What is your ratio of known words?

I started at 20%, now its around 16%.

I mean here the percentage of LingQs I came across that I marked as known. For every 1000 new words I read, 200 were known. Since I started to do kanji, It dropped a little. I have about 5000 LingQ, and I know 800 of them. I bet chinese and japanese learners have lower ratios.

I must say, I exclude person names, and most places names. But I will mark as known katakana words even when they come directly from english or french. And I mark as known only when I can recognize them and pronounce them when reading.

I would like to know from chinese/japanese learners, but also I’d be curious to know the numbers from people who learn languages that are closed to their own. Just a little curiosity. I wonder what is the ratio of latin people learning another latin language for instance. It could give me an idea of how far I would be if I had chose spanish instead :wink:

It’s an interesting thought. I’d never actually stopped to think about how many words I can read per 1,000. I’m not sure it’s useful to know for Japanese and Chinese, but I’m curious as to what others think.

I will explain. In Japanese, for example, I always know far more vocab orally and actively than I know in reading, so knowing the ratio isn’t necessarily helpful. The pesky Kanji hold me up:) Knowing more words than you can actually read can be frustrating. And knowing one knows far more than one’s LingQ known words can be frustrating.

However, when I started French recently, it felt like a breeze compared to Japanese and Chinese. It was relatively easy to acquire ‘known’ words.

Having said that, I think I pronounce and have a much better ear for the Asian languages than French - even though I’m a native English speaker. I also like the sound of Asian languages better than European ones.

Imo, it’s better to choose languages by interest, rather than perceived ease.

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I had put a lot of efforts learning kanji the past 4 months. I had read the Heisig list like 4 times, and created my own story for each, etc. etc. Lots of work. --and by the way I dont know them all yet. And funny enough, I find it now easier to understand and recognize words just be guessing from the kanji than to actually remember their prononciation. I have tons of LingQs marked as 2 or 3, but cant get to 4 because of the prononciation. So I seam to have the opposite problem you have. I confess I stopped doing listening. Actually, I do listen to every unknown words as I read. But I never listen mp3 or any audio sources. I find I dont have enough vocab so I dont see how I could learn much from that practice.

And I agree about your last statement. Actually, one of my many interest in japanese was the challenge itself. I had started spanish and stopped after 2 weeks because I found it too easy. What I mean by that is because I’m native french, I can already guess the meaning of many sentences without any study. And some more rare sentences I can understand every single words of them. I dont mean I would not have years of work to put in, but I wanted to start from scratch for the fun of it ( and also because I’m more interested in japanese than spanish). And I can say that after 4 months of japanese, doing maybe 1h a day, I’m probably still worst at japanese than I am in Spanish, even though I never learned spanish. Its a good think I’m kind of drawn to ridiculously difficult and long tasks, because otherwise I could find it kind of discouraging. :slight_smile:

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" For every 1000 new words I read, 200 were known"

Actually its not well phrased. I mean here that when I started, I knew 0 word. By the time I added 1000 LingQs, I had read over and over the same words, and 200 of them I ended up flagging as known. So I can say that for every 1000 new lingQs, I learn 200 words. At least I could say that at the beginning. Hope it’s more clear.