Number of known words

Is there any way to retrieve the number of known words (for a particular language)? I would like to create my own (text-only) “badges” that would fit the design of my website.

I’m not well versed in the API, so I can ask one of our developers to find out. Otherwise perhaps one of our members can help out?

Unfortunately I can’t help you but I think it could be a great thing to be able to see those words, like a sort of dictionnary. It would be a really great update of the website.

I do not see the purpose of seeing a list of my known words. In my case, for Czech and Russian, these number in the tens of thousands.

I would like to see cloze tests of my known words, just to catch the ones that I don’t really know, and as a test of what I have learned. Maybe in the future.

Compared with LWT http://lwt.sourceforge.net/, it is true that we can not see a list of our known words and ignored words on LingQ.

I don’t really understand these technical websites but…

Does this mean it would be possible to have an offline Lingq app for reading novels? Because I read books on my phone using CoolReader (an offline app), then have to log onto my PC later (when I have an internet connection) to create the Lingqs from my reading.

I would probably be willing to pay good money for a android reading app that I could export my new / known words to LingQ from.

Why the stars in “Compared with *** http://***.sourceforge.net/”? Has someone edited words out?

A while back the project creator was spamming here in the forum. Now the abbreviation is not permitted.

Just guessing: LWT (L and W and T – it took a while to write it down in a way that doesn’t get censored). Is censoring the name of your competition in forums really a good way to counteract spam, LingQ admins?

I guessed the same. Thanks for confirming! I appreciate that the site is kept clean from spam, but censoring the name when it’s written by someone who is not a spammer seems immature. This way it easily becomes a slippery slope where it’s forbidden to talk about any competing site even when it’s not written as spam.

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We do not censor references to LWT. We do delete outright spam from people promoting LWT, with a link to the site, here on our forum. Some members have taken to self censoring the name of the site when they refer to it.

People here regularly refer to other competing language systems on our forums, no problem.

I guess I was wrong. Maybe that was set up so we would not have to delete these messages. I will find out more tomorrow.

I am more of a user than an administrator, and often don’t know what is going on!!!

On the other hand, I found LWT’s promotional message knocking LingQ and their efforts at promoting themselves on our forum both lacking in common sense. I have no idea how they are doing but feel no inclination to offer them any publicity here.

Back to the original question, any plan on adding an API method to retrieve the NUMBER of known words in a language?

It should be pretty straighforward for a developer to implement it on the server (i.e., the Lingq) side given that there’s already a method to get a LIST of all known words. Obviously, one could use that method on the client side to get the number, but it seems like a big waste of bandwidth to download all those words just to count them.

I don’t understand the question. The number of known words is written at the top of the page.

Colin: The question was posed in the forum about LingQ API, i.e. the point was to have a way to obtain the number of known words using languages like PHP or JavaScript.

Ah, I understand. That would have been obvious for me if I was able to read English.

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@rafael_nc - I think this may be possible now so let me take a closer look. If not, we are continuing to work on the API and will see if we can add this as well.

While there’s news on the API, here’s a python script that prints the number of known words for a list of languages. In my system and with my lingq data (about 54000 known words total for all languages in the list, 6 MB/s internet connection), it takes about 10 seconds to complete. Not bad for a once a day query to keep score, which is what I want to do. For website integration it would be a no no.


import urllib2
import json

API_KEY = ‘’
languages = [‘de’, ‘ko’, ‘ar’, ‘en’, ‘fr’, ‘ja’, ‘eo’, ‘pt’, ‘la’]

url = ‘https://www.lingq.com/api/languages/{}/known-words/

for lang in languages:
request = urllib2.Request(url . format(lang))
request.add_header(‘Authorization’, 'Token ’ + API_KEY)
request.add_header(‘User-Agent’, ‘curl’) # Had to fake a User-Agent to make it work, don’t know why
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
r_json = response.read()
words = len(json.loads(r_json))
print lang + ': ’ + str(words)


(The forum software messes up the syntax, all lines after “for lang in languages:” should be indented by the same amount… if you know Python it should be obvious, but, still)