As far as I know, unlike status ‘4’ words, ‘known’ words are not traceable at the user level. This means:
Known words cannot be exported
Known words won’t show up if you want to find words by similarity
You cannot associate hints with known words. This means other users cannot benefit from what you know.
So, what is the point of marking a word as ‘known’ instead of status ‘4’? The only reason I can think of is that it requires only one click.
Known words don’t have little lines underneath them. I like my texts to not have little lines underneath every single word.
It also saves users without premium accounts from drowning in a sea of blue.
Also, if you have 200 blue words by the time you get to the end of the lesson, you will have saved yourself at least 599 clicks by not saving the blue words, plus 200 long waits for the LingQs to be saved, and 200 long waits for control to be returned after changing the status.
I used to mark many words as ‘known’ also for convenience reasons. But recently I am starting to realize that this does not make much sense. Once a word is marked as ‘known’, I cannot track it anymore. This seems to defeat the fundamental concept of LingQ.
So from now on, I stop marking any words as ‘kwonn’. This means I have to do extra clicks to mark them as ‘4’.
Why would you want to track a word you already know?
See #2 and #3 in my first post. Mainly #2, but also #1 for contingency.
I have read quite a few books on LingQ now. Before the most recent update of the app, I always went through each chapter on the website before reading them in order to create the LingQs. I would have one finger on the enter button, and one on the k button, and just flick through creating LingQs (of course, I would move my hands arround when it came to looking up words in the dictionary and making my own hints). I would create many more LingQ this way than if I was simply to be making them as I read simply because I was not really paying attention and because I was not seeing the words in context, so words that I would obviously understand in context were not clear. I would then set a large fraction of these to known as I read the chapter. I only once got up high in the activity scoreboard (I was third for several weeks), and it was only possible because of this.
Say, when you encounter a verb, and right away you recognize it as a past tense form of a verb you have learned. Do you mark this as ‘known’ or ‘status 4’?
I used to mark it as ‘known’. But then I wouldn’t be able to pull out all the forms of that verb if I wanted to. So it makes more sense to me to mark it as ‘status 4’.
If you agree with this logic, and if you are starting a language from scratch, you should not have any ‘known’ words.
As I read a text, if I am confident that I know the meaning of a new blue word, I leave it. At the end of the lesson I convert these to known and don’t worry about them again. I occasionally encounter white words, in other words “known words”, that I don’t know. Then I save them.
If I encounter different forms of words I have already save, I sometimes save them. This is the case if I have not yet learned the meaning of scope of the first appearance of the word. It is also the case if this particular form of the word, let’s say the third person singular of the past tense or something, is hard to remember.
I changes the status of words either when flash carding, or in the yellow pop up, or in batch form in the Vocab section. In some cases, the status moves up as a result of my flash carding.
Even starting from scratch there will be known words if the language shares some vocabulary with a language you already know.
I doubt if many, if any, of the people with a high AI score are “gaming the system”. They are too busy learning their language.
LingQing is generally faster now than it was for a long time. There are some issues at the present moment with uneven delays in LingQing and we think we have a few solutions that will improve things. So I am hoping we will get improvement in that regard fairly soon.
But this has not held me back. I have LingQed 1751 words in Ukrainian in the last 7 days and my known words count has increased by 5832. This known words count is not a true indicator since so many words are similar to Russian, and I had spent the previous 10 days doing Ukrainian in the Hebrew slot. This was really time consuming because I had to change google translate to Ukrainian from Hebrew each time. In this period I saved 1593 LingQs and added 4023 new words, many of which were added again in the Ukrainian slot, no doubt.
Steve, how did you migrate your vocab from the Hebrew slot to the Ukrainian one?
Hypothetically speaking, if you had those known words marked as ‘status 4’ from the beginning, you could just export all the lingQs from the Hebrew slot and and import them to the Ukrainian one. Now, I guess you have lost all the ‘known’ words, right?
I have no interest in exporting any words, or finding words of similarity. If I want to see verbs in their different forms, I will look for conjugation tables on Google. What I want to do is read and read and read, as easily and as enjoyably as possible.
Edwin, I just started all over again.
You started all over again?!?! Oh man, if only you had instead created status 4 LingQs for the hundreds of thousands of words you have set to known in every language, you could have saved yourself the trouble!
Just wondering if anyone actively changes words to status 4 on recognising their meaning only passively (and saves them separately for all forms)? I have been holding back doing this thinking it is somehow ‘cheating’ and subject to daily fluctuations of tiredness and confidence…
But if I DON’T do this and rely only on working through the flashcard exposures, it takes ages to increase my known words, and also seems impossible to meet my known words weekly targets.
I always change my lingQ status manually. I never let the flashcard tool change any status. I prefer more control. But it is really up to you.
Most of my known words are words that I do not LingQ. I usually have a very low “learned word” count, i.e. status 4 words. It is mostly the reading, LingQing and listening that enables me to learn. Thus known words, words read, and LingQs created are my key stats. The listenint stat at LingQ does not reflect the amount I listen on my MP3 player.