Steve, that’s OK that we have the word counting at LingQ, it’s very useful to check yourself how many new words have you done for a week
My objection is only about the exaggerated role of the word quantity in speaking. I believe it’s more important to think very quickly by speaking; that’s why 3000 ‘active’ words in an oral expression are more useful than 30000 ‘passive’ words because we haven’t more than one seconde to reply our counterpart in conversation.Therefore, the passively known words practically don’t work by speaking. You can say: they can be important to understand the answers of your companion. Theoretically - yes, but we can’t guess what he answers. And to learn another 10000 words to understand this one unexpected word is not practical. More practical is just to ask him: What do you mean? What does this word mean?
I have spoken only about a conversation. For reading the more words you know the better.
But it is almost impossible for me to know all the words even in my mother tongue even if I catch up the word, follow the conversation. Each one has each domain. I gave up getting certain special words. In my viewpoint, using 3000 active words regularly (when writing or speaking) is more effective than spending much time to know another passive 10000 words in every domain.
@dilemme, I’ve completely agreed with you. More than 3000 words we need for reading. But by reading we can stop and think a bit about the meaning of this or thar written word and guess it or look up in the dictionairy. But we haven’t such a possibility by speaking at all.
Well, I ask when I don’t understand something!
While I speak in Russian I have Google translate open, and when I can’t of the word I want I stage a coughing fit while I type the Engish into the translator. A year ago, when I started doing this, I usually couldn’t tell if the translation was reasonable or not, now my passive vocabulary is large enough that I can very often recognise the Russian word as being the one I meant.
I’m still not so good at pronouncing all these new words in my passive vocabulary though, and am experimenting with speaking dictionaries.
But most of dictionaries are in my view awful: the just give a set of possible meanings, by the way, the more useful ones at the end, without or with only a few examples how to use these words. And a great quantity of obsolate words that are out of use now.
On the other hand, the new words we can hardly find in the dictionaries for a long decade!
And only native speakers(but also not always) can help you with some doubts of translation.