I’m currently learning Japanese and French, with about 20,000 known words. It will probably take at least another year, but my goal is to reach the level required to complete Advanced 2 in both languages, which I believe is about 30-33,000 words.
Regarding the targets in LingQ, I plan to keep reading everyday and am fine with the reading targets, but what about the target for new LingQs, i.e. brand new words? At a certain level, it would be very difficult or overly time consuming to find 13 new words through one’s daily reading when they already know 30,000+ words. I would think it would be appropriate to aim for at least 1,000-2,000 words of reading per day, with just 1 or 2 new words encountered and turned into new LingQs. I also want to maintain my streak, which is now ~250 days in both languages, so I would want to keep meeting my LingQ targets even after I reach a high level of comprehension.
Does anyone know from experience what happens to the LingQ targets once Advanced 2 is completed?
For what it’s worth, I’m currently reading a book in French and I have 35K known words on LingQ. My stats for yesterday are:
Words read: 2007 ( one LingQ lessons worth, or about 7 pages of printed book)
Known words: 28
LingQs: 16
LingQs Learned: 8
I think that means that in the 2007 words there were 36 new words for me. 20 I’ve never come across here before, but knew what they meant anyway (probably from listening to books, or hearing them in a movie.) and 16 which were new and unknown. 8 were previous LingQs that I marked known.
So, technically if hitting the marks you mentioned are important to you, you can still do that after you’ve completed Advanced 2. But having said that, I think these stats will loose importance as you keep advancing and using the language.
As far as I know, beyond advanced 2 there are no things unlocked (avatar related or anything like that). However when you get to advance 2 or beyond there will still be new levels (advanced 3, 4, etc), the only thing that’s different is that you don’t get any new avatar things.
At the time of writing I have 40 405 words in German, I am at Advanced 4 and I have 8846 words left to advanced 5. Basically this is the only difference.
Once you “complete” Advanced Level 2, and “reach” Advanced Level 3, your avatar stops growing. However, LingQ will throw on another 10,000 words (actual number depends on language) to complete level 3 and reach advanced level 4.
I don’t believe your LingQ targets at the activity level change. At least not when you go to the “All Time” view. I dont’ believe it even does at the daily, weekly, monthly level either. So fo rme, all my progress bars are blue at the “all time” setting and I think my daily known words target, which is 45 words, is the same as it was at the prior level.
Getting close to 30k with Japanese. I find you have to consume more and more to meet your targets because it gets harder to find stuff with a lot of unknown words. For example, I’ve read 11k “words” this week and still nowhere close to meeting known word/lingq targets.
As for the targets, they still keep coming. I’m almost to “advanced 4” I think.
It’s interesting to hear that the levels keep coming. I was under the impression it stopped at Advanced 2.
I don’t blindly focus on the targets, but keeping the streak going (new LingQs every day) is good motivation for me to commit time every single day. Without the targets and streak, I would still be committed to the language, because of an actual interest, but I might have a day here and there where I just don’t feel like doing anything. Now at least I am committed to doing a minimal amount at least and not allowing myself to slack off and get rusty.
I suppose part of the fun will be seeing how much more I read as my vocabulary grows, and that’s probably the point of all this. I will need to read more in order to find new words and keep the streak going, but my reading speed should also improve, allowing me to read even more every day and strengthen the language acquisition benefits that come from mass reading.
I don’t really follow LingQ targets but I have my own. At the beginning I used to focus on achieving a known words count each month, but as my languages have progressed I focus more on words read count. For example for Russian I‘m aiming for 100k each month, Spanish is 60k, French is 30k. The “end goal” is to achieve 3 million words read in each of these languages, and I’ll easily hit all of the LingQ levels while moving closer to the words read goal. I changed my thinking from known words to words read because I realized that even once you reach advanced 2 (and probably after) you’re nowhere near done with learning the language, and it’ll basically come down to total words read to achieve a reading fluency. I guess I’d also rather read an adult fiction novel quickly than read some obscure papers slowly to focus on adding words.
Edit: not to mention, it‘s easier to focus on words read because you know how much time and effort that’s going to take to achieve it, and therefore you can create accurate goals. Then just use a recent (words reads)/(newly added known words) rate to predict how many known words you’ll achieve in the next month, year, etc.
If you can find one have you thought about locating lists of slang, swearwords and idiomatic expressions? Think of all the variations of swearwords and slang words in your own languages. There are also the names of countries and places that are probably very different. I didn’t know that the French for Scotland was l’Écosse, so chances are a native speaker might not know what the heck you’re talking about if you say “Scotland”.
Great point. This is why I try to read a variety of news articles and other types of material that cover the names of different countries and places. For French, I also mix it up between French and Quebec sources.
Reading fiction would be a good way to learn slang and idioms. The only challenge I find is being able to locate free online fiction, so I usually tend to use Shortédition for French short stories and Monogatary for Japanese short stories - not always the best quality since anyone can submit things, but a good way to gain exposure to the language as it’s actually used by regular people.
I count the names of countries and major cities, as well as the names of major political or historical figures. These names are so essential to the use of the language generally that to not know them would be a hindrance to advancing further. As miscology noted, there are cases like l’Écosse where it’s not obvious - and others I can think of like Allemande, Londres, etc., in French, and many others in Japanese where the transliteration is based on the original language and not via English.
I ‘ignore’ the names of more obscure towns and places and the names of people who are not not well known in world or where the language is spoken. So I would count names like Australia, Obama, Seoul, etc., but not lesser known places and figures likes Smithville or Kaczynski.
A major exception to this is all native Japanese names (not transliterations of Western or other foreign names), because being able to read the kanji, recognize it as a name (and not another type of word), and make a decent attempt to pronounce it properly, is a learned skill.