Hi, regarding the count of different forms of the verb the dicision to learn them or to ignore them lies in the various aims of the learner. Every learner has different priorities.
I for myself don’t care about the number of known words. Actually I am on a B2+ level in French and Italian and a C1 level in English, but my “known words” say 31, 5300 and 5062 for these languages, despite the fact that I reach my daily (mini) goal for all three of them for almost a year now. That’s because with every language I learn, I use LingQ differently.
When you start on LingQ with a language you already know quite well, you could for example “ignore” all the words you already know and just move the new words to known after you learned them. Then the “known word” list just shows the number of words you learned on LingQ. (That method does not work well when you compete in a 90-day hard core challenge. But that does not deter me from participating… )
I usually ignore words that I don’t want to learn: Names that are the same in my native language, some words that are part of a dialect (for example in a few older britisch novels), unnecessary street names or names of (for me) unimportant places,…
As a learner I would never “ignore” compound words in German. Let’s say we have the well known German word Autobahn. Even if you learned the two components Auto [=car] and Bahn [= train/ tram] before, how do you get the meaning of “highway” out of that? As someone who want’s to repoduce the language you need to learn the compound words because even if the parts are a clue to meaning, sometimes the first part is in singular, sometimes in plural, sometimes there is a letter inbetween…
In other languages it is the same. You could just learn every word in itself, but often two words together have a special meaning. Just a little example in English: I see the new word “flowerpot” and I say >>oh I know the words “flower” and “pot”<< and I even have a mental image of both words in my head. So I ignore that compound word… Then a few weeks later I want to reproduce that word in a conversation and I say “flowers sauce pan”…
Also for conjugations, personally, I think that knowing every single form is necessary, when you want to be able to write properly. If you’d move them to “ignore” you would not have any way to track them. But as I said, if you just want to understand a text on the surface, or you just want to mark words that are important to you, you can ignore them for sure.
Also, I see the plural forms of nouns and all their forms of declension on LingQ as “full words”, because I want to be able to understand and reproduce them.
As for the different methods you can use LingQ: While I read or listen only in two of my target languages, I use LingQ very untypicly with my A2 language, which I learn more intensely at the moment. I first read a sentence here. I look up all words I don’t know yet, but I don’t mark them. Instead, I write the translation of the sentence into my (real life) notebook. Then I try to translate the sentence back into the target language the next day. I repeat that over the next week until I get the sentence right three times. THEN I mark all new words as a lingq. And everytime I come across a lingqed word in another sentence or text and I am able to produce the translation without looking the word up (and the meaning fits with the sentence), the status of the words moves up. This is in fact a very slow process, but I was able to produce a well written text in my language course quite soon after using that intensive method. I guess, I will change to another method when I change my main focus to another skill, soon.