Studying Native Language on Lingq?

I’ve seen people on their stat pages that have studied their native languages on Lingq is this a viable thing to do? I was just curious after seeing what I assume people doing this but it could be they have their interface language changed to a language they are studying and it displays their native language as something different in their stats page.

I suppose some people like to try out how lingq works before they start studying their target languages.

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Oh gotchya makes sense,

I’ve been thinking about doing that tbh. A few classic books in portuguese have all those fancy words that even though I may know I’m not 100% sure of their real meaning and applicability. I also think that saving them as lingqs (and reviewing them) will help me improve my writing by expanding my vocab :slight_smile:

My native language is Spanish, I’ve been studying French for more or less 20 years, and English for a bit less than that.
In those three languages I have a couple books that I read from time to time, and I can safely say that I learn something new every day.
I guess it’s just a matter of what’s your objective. I did enjoy reading before using LingQ; I just managed to find a way to do the importing process less obnoxious, and after that I just found myself doing the same but through this app. As a side note, this happened after using the app for quite some time (maybe one year in?).

It has been a very rewarding approach, I am forced to pay more attention to words that I either don’t know at all, or whose meaning might be unclear. I’m also guilty of maybe too shamelessly jamming here and there some of those very words that I did read the day before. But I guess that’s how we learn.
Obviously you do not need to use LingQ for that, you can just read books elsewhere, but for me it just makes the process more engaging, and the looking for words less tedious. If it’s effective or not, I don’t know.

nb: When it comes to other people, especially to english natives, maybe they just happen to import videos with audio in their target language (let’s say Russian) that only have subtitles in English (the most common language for subtitles), therefore the word count in their native language. Or, in the same line, they use their native language backwards to learn their target language. Think about using the dictionary function (English to Russian) for words in English that you don’t know how to translate into Russian. It may be another take on their learning.

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I thought about this a bit as well after realizing the effect of context on my native language there are alot of words i dont really know i hear/see them alot but without looking them up i dont know them. The idea just seemed interesting.

I think without looking up words there is a high likeliness of skipping over them because techncally you dont need them. But im glad i found someone that does this. I have seen quite a few people with 20-40k known words in their native language I just assumed they did this. Lingq as a kindle type reader and just look up words that one wants to know in spanish do you feel you pick up words faster than in french/english or once you get to a certain point they all pickup words super fast?

It really depends on what you have in mind when you say pick up words. Most of them are names of animals, trees, weapons, clothes, food, latinisms, archaic words, dialectal words etc. things that you won’t use in your daily life unless you force it to awkwardness. Without being able to use them the retention rate is almost none, or if you want, the diminishing returns are huge.

Does it get easier? It depends more on the book than on the reader. I shared Trois contes by Flaubert in French, I can ensure you that no native can fully understand the text without a dictionary. There are menagerie descriptions, lists of weapons, (old) food etc. Same goes for Tirano Banderas in Spanish (I have close to 40% unique new words which is insane, and the book is not even that long).
But does it get easier? Some things do, many stay the same. Having almost no feedback due to the rareness of those words makes judging the whole process very difficult.

If you were asking in terms of LingQs, if I do highlight less and less words, then I don’t think so no. Same goes for Greek where I have around 85k words, the grind is always the same. But then again, it would be very conceited for me to believe that one could fully understand literature with only a couple years of study, or even 10 or even 20. Those very writers may have spent decades and decades reaching the level that allowed them to write those texts.

Plus, being fast or slow most of the time is a matter of useful laziness. Pick whatever word in your native language, search it in the Merriam Webster, you’ll probably ignore some of the meanings. Since knowing a word is never a black and white thing, you see that being fast or slow is more the result of your learning objective than, let’s say, the skill or the resourcefulness of the learner.
It’s not because you go faster that you speak better a language, and, more likely than not, it probably just means that you are satisfied with the meaning that you are able to parse (assumptions made that we are talking about very advanced learners of a language).

tldr: Depends more on the text. The grind is the same (and god bless). Being fast or slow can be a wrong approach to test the efficiency of a learning method.

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I was thinking about this myself. I mean, we are always learning - just because you are a native of a language does’t mean you know EVERY single word. I guess if you wanted to become really sophisticated in your native language you could learn all sorts of fancy vocabulary by using LingQ with your native language.

I’d also be curious to see just how many words I know in English, not that it has any meaning I’m just curious.

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Most of the people using LingQ for the native langauge seem to be mostly: 1) using the slot for an unsupported langauge 2) reading something esoteric 3) experimenting with the site

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I think that it is okay to learn more about your native language. There is room to improve. I can consider doing English just to see how many words that I do not know. I may know thousands and thousands of words, but I do not know thousands more.