I have a concern and it involves the amount of known words on my badge compared to others. I only have 1760 words and i have been learning for over a year now. I see people like Steve and others with over 15,000. How do people achieve that so quickly?
I open a lesson, read and listen several times and lingq the words. Then i go and flashcard the session until i can do it without making a mistake. After this i download the audio and play it while i walk to work each day (30 minutes).
So should i just zoom through lessons and aim to lingq as much as possible, even if i donât fully understand each lesson before moving on to the next one?
Is it better to say, lingq 1000 words and maybe only remember 200 or only lingq 300 words and remember 200?
12000 words a year works out to about 32 words per day. How is this possible?
I would be grateful if someone could answer this for me as it is the one area of lingq that i do not fully understand.
Massive LingQing is the key. Donât worry about learning the words through flashcards, as youâll forget them anyway afterwards. I have never bothered with flashcards; I sometimes do a review of vocab via the daily emails, but I donât worry about it, pretty much all my LingQs are still at status 1. When you create lots of LingQs you see the yellow words again in different content and contexts and thatâs how they eventually get into your brain.
If you understand the content youâre listening to/reading, move on. Try to get through as much content as possible. Youâll soon see your stats reach five figures.
Hey,
I think thereâs a balance. 1760 words that you know to a âdeep levelâ, like you always recognise and understand,and can maybe use actively, may be better than knowing twice as many at a more superficial level.
I wouldnât worry too much about 100% understanding and recall of a lesson before moving on to the next one. Words will come up all the time in different contexts, which I find (like Steve says) helps me to understand and remember them. I think you can afford to be a bit more casual and move through to new texts quicker, the more of the language you hear and read, the more will sink in.
Itâs only my view, and as yet I couldnât say Iâve reached success in my learning, but I have found it better to linkq lots, with a view to maybe only recalling a small percentage. Iâll have further encounters with the words that didnât stick when I move on to new texts. So yea, donât be too hesitant to speed through more content : )
â12000 words a year works out to about 32 words per day. How is this possible?â
Donât forget: the total word count is artificially increased by inflections and conjugations. For example: gehen, gehe, geht, gehst, ging, gegangen (etc, etc) are all individually counted. But they are stored in your brain as âgehen+[pattern]â
Yeh i realise this, but still, increasing your word count by 32 a day seems a lot of work. Also, to get my word count to 12000, wouldnât i need my overall LingQ count to be double that? Since it is only known words that get put on the badge? If so then that 32 words per day would need to be far higher.
Lingq all words I donât know or am not sure about the meaning.
set the words I know as known words.
and, understand the text as a whole.
I normally follow this orderâŠ
Open a lesson. Lingq all words I donât know. Listen to the audio N times(in the PC or mp3 player when doing other stuffs). Then I listen and read at the same time.
If I understand the text as a whole, I go to the next lesson.
If Iâm getting bored of reading or listening, I go to the next lesson.
If I donât understand the whole text, I look the meaning of the yellow words and/or listen to the audio some more times.
I donât bother too much about mastering all the words of the text. To me, being able to read all the text, understand and enjoy the content is my focus. As Steve repeatedly says: when learning a language, you have to enjoy the process.
As for flashcards, I donât review them very often. And I like to take a glance at the daily emails, without really paying too much attention.
Re-reading my last post, I had the feeling that the âisnât it?â part sounded wrongâŠ
Should I write âdoesnât?â instead?
Well, anyway. I meant:
If you raise a yellow word to status 4, it counts as a known word(+1 in the badge).
But Iâm not sure. Could anyone confirm that?
Just to give you some idea of how this works for someone who has over 20,000 âknownâ words (in French), I imported a text of about 400 words from a French news site via the Import Bookmarklet.
Here is the breakdown.
If I did this kind of activity for a couple of hours I would probably add 200 or so ânewâ words to my total words count without breaking into a sweat. Itâs easy.
LingQ like a maniac and import as much stuff as you can is the best advice I can give.
I started on Sept. 22, 2010 learning French @ LingQ. I was not an absolute beginner.
The first 50 days: 2722 LingQs, 2634 learned words
The next 90 days: 2854 LingQs, 1942 learned words
The next 90 days: 2464 LingQs, 1920 learned words.
Now I lingQ about 27 words per day, and I âlearnâ around 21 per day, but those are very often conjugations, plural/masc/fem. forms of words I know.
There are now 1500 words I should learn, but most of these are not very important (for me).
One thing Iâd like to add: remember that you can now use the red âIgnore this wordâ button for company names etc (actually, for any word that you donât want to be counted).
My own view is that company/person names etc. should be counted. After all, they still have to be pronounced and understood in the target language, even if you wonât find them in the dictionary.
So do i assume then that what i have been doing isnât right with regards to how this site works? For example, a couple of weeks ago this was my daily plan.
30 mins on LingQ (reading, listening on loop and LingQingâ.
30 mins listening to the same lesson on loop walking to work.
30 mins flashcarding that lesson on my lunch break whilst listening.
30 mins listening again on my walk home.
The following day i would do a new lesson and repeat.
Doing this i became good at understanding the audio and using the new words when writing with my German speaking friend, but my new words total at the end of the week only went up by about 60.
"So should i just zoom through lessons and aim to lingq as much as possible, even if i donât fully understand each lesson before moving on to the next one? "
Yes, absolutely. Do not expect to nail down lessons or vocabulary. The further you progress, the less often you need to listen to the same text, the less you tarry at each lesson. Good luck.
How long is your typical lesson? 2 hours per lesson seems a bit excessive to me, even for a beginner in the language, although youâre clearly doing the right things (lots of listening, reading the transcript and LingQing). Maybe I would cut down on the repetitions and ramp up the number of lessons instead. I would also forget about trying to âlearnâ the LingQs via flashcards etc., although this is a personal view based on my own experience.
Yeh around that time give or take. I find listening hard but reading, and to a certain extent writing, comes easy to me. Hence why i am spending so much time listening to the audio. Maybe to the detriment of my vocabulary. Catch 22 maybe?
From this evening i have zoomed through about 6 lessons in an hour. Read through 3 or 4 times and listened to the same number. LingQed the blue words and added the ones i think i know and moved on immediately. I downloaded the audio to listen to on the way to work tomorrow but from now on i will only spend 10 mins per lesson (unless there are a lot of unknown words).
I will keep this up for a month and see what happens.
I listen to an hour a day and THATâS where I learn new words. Flashcarding and going through my vocabulary list is just bookkeeping - moving the words my ears have learned for me to âknownâ