Thanks for that kcb. What you're describing is really how I think the process works - unless you already speak a language with a lot of vocabulary shared with the one you're learning, then you can start off closer to that later stage.

So, going back to Steve's Russian. While he was certainly a confident, interested and experienced language learner, the shared vocabulary would have been rather small relative to other languages he has studied. There are a lot of links between Slavic and other IE language but they are often hard to spot or the meanings have shifted to to such a degree over time making them unrecognisable. It seems as though he's able to quickly move to that point of moving more words instantly to know than lingqing them. 72 thousand words which have not been lingqed but are classed as known! Only 3 thousand learned and he prefers to leave his lingqs yellow, even when he knows them. Therefore, out of his 34 thousand there will likely be quite a high percentage which are known. Ignoring the names and random stuff, taken into account only lowers the total a small amount overall, compared to the massive total.

It's pretty hard for me to understand.

I feel like I'm repeating myself now. Nobody seems to understand what I'm saying. hahaha

> There are a lot of links between Slavic and other IE language but they are often hard to spot or the meanings have shifted to to such a degree over time making them unrecognisable.

In fact, Russian has really a lot of adopted Germanic words comparing to Western Slavic languages which are surprisingly puristic.

> It's pretty hard for me to understand.

A Russian noun has 12 grammatical forms where an English one has two. So, you get 12 "known words" when you come across the same noun in different forms. This ratio for adjectives is even higher given that it should be multiplied by three genders.
Therefore, when looking into this aspect, 75 000 as a number of Russian known words is not higher than your number in Dutch.

Yeah, I can understand that. Dutch has two genders, no cases and an average Western Germanic verbal system. Dutch nouns can have 4 forms if you include the diminutives, but I guess you didn't count those for Russian.

I noticed that Polish had some words which seemed to be very obviously Germanic (also some French). I'd be interested in seeing a list of such words if you know of any eugrus.

> I'd be interested in seeing a list of such words if you know of any

Such a list would be extremely hard and useless to compile, since it is going to include at least every fifth word used in Russian, I guess)

Extremely hard to compile but not useless! :) I'm compiling a list of Yiddish words with Slavic origins at the moment and it's very useful as there isn't a good dictionary while has all of these words. In this situation, such a list is very useful. Of course, Russian dictionaries will all define these words.

But, in any case, my big question here is not the total of words he has as known, but the sheer number which have been moved to that level without lingqing them. Perhaps the 34k lingqs are the one or two forms and he's moved the forms with the other cases to know pretty quickly? Sorry, I'm just trying to sort this all out in my head.

@Imyirtseshem Didn't you think of using http://en.wiktionary.org as a platform for such things? They have nice Etymology sections, allowing to follow words up to their Proto-Indo-European/Proto-Turkic/Proto-Iranian/Proto-etc roots.

Thanks for reminding me, Eugrus. I guess that because I wasn't aware of there being a large amount of Germanic vocabulary in Russian, I hadn't thought of looking into it.

I'm rather interested in language etymology, so this kind of thing is rather fun for me. :)

Somewhat related to picking up words from other forms, but something that I do, and I'm sure others do, is pick up words from their 'parts'. An example of this was today when I came across the word 不可能 for the first time in Japanese, I've seen 可能 before a lot, and I know what 不 means as a prefix, and using that along with the context meant I could easily guess the meaning correctly.

Likewise, in English, if you knew 'theist' and the prefix 'a-', you'd be able to guess the meaning of 'atheist' with little chance of getting this incorrect. I imagine this is the same for all languages, once you know a certain amount, a lot of the rest will snap into place.

I'm not sure if you would consider this learning "incidental" learning, but it definitately makes the process easier than learning x thousand words, with no relation to each other.

Yes, I'd consider it as such Lyise and also think it's very good. Still, there remain x thousands of words which have no relation to others which still require learning. hehe

@Imyirtseshem:

I have been puzzled by Steve's Russian stats too. I've been learning Russian quite hard on LingQ for nearly 4 years, but I can't get close to his known words score.

Remember that for the first few years of Russian being on LingQ there was no "ignore word" function, you were encouraged to click on "mark all words as known" when you wanted to move onto another lesson.

I create LingQs for at least half the words I meet (I can't be sure because the lingqs created statistics don't distinguish between lingQed words and phrases, whereas "known words" refers to only single words) and knock them up a notch every time I recognise them in context. The rest I mark as "known" individually when I meet them in a lesson. These are usually words I know in a different case or gender or number, or words borrowed from English (give them back! We haven't finished with them yet!).

I really struggle to meet the "known words" weekly targets.

Yet you seem to be going quite well! Keep at it! :)

Is it that hard to believe? In the last week, I've added 1800 known words to my French known words total (on top of 27,000 and French is not inflected). The main difference being that I've been reading a lot more (instead of reading and listening, or just listening) than I did last time I worked on French. I've noticed that in reading a chapter of Harry Potter in French, I might only add 100 new known words (and the length of the chapter might be 6000 words), but when I read a newspaper article of 500 words, I add about 20-40 new known words (after removing names etc.). In either case, if I do what I did this week for the whole year, then that would be 1800 x 52 = 93,600 new known words. Obviously I wouldn't be able to keep adding 1800 new known words each week, but this is on top of the 27k I already 'know'! Also, I understand Steve reads the Czech newspapers every day, and he probably did the same with Russian, for like four years or so. It's not THAT hard to believe, in my opinion.

It'd be interesting to see how many new known words we would add to our (already high) totals if we were to read 10 newspaper articles every day (which isn't THAT much, if that's all of our study). Anyone up for a challenge? Ten articles (be it News, Sports, Science, Health, Economics, whatever) each day, and we'll see how many new words we can add in one week? :)

@skyblueteapot: But you do have impressive stats for Russian nonetheless! Why struggle to meet "known words" targets if you have nailed down over 40000 words? If I understand it correctly, you've been learning Russian on LingQ for 4 years intensively - how would you describe your current level of fluency? Superfluent? :)


Personally I don't have much to add to the discussion, but I think I learn in the way Steve and kcb described above. The more I know the language, the more I can understand from the context. If I know a given verb in Turkish, I very often recognize and understand it when conjugated or used in another tense or mood. When I am not 100% sure about the form, I LingQ it (following the rule "when in doubt, just lingq it") and mark as "3", but still I can sometimes understand more than I would expect. But I have no doubts that this process speeds up with the number of languages you know - Turkish is my 3rd foreign language and I study it much more efficiently and thus learn it much more quickly than I studied English and German.

I'm afraid that I'll be unable to match you when it comes to French, Peter. I'm far too much of a beginner for that at the moment. Right now, I'm adding around 1300 known words for Dutch per week by going through audiobooks. The language a little less inflected than French (common gender adjectives are the same for the plural, less verb tenses, etc) so with that taken into consideration, I think that we're going at about the same rate there. At almost 18k known words, I'm understanding 95% + of everything I come across. I think that my 2012 goal of 30k known Dutch words is very achievable and would certainly count as a very good level of Dutch. My ultimate goal is 50k!

I would be interested in a newspaper challenge, although I don't have anything with audio. Perhaps when I've done my current run of a few more audiobooks, I'd give something like that a go. Maybe starting in March. Only 10 articles though? I'm reading an average of 20k words per day at the moment. That would be 40, 500 word articles. Perhaps it would be better to do a challenge based on number of words.

I've never actually read any Dutch papers at all. I read one Wikipedia article once but I was too early into my studies and my brain almost exploded. I think that I've got a good vocabulary when it comes to novels but my vocabulary in terms of politics, economics and world events is severly lacking, so I'd like to work on that.

Maybe we can work something out.

Ten articles, plus one chapter of a book or audio book (possibly two chapters). That's probably the most I can commit to. I still have to work as well! First week of March would suit me.

If you don't want to read newspapers from Holland, you could always mix it up and try a newspaper from Suriname or something :) http://www.dbsuriname.com/dbsuriname/

Well, I'll look into collecting some materials I think I'll find interesting and get them ready to import. Any thoughts about Wikipedia articles? I think that I'd like to read a little about Dutch history. The articles will be longer, of course.

Maybe we could do a non-fiction/news reading challenge. Set no definite limits on amount read but pushing ourselves to do as much as possible. That way it's a challenge for ourselves but not a real competition and people can go at their own pace. We can compare our words know / words read and language (considering inflection rates) for a rough idea on who "wins". What do you reckon, mate?

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out a bit more later.

We all like to learn in different ways, and we use LingQ in different ways. To judge how many "incidental" words you may be learning you may try doing the following.

1) Select an item for study or import something. Note the number of new words,
2) LingQ using QuickLingQs.
3) Delete non-words, names etc, and save the LingQs you want. Do not mark any words as known.
4) When you have finished QuickLingQing, how many new words are left?

I did this for an article I just imported from Czech radio.

The article had 69 new words (11%)

I deleted 8 names and non-words.

I had 42 new words left after LingQing the words that I wanted. This means that I LingQed 19 words. However, the majority of the words were in some way connected with words that already knew, and if in doubt I could read the little saved phrase for context. Basically I picked up twice as many words incidentally as I saved.

Yeah, even though I'm at a pretty advanced level with Dutch, I won't get anywhere near that percentage.

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Recently, I realize that the majority of saved words are the names of people, geographical names, other proper names, etc when reading daily news in English or French. I delete verb conjugations, plurals, foreign language words etc. I am wondering if it's important to spend time to save the proper names that I cannot look up even on Wikipedia.

I also save the special idioms which I cannot figure out, especially something like colloquial common expressions, in the other contents.

I will try to check up my next LingQing.
Maybe, I will have to delete some words something like verb conjugations.

February 22
When I was reading Chinese LingQ contents, I deleted half of blue-highlighted word-combinations which are not found in dictionaries. I know such functional words. I will continue to delete them.