You know more words than I do. A lot more, if your word count is for a non-inflected language, or for a language much less inflected than Russian.
Out of curiosity I enumerated all the words in all their forms that I could derive from a single imperfective Russian verb like “кидать” (to throw, to toss). Counting the present and past tense forms for all persons, the gerund, all the participles, and all the declined forms of the participles, I got 59 words from one little infinitive! I may have made some errors, but still…
So if I know the grammar I’ll be able to recognize and use all 59 of those words as soon as I know the infinitive. But really, do I suddenly know 59 distinct new words? I don’t think so, even though that’s how Lingq will count as I encounter them. On the other hand, it probably has to be more than a single word – a beginner who learns “кадаю” may not know or recognize “каданными” for a long while.
If I’m not making an error of omission, the most that I think I could boast from a regular imperfective verb is 6 words:
- The present and past tenses of the verb for all persons and number.
2-5. The present and past, active and passive, participles in all genders and cases. - The gerund.
And that might be generous.
I recognize the enormous complexities it would take for Lingq to count like this, compounded by irregular constructions, and multiplied by all the other languages with their own grammar rules and exceptions. It’s just not practical.
I also recognize that the known word count serves a useful, if imprecise, purpose in metering one’s progress. I’m constantly opening lessons with tons of blue words, which can be frustrating. Without that incrementing counter to show that I am indeed making some sort of progress I might feel like I’m going nowhere. But you just can’t compare a Russian word count to a Chinese word count.
That said, I have a question. Are Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced levels in different languages determined by the same word counts, or by counts that are specific to the language? The question may be moot – those levels probably serve no other purpose than the word counts themselves, simply to mark progress of some sort in a given language.