Hi, I've been using the site for a few weeks and I've been creating lingqs as I go along. However, when I've seen how many lingqs others are creating I feel that I'm not doing enough. When I've checked the stats of some of these people who have maybe created thousands of lingqs, I see that their activity level is huge, but often I can see that their known word list, or learnt word score is often comparable to my own. Now, am I missing something here? It takes quite awhile to import my own lessons, and create lingqs, and then I tend to go through the lesson again and again etc. I might be working on that lesson for a few days before I can move the new vocab to 'known'. Then I'll start over with a new lesson. It appears to me that it must be a full-time task to create so many lingqs, and it certainly appears that some of the high-achievers don't learn many more words than I do, as almost all their time is spent simply creating lingqs!
I'm wondering if I'm missing something here? Should I be importing more lessons and creating more lingqs and not worrying so much about actively learning the words and phrases? Is it enough to just be making lingqs?
I've been a bit long-winded, but I hope you can guide me on this.
Many thanks!

Language learning is hard work, as most people here will attest to :)

When comparing your activities with others, I think it's important to note that everyone is (a) studying different content and (b) at different levels with their languages. If you study easy content, then you'll certainly increase your Known Words total more quickly than your LingQs total, but if you study very difficult content then you'll find that your Known Words total barely moves while your LingQs total skyrockets. Another thing is that when you have 5000+ LingQs, there inevitably will be some that you now know but haven't yet moved to Status 4 (i.e. "Known").

With the words that you're moving to Known within a matter of days, I encourage you to go back and review those words every once in a while as well since you're bound to forget some of them.

I rarely move my words to known. If you see my profile you will see that I LingQ a lot of words. This ensures that I will see them again highlighted in yellow. I know that I will gradually get to know them, and in fact I do. I cannot possibly flash cards all the words that I am saving. I flash card occasionally. It helps me notice the relationship between words, which in turn helps me notice them and learn them.

I find that I learn most of my words incidentally through repeated exposure in the massive amount of reading and listening that I am doing, helped by the yellow highlighting. The yellow highlighting is also important in that it enables me to read and look up words on my iPhone, using iLingQ.

Thank you both for your advice. To be honest, I think I was missing the point of creating LingQs, or at least I hadn't quite understood the purpose. I think maybe I was looking at each lesson as totally separate from the next instead of just another building block, so to speak, and failed to see the big picture!
Too much of a hurry trying to move words into 'Known' and missing the value of repetition and more passive learning?
I guess I need to import more lessons and keep LingQing...read and listen, and allow the language to 'seep in', rather than worry about scores!
Thanks again for such quick replies and helping me out with this!

I've used lingq in a similar way to what Alex describes. Much of my reading has been in the form of news articles, especially global news and science related stuff. A lot of it is beyond my reading level so i dont always understand it in full but I find reading that more interesting than materials written for intermediate learners. As a result, I've got a lot more lingqs than known words.

Lately I've been using the flash card app a lot and concentrating on specific lessons (Steve's book) instead of creating lingqs so my know words total has been going up faster even though my activity score has gone down.

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That's a very good point.....finding your own approach. I've been flitting from one course or style of language learning to another, and feeling quite frustrated as each method seems to have 'gaps'. At least with LingQ we can import any number of dialogues, articles, news items or even scientific stuff as suits us, and then use LingQ as a tool in whichever way we find the most suitable.

Cgreen0038, you make the point of importing material that's interesting (to us as individuals), and learning from that. That will account for some of the reasons that I've flitted from course to course, as I suppose the dialogues etc they use in set courses are put together to get a language point across, rather than being interesting, so I've found it difficult to stick with it. My interests outside of learning Spanish includes photography and motorcycles, so I may need to get Googling for importable material about those subjects and get Lingqing!

This is the first time I've posted to a forum and have really found it beneficial, as I feel much more motivated and you guys have given me a lot of ideas and basically 'put me on the path'. Cheers!