Changing words from yellow to blue is easy, so, it shouldn’t be a challenge to keep up with what one knows after seeing it several times and no longer needing a hesitation. That’s what yellow means to me: hesitation.
I don’t see the purpose in this post. Why are you concerning yourself with how people spend their money and time?
Some people have more lingqs than others. I don’t see why they would have put in the time to make all those lingqs for nothing…
You can go through 200 words while still on your first S? I can probably do about 20.
I really don’t know what to do in the vocabulary page. I have over 20,000 LingQs. It is somewhat overwhelming.
Actually that is not quite true. After a discussion like this one that we had recently, I decided to try doing a bit more flashcards reviewing. I started marking LingQs that I think are important as status 2 (previously, all my LingQs were status 1 or 4, except phrases which I made status 3) and once per day reviewing my status 2 LingQs with the flashcards. This has a very small effect on my number of unlearned LingQs, but I quite like reviewing a small number of words like this.
Where did your original post go?
When I go to the vocabulary page and look through a random bunch of level 1 LingQs, I find that most of them I do not know. Most of my level 1 LingQs are words that do not come up often (this can be seen by the fact that I have more LingQs than known words, yet when I open a document, the known words dominate). If I spend time reviewing level 1 LingQs in the vocabulary page, I will be reviewing unimportant words. On the other hand, if I keep reading, the important words will keep coming up in the texts that I am reading, and so I will be reviewing them in that way. This will be better because I will concentrate on the more important vocabulary, and I will be learning it better because I will be seeing these words in many contexts.
I have often thought that LingQ could do a better job of deciding which words are important specifically for you, by keeping track of the frequency of each word in all of the materials you have reviewed. The words which are high-frequency, but which are still level 1 or 2 clearly deserve more attention than those which are low frequency. Maybe LingQ already takes frequency into account, but I have never see it.
Somebody recently suggested that LingQs all get given counters that say how many times the LingQ has been looked at. This would be quite cool since you could then know which are the trouble words, i.e. the words that you keep seeing, but just can’t nail down. I used to do this back when I was a heavy Anki user. I would sort all the words in my deck by the number of times reviewed, and see which ones were problematic.
@Anthony
Apropos word-frequency, are you aware of this book? If so, how do you rate it?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frequency-Dictionary-Czech-Vocabulary-Dictionaries/dp/0415576628
I only know that the book exists, but have never used it. When I was first learning Czech, I would have loved a book like that though. At the same time, I think this particular book is probably not appropriate for absolute beginners, because the example sentences (as far as I can tell) are not well thought out : they often do not include the key word being shown in the form in which it is shown. So, you need a good grammar knowledge to unravel many of them.
By the way, the first frequency dictionary I came across in Czech listed the words in alphabetical order, with their frequency as a note against each word. I cannot for the life of me see how that ordering would be useful to anybody.
Thanks, Anthony.
Yes, I can see that these frequency dictionaries have their use. But I do wonder whether the first 5000 words is quite enough? (Arguably the first 8000 words would be a true “core vocabulary”…)
@ J4J - I guess the most important 5000 is a good start, but it is certainly not enough for genuine fluency.
@ AnthonyLauder - I guess they made it alphabetical so that people could look up words for the example sentences.
I guess I am doing a lot of guessing tonight.
"Somebody recently suggested that LingQs all get given counters that say how many times the LingQ has been looked at. "
That was me. And you have the same idea as me… export them to some flashcard program and really drill the troubled words in. Right now I have a fairly firm grasp on my troubled words… but obviously they will evolve over time. I really hope they implement this feature. Hint hint!
IIn other words,a counter that shows how often a word has been LingQed, and perhaps an ability to grab the most common 100, or 500, or 1,000.
Note that we already do have a frequency counter for each word, (not in Beta languages) in other words the number of asterisks ****, ***, **, and *.
No no, not that. The number of times you personally have referred back to one of your LingQs or Known Words.
For example you have “Geheimnis” as a LingQ… and as you’re reading you forget it means “secret” so you click on the word to review it. This would increase a counter on that LingQ. You presumably could sort your LingQs by this counter and export (or review) your most revisited LingQs
@ steve - The feature with the asterisks is great, but as far as I know, there is no way to sort LingQs by frequency in the vocabulary section. It would be great to be able to periodically go over the top 100 or so LingQs. Now there is in fact the ‘top 25’ on the main screen. I am not sure what exactly this top 25 is, but I do like going through it and knocking off a few words, but 25 really is not that much. Spatterson’s idea is also good because it is quite simple and also customized to the user. I find that I learn some words straight away, while other words simply will not stick, and to an extent, I think this is pretty random. It would be great to be able to review those words that I keep coming up across, but just won’t stick. Anyway, it is just an idea. Some way of accessing the most important LingQs would be great, but I don’t think it matters so much how the most important LingQs are determined.
@ColinPhilipJohnstone, AnthonyLauder - If you go to the Vocabulary page you can change the “Sort” filter on the right to “Importance”. This will display the highest frequency words at the top.
@alex - How does the LingQ system decide the frequency of words? by the available imported lessons?
-double post-
@kigoik - That’s correct. We have a script that we run every once in a while to update the frequency data.
@ alex - Fantastic! It was under my nose this entire time!