Word count and variable degree of language morphology (grammar)

Open Forum
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Taking an example of a language with a relatively high degree of morphology like the French language, versus languages with a low degree of morphology (grammatically simple), the idea of progress by word count is kind of subject to giving a wrong impression.

For instance, in the French language, should “l’homme” and “homme” be counted as two words? the former actually being a conjugation of two words. Since there are tons of such conjugations in French, I thought it to be kind of playing false to count them as two words.

It is the same with the female and male forms, are noir, noire, vert and verte four words, or two? Or what about single/plural, if it is just an s or x added to the word?

All in all, in the French language, with such a high degree of morphology and conjugations, on hindsight I had been thinking that counting them separately does not really honestly indicate my progress. Conjugations for instance should be treated as patterns, not individual cases, and there are male/female forms, which can be treated as patterns, etc.
If you know the pattern, you know the other ‘word’, of which you already knew the meaning.

Additionally I am not sure how to (technically) treat a conjugation or female form different, making the word white, while not adding it to my word count. For instance: making l’homme, l’hotel, noire (female form) white, while only adding homme, hotel, and noir to my LingQ and known word count list.

Of course this essentially touches on the issue of grammar, which is basically about patterns and pattern recognition. Maybe I am more pattern oriented. I would love to able to click on a verb and other forms, and see the various patterns, conjugations, etc. Even more, I thought it would or could be interesting if I myself could take a word, and add it to a list based on grammatical patterns.

All in all, LingQ is awesome, but for those who tend to think in terms of patterns more optional options related to grammar would be even better.

Any thoughts?

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Ignore the stats, they are rather meaningless.

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I get what you mean, but they can be useful to select lessons by number of known words, so that you are not overwhelmed by too many new words.

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I don’t think French has hardly any declination of nouns at all, but it has a lot of conjugation of verbs.

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That’s correct, but doesn’t require the amount of thinking you’ve put into your initial post. After a while you will get an idea of what percentage will generally be handable by you. But even this simple number can be misleading, as other factors come into play, too. You may be able to handle a higher new words count if the topic is familiar and vice versa.

Grammar plays a role, too. If the text consists out of a series of long and complicated sentences, featuring a wide variety of grammatical constructions you may not necessarely be familiar with, you have less capacities left to focus on the new words or guessing their meaning from context.

In the end a lesson with a higher new word count might be easier to understand then a lesson with a lower count. And the known word count doesn’t mean much, if there is no standarized method how to categorize the words in known/unknown (or the different levels respectively). What do you want to compare that number to? At best, you can compare that number to the one you had one month ago or so. But whether that gives you any valuable information that helps you learning the language is arguable, at best.

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This question has been discussed many, many times on this forum already. The most common conclusion seems to be that you can only use the word count as a vague indicator of your progression. Everyone needs to determine for themselves whether they consider a morphological difference significant enough to be studied as a seperate LingQ, and to be included in the word count. There is no right way, but I would encourage you to be as consistent as you can in order for the trend to be meaningful.

Incidentally I find French to be a rather odd example of a morphologically complex language? Especially when there are languages like Russian or Finnish out there which conjugate large parts of the language by several tenses. Or when you consider a language like Turkish, which includes much if the information most Indo-European languages would consider to be prepositions as suffixes or prefixes (I don’t speak Turkish at all, so apologies if this is a misunderstanding)

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I suscribe. I think it would be really helpful.

As for the statistics, it is just that, statistics… you can do your research about the language itself to figure out how many words / patterns take to be x level = how many does that mean on lingq. For instance:

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I would love to able to click on a verb and other forms, and see the various patterns, conjugations,

Me too!
I would love if

  • nouns listed their gender and declension pattern name (if not obvious from gender), and were linked to a full table
  • adjectives listed their declension pattern name, and were linked to a full table
  • verbs listed their conjugation pattern name, their aspect, their infinitive form, and were linked to a full table
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yellow🡒German seems to be a simple language to me. :winking_face_with_tongue:
green🡒good luck with that conjugation tables.

What would the be benefit of having such a table? Do you want to learn the conjugation for each verb seperately?

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‘Naturally’ developed languages are hopelessly inefficient, it should be possible to systematically develop a language which is more rich in expressions than the most morphologically complex natural language. Well, in as far as morphological complexity is even related to wealth of possible expressions..

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If you want a language that expresses as much as possible, as unambiguously as possible, as briefly as possible, give this a shot! Good luck!

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I look at the conjugation & declination tables on wiktionary not infrequently

  • to see if I spelled something correctly or to spell it correctly
  • to verify if my guess about an ending is right if I heard or am reading something and am unsure
  • to find out how the participles are formed
  • sometimes even just to check the gender of a noun or conjugation pattern or infinitive of a verb (if I remember either the infinitive or a stem vowel but am not sure of the other)
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I didn’t mean that they are of no use. I am just not sure whether you need them to pop up in LingQ all the time. I look up particles or grammar patterns, too. But if I notice that I have issues with a particular grammar repeatedly, I usually use chatGPT or a grammar book to drill it.

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For verb conjugations I use the Reverso Verb Conjugation popup in Dictionaries all the time. Works great, at least for French.

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Good point–adjective declension tables and verb conjugation tables can be enormous–wiktionary puts all the participle tables in separate pages for Russian.

I’d be happy to have links to the wiktionary tables, actually.

jt23’s suggestion above really helped me; I just figured out that I can add the wiktionary popup option and drag it to the top, so thank you jt23!
That popup extension editor they already have in lingq seems nice & intuitive, including how to to choose desired source language.