve’s language learning strategies, but I don’t like such statements like “I acquired over 24,000 words in 60 days” because I find them unrealistic and demotivating for most of the learners here.

Steve also tends to read fast and “LingQ fast” by pressing just RETURN and using Google Translate’s or other people’s LingQs. I prefer to find the best translation and think a bit more about a sentence (according to Steve’s principle #3 “Learn To Notice”).

But people differ, and so the usage of LingQ differs, and the number of words we “learn” differs.

26

@ Steve - Oh yes, me too, but that’s not what I meant. What I mean is that you did not really learn 400 words a day. If you set 400 words a day to known on LingQ, it is because you recognized these words based on your previous knowledge. At least this is how I understand it. Please correct me if I am wrong.

According to my stats, I learned 140 words per day in the last 6 months at LingQ. This is nowhere near realistic, expecially since I save all the nonsense as known too.

27

I only used Romanian as an extreme case. I think 100 a day is realistic.

28

Hape,

think we should just share our experiences here without worrying about whether we are motivating or demotivating others. It is possible that some people are demotivated by seeing a number of 1 to 5 as the number of words we can learn a day. It is nevertheless important to share our different approaches and different experiences.

29

How about “der”, “die”, “das”, “dem” and “den” in German?
Or “quoi”, “comment”, “combien”, “pourquoi” and “que” in French?

If you understand every way to use these 5 words in a single day, that would be amazing progress.
It´s an extreme example, but I hope you know what I mean.

5 words a day might be demotivating without hearing u50´s explanation and 400 words a day might seem like bragging without hearing Steve´s explanation.

30

Another thing is that the definition of “knowing” a word differs from person to person. Are we talking about just knowing the dictionary definition? Or are we talking about knowing the myriad of definitions and the connotations that the word implies? For example, a Puerto Rican professor told us that the word “ambitious” has a negative connotation in Puerto Rican Spanish (maybe Spanish in general but I haven’t asked other natives this). Also, I just learned that in Spain, the word “suburb” has a negative connotation as it implies living in a poor area.

The knowledge of a word doesn’t just end with knowing the dictionary definition, that is all I’m saying. Under this more stringent definition about knowing a word, most people would have a much lower number of words learned per day.

31

@cazagiloso

Exactly :slight_smile:

I was just thinking of “to cover one´s feet”, I´m pretty sure that every native speaker and most english learners know the words in that sentence, but how many of them would get the meaning of that phrase?

What about “I´m all ears” or “He´s the big cheese”?^^
Knowing and understanding words a two completely different things sometimes.

32

Steve, if you don’t do flashcards very much, how do you get your lingqs from yellow to white? Do you just realize you know the word one day and change its status?

33

dasani,

I sometimes move them in batches to status four in the vocabulary section. I do study flashcards but not that often. When I do, I often move words to known. Mostly I think I move words to know while reading at the computer or on my iPad. As I see LingQ which I now know very well, I just move them to know.

34

@ caza and Puale,

It is not possible nor practical in my view to know all of the possible combinations of words, nor all of the possible shades of meanings of words, not in foreign languages and not in our own language. To me a word is known when I can recognize it in one context. That is usually a good start, or a Hint, as we say in LingQ, towards the meaning of the word. The more often we meet up with that word again, the more complete our knowledge of the word, the scope of its meaning, and how it’s used, will become.

35

It’s not an either or proposition. It’s not like you choose to learn a lot of words with little depth or learn just a few words with exhaustive study of the minutiae of each word. The deeper the knowledge that a person has of a language and of the words, the more subtle they can be when expressing themselves. The register of a person obviously changes when speaking to a bunch of university or higher educated graduates in a graduation ceremony or when talking to a bunch of b-boys in an urban setting.

I stopped learning a bunch of rare dictionary words because they are hardly ever used by natives in my target language. The only times that I look up words are when I read relatively informal articles online and not RAE dictionary type words that even some natives don’t know. One will learn words at a blistering fast pace when they are common words but it definitely slows down when you try to learn obscure words that are never reinforced. Well, unless one is only reading. In that case one’s time wouldn’t be occupied with oral practice of the language.

36

When I mark a word as known, I know it passively - if I understand them in the context that they are being used, I mark them as known. No other criteria. I don’t worry about other contexts. I don’t worry if I can use the word in my active vocabulary. I’m not sure how I would even be able to determine those things anyway. How could I read or listen to something in one context and then decide if I know it in other contexts?

37

I use the dictation function on my computer. I apologize if sometimes I am in a hurry and don’t re-read my comments carefully. The odd strange comments sneak in.

@cgreen,

Very much in the LingQ spirit!

38

During my CELTA certification I was taught to plan for 7+/-2 new words in any 90 minute lesson - call it 5 words per hour. The focus was not on building a large passive vocabulary but in being able to produce this new language quickly. If the latter is your own goal for a foreign language then I’d argue that this is a reasonable benchmark.

Do you want to be able to USE a vocabulary of 5000 words or word families? Expect 1000 hours of study.

39

I do not understand why you would assume that learning takes place primarily in the classroom.

I believe that to comfortably use a large active vocabulary, you will need to possess a much larger passive vocabulary. To comfortably use 5,000 words, you will need to interact with native speakers who use a much larger vocabulary, and you will need to understand them.

I think you will achieve your goal of a large active vocabulary faster if you focus your learning on intensive input activities, such as we do here at LingQ, and gradually increase your interaction with tutors as you progress.

As for the number of hours required, this depends on the language, and other factors, as has been discussed here.

40

I believe understanding and being understood is the key. I don’t know how many times I thought I knew a word until I heard it in a different context than what I knew before. Sometimes in a context not shown in a dictionary. So building a large passive vocabulary is my goal to reach understanding faster in order to learn to turn those words into active vocabulary so that I can be understood. Since drilling words in my head with flash cards and other methods don’t work, the more input I have over time and the more words are seen or heard in a context tends to build my active vocabulary in a more usable way. We all learn in different ways, so it is important to discover what works best for you. Taking positive steps in using the new language daily is my way no matter how big the steps are.