I know words are counted differently on LingQ than most other people count them. Is there a quick and dirty formula to get an idea of how many words I know the ‘normal’ way?
There is not because it depends on, a lot of factors. However, there are some rules of thumb which are dependent on your target language. We have discussed a few of those in the forum.
I suppose you are interested in Korean. If so, I can’t help you there but I guess the “conversion factor” from “ling words” (word forms) to word families must be fairly large. If it makes you feel better, I think the one in Japanese is even worse, not because it has more inflections, I think it is similar or a bit less, but because many words and even word forms can be written in several ways.
I guess there isn’t is there. I am focusing on Korean right now completely so you supposed correctly. I know I get a lot of free words because I’m just marking the same words as known over and over because they have slightly different grammar attached etc.
If you don’t want to include them in Known words stats, you can ignore them instead.
Yes, that happens. My advice is just to relax and keep on adding those words. Stats are there to measure your individual progress, not to compare yourself with other learners or external criteria
“Slightly different grammar” changes the meaning of a word. In languages like Korean the idea of “I may have ran” is one one word. It’s “run” with slightly different grammar attached to it – but you need to learn what that grammar is, and you need to learn what the difference between that and “I would have ran” and “I would have had to run” which will all be one word, all based on “run.”
So yeah, all those compound words are legit words, and they are not “free.” 
Marking them should be the ‘normal’ way. I think word families are BS. Words are words, they have their own meaning. If it’s considered a legit word in the language, and you understand it, mark it as known.
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I agree that it is better that different forms be counted separately and that they are not “free”. However I disagree with the “word families are BS” part. They are as BS as word forms. In both cases the definitions are arbitrary. Word families are useful in order to ascertain your overall comprehension of the language, allow comparisons between languages and they also make sense because in many cases you can predict many different forms from one single stem after some contact with the language and are thus not independent from one another in terms of understanding.
Yes, calling it BS was an exaggeration. What I meant was that for overall comprehension, it’s the individual words that count. Of course the concept of word families has an important roll in linguistics.