It happened with me. Just as I'm nearing I2, it moved to 13,200. I laughed out loud and didn't think more about it. Seriously, many of us have our own criteria for what counts as a Known Word so my 13,200 words is going to be different from other's 13,200 words. What difference does it make? It's just an arbitrary number to get some sense of progress, but I already get that when I realize I've read a sentence without even thinking about any of the words in it.

The majority of my reading is imported newspaper and magazine articles that interest me. I don't count proper names or compound words (Norwegian). I also don't count most technical words like legal, scientific, medical words I will likely never ever use but can easily look up.

My most important metric is words read. I try for at least 3,000 words a day which is about 3 typical news articles. I'm close to 450K words so far, but even that is only a guide as I read lots of print stuff that never gets imported as lessons.

I can understand how it could feel like a setback. I know I certainly spent a lot of my time worrying about what really just amounts to side quests, rather than the main object of the game.

I would suggest that if losing your ranking on LingQ is that demotivating, this would be a good time to reassess what you're really after. Are you pursuing fluency, or just a rank and number? I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had to make those kinds of adjustments. I feel like I'm needing to do it constantly, personally.

Just remember what we're all here for: fluency in the language. Nobody's going to give a crap if you tell them you're an Advanced 2 on LingQ when you still can't communicate.

What are you on about? You still know the exact number of words, that you knew before, and you are still on exactly the same language level. Nothing was taken away from you. The known words for levels were never anything else but to provide some rough orientation as to where you stand. They were always arbitrary and meaningless and much too low to begin with.

So do you lose or gain anything if Lingq up- or downgrades your level? Get a grip.

Frankly, I don't understand why everyone is so upset about this. First of all, grandfathering people in would be a difficult thing to do as far as programming logic is concerned.

Mainly though, I just don't think this is a big deal. If LingQ staff thinks that the old known words targets weren't representative of the levels they were supposed to represent, who cares? If people are losing the entirety of their motivation over some arbitrary goalpost being moved, then they probably didn't have the motivation to learn a language to a high level in the first place.

The known words targets exist only as one of many metrics that can be used to measure progress. What would be most effective for each individual would be to choose a known words goal independently from the LingQ-defined goals, and work towards that personal goal. LingQ's metric for known words is their suggestion based on their research. Whether we agree with those numbers or not should not be cause for 50 posts in the past few days talking about how this is (somehow???) ruining the language learning experience for people.

On a larger scale though, the most concerning thing is this trend of users filling up the forums on a language learning website with complaint after complaint after complaint. That isn't to say you need to be 100% on board with every single decision that LingQ makes. I don't agree with every decision they've made either. However, ever since LingQ 5.0 came out, the forums have been flooded with posts that are just complaints over minor things that don't affect the thing we're all here to do: learn languages. Complaints like the order lessons are in on the home page, or the hundreds of feature suggestions that only a tiny subset of users would use. At the end of the day, LingQ knows how their users use the site, and are developing for the masses. Who are we to complain about minor decisions they make when those decisions don't affect the core functionality of LingQ - mass reading and listening.

I have 834 known words but when when it is a sentence like a house it will not count as s known word.

Those goalposts based on known words didn't become more meaningless after the change. Because it doesn't matter what coefficient you apply to zero sense.

Basically, for Advanced 1 you now need the amount of words you needed for Advanced 2, you Intermediate 2 is what used to be Advanced 1, etc?

I don't see a problem with it.

It bothered me at first when the goalposts were moved but then someone posted how it's much better to track the words that we've read. He suggest 2.5 million to 3 million words read to be advanced. That makes sense and I'll be tracking that now.

Allow me to suggest to you that you might be overreacting. You haven't lost anything. You still have all your known words. Set a goal based on your own known word target, or better yet words read (See PeterBormann's page, "General SLA strategies"). The only thing that changes is the one word on your profile, which is based on an arbitrary definition of what the levels are. You can still use the old ones if you want:

I am wondering what the new numbers are.  However I think mine didn’t change (not sure) maybe just by chance.  But I don’t feel strongly about it. Did anyone move back a level? 

I completely get what you mean, but the reality is that the old numbers were quite meaningless to begin with. I was about to reach beginner 2 and suddenly I have another 500 words to go to reach it. But my plan in the end is to reach over 100, 000 words so it doesn't particularly matter to me what the individual goalposts are because I'm planning to absolutely destroy any reasonable goal and aim for a very large number.

Saying it's demotivating is a little extreme because you're not playing a game. LingQ is not a game. Learning a language is not a game. So what difference does it make if you have to learn a few thousand extra words? Weren't you going to do that anyway? And when you did reach the goal, you'd just make the next level your goal anyways.

My only issue is that there hasn't been any official post about the new changes and Steve hasn't made a video talking about it, so everyone has had to discover it suddenly which is understandably shocking.

I am sorry you feel that way. We had to adjust level targets to make them more appropriate for each language. I understand it may be demotivational for some users, but keep in mind that new level targets are more accurate.