The article mentions 9000 words. I wrote that the word count would have to be way over 100k for exactly that reason.
Ah ok, but that would probably not be necessary because it depends on how you know the words. Once you know a verb, for example, and how verbs conjugations work, there is no need to have all the variations counted as knows lingqs in the system. Probably most of them you will never encounter.
So, it’s probably something in the middle or even less between 9000 pure words and all their variations.
According to other people here, 50k is already a very good number to have and after that you don’t really have a big advantage.
Here below I put you a tab I had copied here from another user. I have no memory to tell you where it was.
As you can see from that tab, 11 million words corresponds to 280k lingQs. But from 55k to 280k you only gain 2% more comprehension.
Comprehension - Known words - Cumulative read words - Known word forms on LingQ
81,5% - 1k - 200k - 5,0k
88,2% - 2k - 400k - 10,0k
91,6% - 3k - 700k - 17,5k
94,2% - 4k - 1200k - 30,0k
95,5% - 5k - 2200k - 55,0k
96,4% - 6k - 3700k - 92,5k
97,1% - 7k - 5700k - 142,5k
97,5% - 8k - 8200k - 205,0k
97,9% - 9k - 11200k - 280,0k
If your going to read 11 million word here you will encounter a lot of different variations anyway, so if you want to have an extensive vocabulary in Russian your word count will blow up like crazy. The difference between 50k known words and 100k is immense. Not only have you doubled your amounts of known words but also repeated the known words a lot more often.
Also not understanding 2% of anything is still a pretty big gap. Certainly enough to throw you off the rails in spoken form.
I think our brains have a tendency to dwell/linger/try to figure out something that we either don’t recognize at all or recognize enough to know that we can remember the meaning within a couple seconds, but this isn’t very helpful in fast spoken language. One thing I’ve had to force myself to do is always listen for the next word and don’t waste time trying to figure out what I’ve already heard. It feels a bit like pushing your brain to focus on the current word that you’re hearing and not let it live in the past (like riding a wave on a surfboard). If you’re doing it correctly, you’ll feel like you can mentally say the words as they are being said by the speaker. I think this is along the lines of what most people call shadowing, but you don’t have to physically move your mouth and make sounds. This method is one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is what Luca Lampariello does, in that he tries to understand the general meaning of what he hears and doesn’t worry as much about catching individual words. I try to use both methods at different times.
“I forget how/what I did in order to get the Spanish to just being it’s own thing with no real link to English translation back and forth.”
You just listened and read more in Spanish and it’s an easier language. It’ll get like that in Russian eventually.
I am not yet a polyglot, I am trhrough my 4th language right now, but here is what I am doing while listening to a language that I am not yet mastering : I try to get some words only. I listen to begginer’s, intermediate or even advanced conversations in my target laguage and I try to get some words. At first, you will find that you only catch the words that are common with your mother language (another laguage that you master) and it is still great, because you did not know that it is the same word or almost that in the language you know. Then, the weird part, it that I find my self immitating the language in my mind, cheberich sounds but thet looks like the target language. When you catch instantly whole phrases and a number f words from a converstaion, that is where I think, you try and translate it to your motherlanguage.
Interesting. Now I understand you. So 9,000 words. That’s not actually too too bad. I’ve read elsewhere that it’s 4,000 to get to intermediate and 10,000 to get to fluency. I’m currently at about 6,000 in lingQ so maybe a few months more.
Thanks for the insight.
Question: if you’re not a polyglot at four languages, then what is the definition?
I’m almost 20k “lingQ words” in German and I feel crap, just basic. 50k is my target with this language at this moment.
Keep in mind that’s actually 9,000 “word families” not words the way LingQ defines them. So, for example, in English: access, accessed, accesses, accessibility, accessible, accessing, inaccessibility, and inaccessible all count as one word family, whereas LingQ would obviously count that as 8 separate words. Multiply that times 9,000 and you will get a much bigger number.
Plus, Russian has declensions, conjugations, and gender which will increase the number of LingQ words per word family compared to English.
On the other hand, LingQ only counts a word as known if you’ve come across while reading and marked it as known. So, you likely actually know many more “words” than appear in your known words in LingQ.
All this is just to say that based on the way LingQ counts known words, its hard to say how many known words you actually need in LingQ to equal the famous 9,000.
It would be nice if LingQ could build a way to count word families, but I get that it would be hard to support that for all 37 languages.
Hi David,
50K probably too low for slavic languages as pointed out. I’ve seen numbers like 80k to 100k+ for slavic language known Lingq words thrown around.
81,5% - 1k - 200k - 5,0k
88,2% - 2k - 400k - 10,0k
91,6% - 3k - 700k - 17,5k
94,2% - 4k - 1200k - 30,0k
95,5% - 5k - 2200k - 55,0k
96,4% - 6k - 3700k - 92,5k
97,1% - 7k - 5700k - 142,5k
97,5% - 8k - 8200k - 205,0k
97,9% - 9k - 11200k - 280,0k
Im just curious where were these numbers obtained from? And this is for Russian?
@eric: yeah, that could be true but you also have to consider that once you know a verb, for example, you might know all the variations as well without having them on your LingQ statistic. Because you don’t encounter all possible variations on every word you know on LingQ. So you might estimate that if you know 50k lingq words probably you also know 100k or sort of. It’s very random because it depends on what are those 50k or those 100k.
@Hagowingchun: as I wrote before, I don’t remember where anymore. Here somewhere in the vast LingQ’s forum. Definitely done by a user that like numbers. 
10.000 words is quite fluent but meant are base words. In Lingq with all their variations it might be 2000k words.
I think a lot of people say five, but there seems to be no real agreement on this.
Ok, I have to say I was having fun about searching for it. And I had to stop because it’s a never ending.
I would say it feels right though. I mean “five” but included your own language.
But from the dictionaries you could say more than 2 and it would be ok. There is no number specified.
From random dictionary:
polyglot
adjective: knowing or using several languages.
noun: a person who knows and is able to use several languages.
Cambridge dictionary: speaking or using several different languages.
Collins: A polyglot is a person who speaks or understands many languages.
several: more than two but not many.
many: a large number of.
large: of considerable or relatively great size, extent, or capacity.
…
Thanks. I was under the impression it was four.
Ugh. I need to master russian and my next one to make it then. So at least two to three years out.
Oh well.
I recently watched the Miss Universe contest and one of the contestants mentioned she was a polyglot, she then defined it as 3 or more languages. It makes sense, the prefix “poly” means “many”, in the case of structures the simplest “many” sided structure is a triangle.
I think the problem about this word “polyglot” is about the feeling of difficulty.
For many people being a polyglot mean being above the average. Being someone that speaks more languages compared to the average.
For example, I don’t consider a polyglot myself because I don’t care about it but I use indeed the term multilingual everywhere. Go figure!
Also, many people don’t include their own native language. I include it like many others because not everyone in the country speak well their own native language. Actually, more people don’t know it well.
So, Miss Universe speaks 3 languages included or not the native language?
If it’s included it could be technically ok from the dictionary point of view but it’s just marketing. Imho.
4 languages included yours could be but I would have the feeling the most people wouldn’t use the term polyglot because in many countries they can have 4 languages at school. For example is Switzerland. And we don’t call Swiss people polyglots but they all generally speak 4 languages or most of them.
5 languages included yours could be a good starting point. BUT you need to know them well. And this is another point of difference. Many youtubers or similar say they speak many languages but don’t have any diploma to prove it. Or they only speak a language but they don’t write it, and so on.
I don’t use the term polyglot for myself because for me it means having every language at C2 level and probably mentally around 7 languages. Because for me, a polyglot is a person that want to learn as much as many languages he can.
So, I’m ok with the word multilingual as it is a bit more casual.
But of course, it’s just a feeling and it might be totally wrong.
Agreed. I go with Master Steve’s original “Linguist” so it works for any other language at pretty much any level.