X lingq = Y real words?

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Especially for German, has anyone an approximate factor for how many real words someone has concerning the number of known Lingq words here ignoring the derivative words?
i.e. the learner who has 100 k lingqs , how many real words he has?

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Consider:

“Er steht früh auf.”

That’s four words. “Steht” is a word and so is “auf.”

With the example sentence, the conjugated use of the verb is three morphemes.

  • steh-: The root morpheme, meaning to “stand.”
  • -t: The inflectional suffix, for third person singular in the present tense.
  • auf-: The separable prefix, modifying the meaning with “up.”

The lemma is “aufstehen.” What you’ll find in the dictionary. Base word can be considered as a synonym as it’s uninflected and serves as the foundation for generating other forms.

The abstract unit of meaning that represents the base form of a word and all its inflected variants, here for “getting up,” is the lexeme.

The lexeme “aufstehen” has a number of word forms across tenses, moods, and persons, such as the following few examples:

  • ich stehe auf (I get up)
  • du stehst auf (you get up, singular informal)
  • er/sie/es steht auf (he/she/it gets up)

In casual speech, “word” could many any or all of these without much concern for linguistic precision, but if we’re talking about relationships or ratios, there may be benefit of precision of what we’re talking about.

In German linguistics, research on the ratio between lexemes and word forms indicates a complex relationship due to the rich inflectional nature of the language. Studies suggest that a single lexeme in German can correspond to multiple word forms, often ranging from 3:1 to 10:1.
Perhaps look at this where German is mentioned and the referenced studies for more info.

Related, LingQ used to have a published table on what threshold number of what-LingQ-counts-as-words it takes to advance by different levels. I don’t know the current status on that, but saw this fairly recent thread.

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I think that would vary hugely, depending on how each user decides to mark a word as “known”. My standard changes as my learning strategy changes. I don’t think there’s any way I could take my word count in Lingq and convert it into a “real” word count. And what does “real” mean? I’m not being philosophical. A real word for reading comprehension is not the same thing as a real word for speaking.

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Absolutely.

“Known” has to do with “do I want it to appear white, yellow, or blue in the context of my own learning purposes and style.”

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Thank you @gmeyer for the detailed answer,

Hi @Timmins What I’m trying to do to push my brain and memory to a maximum by having a high but doable goal, 6 months goal mapped to 1 month>> 1 week>> everyday goal

Pushing myself to commit to this goal, my goal before lingq was to passively acquire 100 words per day, but a real “new/unique” word and familiarise myself with it and to be able to recognize it easily in the next context, with accepting a failure ration of course.

What I mean by new/ unique words:

Verbs> Infinitive form (Ignoring all tenses forms, and pronomens, etc.)
Nouns> singular simple form (ignoring the plural the complex forms resulted from connecting 2 or more simple words)
adjective>> normal form (ignoring Comparative and superlative and thousands declination form in German!!)

OF course this still not precise because you can always drive a noun or adjective from the verb, but this more clear to monitor my daily performance in terms of how many new words I deal with daily, do I need to increase my immersion, or my focus, or my material.

your question is not philosophical @Timmins , the answer is really not solid for me, but known for me as now the ability to recognise the word and meaning in the context because I have seen it before at least 2 or 3 times , from lingq pov it is “status known+ 4 +3” eventually they all gradually will be in known status

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