I think more important than having reviewed X number of words a day is the number of words that one can actually recognize and use correctly (both spoken and written, but especially when speaking and listening) after a certain period of time after studying. For example, 100 words in 5 days or whatever.
Steve, I am only going by how I understand your definition of what it means to know a word. Most of the English cognates I recognized before looking at your lists (some I still cannot see and ‘adroit’ I don’t even know in English), and I have no experience at all with the Romance languages. The ones I understood without needing to look at your lists I would not consider learned, based on your definition of what it means to know a word, if I marked them as known in a lesson. The others I would have LingQed.
I get the impression that this comes down to how hard you want to be on yourself. When I first started learning Japanese, I couldn’t understand most words that were cognates even if they only sounded slightly different than the English version of the word. So I LingQ’d those words and many of them are now status 4 “known” words for me. Now when I run across cognates, I often recognize them immediately so they get marked as known immediately as well.
So did I learn these new cognates that I’ve run across or did I know them all along? Did I learn those first cognates that I ran across or did I already “know” them and just didn’t realize it yet?
I’m pretty sure I learned something along the way, maybe it was those words or maybe it was something else. It’s a whole lot easier for me to just count them as known and move on. That is what they are after all - known words. Getting back to the question at hand - how many words can one learn a day - is it wrong for me to count those known words as ones I have learned?
It is also a matter of what we can measure. We cannot distinguish between obvious cognates which mean the same, hidden cognates, “false friends” and unrelated words that we just inferred the meaning of. So, not that it matters, I am inclined to include cognates as learned words. They are certainly part of the acquired “known words” total.
caza, as I suspected you are more a proponent of the first proposition, in other words that it is important to be able to use a word in order to count it as known. That is where we disagree.
One inconvenience with one’s 'active vocabulary" is that it is difficult to count or measure. At least with passive vocabulary, we have a means of measuring it here at LingQ.
I said twice that I was a proponent of the second scenario. However, then one consolidates his/her knowledge and expands on what they know. I have repeatedly said that I advocate a quantity and quality approach to language learning. (everything in life, actually) I don’t advocate just knowing a basic vocabulary of 1,000 words and be anal-retentive in studying those few words.
You could count active vocabulary by seeing if you could use it in a sentence, unprompted and without help. On a multiple choice test I can get a lot of questions right just by recognition. However the number of things I can actually converse about, unprompted is much less. That is probably more applicable since it represents a higher level of knowledge.
In terms of what I count as “knowing” a word, I would personally define it as being able to use it in a sentence when writing or speaking. In English or Spanish, I don’t think I have a very large discrepancy between what I passively and actively know, believe it or not. Whether I actually use some words like “decorum” or “caterwaul” in life is another story, however.
What exactly is meant by “passive” learning of words?
I only know a word if I think of it spontaneously in every circumstance where it is applicable. In English, for example, I have a working vocabulary of exactly 342 words.
Just kidding. Hey I’m on vacation. 
I agree with cgreen0038’s post here. Very well put.
@BtotheB2 - When I talk about passively knowing a word, I mean that I can understand the word when I hear or read it. When I actively know a word, it means that I can use it in conversations or writing. So in other words, passive vocabulary is used for input (reading/listening) and active vocabulary is used for output (writing/speaking).
I very much subscribe to the Lingq philosophy of learning languages but I can also see where Hape is coming from when he feels that Steve’s word counts can seem intimidating or pretentious. I see the Lingq count more as a relative measure of exposure and in that sense I think it has value. Having said that, speaking a language really well does mean knowing all shades of meaning of a word, all its grammatical forms, usage in colloquialisms and proverbs etc. Essentially one should become one with that word. Now, that is not the case after a couple of months (or even a year) of going at a rate of 400 new words a day.
Even though the word count may be high initially, the words will certainly not have solidified yet. Using the Lingq approach the learner very often infers meaning of unknown or somewhat known words from context and in that sense the context corroborates the fuzzy concept of its meaning that the learner has and thereby helps to refine and solidify it further.
I remember Steve struggling with the very basic word “fremtid” (Swedish for future, in his video on how he learned Swedish) because in that clip he saw it in isolation (in a book title) and in that context he may have expected something like “the present time” which possibly threw him off guard. To me it is misleading to speak of a large arsenal of assumed known words if such basic words (like future) have not solidified somewhat more. Therefore, again, thinking of the Lingq count as a relative measure of exposure makes more sense to me. Solidifying and consolidating the meaning and usage of single words takes a very long time indeed.
I don’t think I ever passively know a word. I either know it or I don’t. If I know it I could use it in a sentence but the surrounding words can be an issue. I find I passively know whole sentences not individual words. So I understand a sentence someone says but if you asked me to quote it back I couldn’t do it at all. There are LOADS of sentences I understand that I could never construct myself. It’s really frustrating.
Just wait until you know 10-15 thousand words in your russian. You’ll start to find yourself guessing the meaning of words that you have never seen before based on their resemblance to other words. You’ll find your passive knowledge grow exponentially in contrast to your active knowledge: You’ll learn many passive words for each active word.
In your native language, I can assure you that you know more words only passively then you would think.
@ btotheb - do you define knowing a word to mean that you can use it in a sentence? If so, you do not contradict what others on here are saying when they talk about passively knowing words. You are just using a different definition of the term. There must be words in Russian that you understand but cannot use. This is what people mean when they say they passively know words.
@ Friedemann - I don’t think Steve’s claim seems intimidating or pretentious. Other people might. I just think it is misleading.
@ Steve
I liked your post where you gave the sentences in French with the English cognates underneath. This seems like a good way to test how much French vocabulary can really be considered ‘known’ (by how I understand your definition) to me prior to studying French. Here are a few lines of French copied and pasted out of the French Wikipedia page about the French language. I have listed what I think are the cognates underneath. I have not used a dictionary or any other resource, and I have no experience learning French (didn’t do it at school, never read a French text, not studied a French phrasebook,…) or any other Romance language. I tried not to repeat the same word twice, I only went through the text once, and I didn’t check any of the answers. Please let me know how well I have done. How many did I get wrong and how many did I miss?
“Le français est une langue indo-européenne de la famille des langues romanes. Le français s’est formé en France (variété de la « langue d’oïl ») et est aujourd’hui parlé sur tous les continents par environ 220 millions de personnes dont 115 millions de locuteurs natifs1, auxquels s’ajoutent 72 millions de locuteurs partiels (évaluation Organisation internationale de la francophonie : 2010). Elle est une des six langues officielles et une des deux langues de travail (avec l’anglais) de l’Organisation des Nations unies, et langue officielle ou de travail de plusieurs organisations internationales ou régionales, dont l’Union européenne”
- French, language, indo-european, family, romance, form, France, variation, continents, environment, people, million, natives, evaluation, organisation, international, Francophone, official, English, United Nations, regional, European Union
Of course I would not understand most of these words when spoken.
I get it now that djvlbass explained what knowing a passive word is. Yeah I guess the meaning of words sometimes in a sentence but I tend to learn them in the process, so I’ll write the word down and double check I understood the meaning right. Sometimes I guess a word that would fit in the context and find it means something a bit different.
I just remembered something that I think would be passive. All the variations of a word like Blue depending on what case it’s in, so I would recognize the root of the word and maybe its new ending even if I haven’t heard it before…is that passive?
Colin, you missed the following
parlance, interlocutor, partial, travail,
Now if someone records this for you, and you study it at LIngQ, and you are able to undersand it when you hear it, in my view, you can say that you know these words, and that you learned these French words at LIngQ. It will take you a while. You will also want to invest some time in easier material, material on other subjects, basic sentence patterns etc. as I did with Romanian.
As you listen and read to this and other material, and LingQ new words, including cognates, you will find that you start to be able to use some of them after a while. You will then want to speak to someone, say a tutor at LingQ. Go for it.
I don’t know parlance and interlocutor in English either. I think this is where we come into a grey area. Would you say somebody knowns a word if they can understand it read, but not heard? Until now I have just thought about knowing a word when read but didn’t consider the fact that it is easier to recognise cognates when written.
p.s. I don’t plan to study French.
@ Colin:
“Of course I would not understand most of these words when spoken.”
After encountering and understanding words in written form, your chance of hearing them correctly goes up considerably.
"I see the Lingq count more as a relative measure of exposure and in that sense I think it has value. "
It is certainly a measure of exposure, but not only. In fact, when the “known word” count increases, your understanding of the language increases. As new lessons have lower and lower “new word” totals, you are able to understand more and more of the language, assuming you also do a lot of listening. So the “known word” count is quite a reliable measure of your increased comprehension. Comprehension, in my view, is at the core of language learning, comprehension both when reading and listening.
“speaking a language really well does mean knowing all shades of meaning of a word, all its grammatical forms, usage in colloquialisms and proverbs etc.”
This is simply not true. It is not even true for my native language.
“I remember Steve struggling with the very basic word “fremtid””
I presume “fremtid” is Norwegian, in Swedish the word is “framtid.” In any case, I have always felt and said that however well we speak a foreign language, there always times when we don’t find a word, or have misunderstood a word, or come across other gaps in our knowledge of that language. If I did not identify the meaning of “framtid” it is either because I had come across the word and forgotten it, or because I had never come across it before. Note that my “known words” total for Swedish at LingQ is only 3,450. So I don’t see the relevance of Swedish to the known words/learned words discussion. As to how well I speak Swedish, for sure I could improve. I usually rank it in the middle of the languages that I speak and vocabulary is certainly the weakest aspect of my Swedish.
I have not done much Swedish at LIngQ. If I had studied Swedish at LingQ I would likely have “LingQed” the word “framtid” the first time I met it. If the word is truly a “basic” word, it would have come up again, highlighted in yellow. I would have learned it. If I invested a month or so in Swedish at LingQ I would have a large number of LingQs but an even larger number of “known words” since I learned the language before LingQ, largely reading and listening, but without LingQ’s functionality. So, for me, a lot of words remain fuzzy. One day I hope to do more Swedish here at LingQ but right now I am pursuing other languages.