Can we learn 100 words a day?
In a comment to a previous post, Stefan asked me how many words I thought I could learn in a day. We had quite a discussion on this, and I have given it some more thought.
If I take my own Czech studies, I have been at it about 6 months. It is all part time, one hour a day most of the time, some days much more, and for stretches of time, nothing. The main activity is listening, then comes reading, and saving words at LingQ, (LingQing). A smaller amount of time is spent on reviewing words in flash cards, and just recently I have started talking to a tutor online at LingQ.
So if we call this period of time 180 days, and if we use the statistics generated by LingQ, the numbers look like this.
"Known words" by this I mean only my ability to recognise the meaning, or a meaning: 25,260.
This includes non-words, numbers, names etc. How many I don't know but let's say 10%. So the number is really probably 23,000
Stefan made the point that Czech is very inflected and therefore this inflates this number compared to English. At first I agreed that this is relevant but now I am not so convinced. In fact we need to learn the different forms of the words, for tenses or cases, or person, whether in Czech or French, so each of these words does count, in my view.
"LingQs created" or saved in the system: 20,600
of which 7,425 have been moved up in status towards varying degrees of"known". Note that I do not do a lot of flash carding and only move words up in status sporadically.
When I look at lists of these words in the vocab section, I know most of them, but certainly not all.This number includes 1725 phrases. So perhaps I should count this as 5,000 words. Even among the other so-called status "1" words, roughly 13,000 or so, there will be words that I know. but never mind.
So maybe I know, albeit passively, 28,000 words.Maybe. And I have been at it, although not every day, for 180 days. This means that I may have learned words at the rate of 155 words a day. Who knows? Maybe it is a lower number, but I believe it is at least 100 words a day. Most words are learned incidentally through reading, and especially through seeing the yellow saved LingQs highlighted in our texts at LingQ.
Note that I have read over 250,000 words at LingQ in Czech, often more than once. This is the equivalent of 3 average length novels.
I can read the newspaper fairly well.
Apparently Czech shares 40% vocabulary with Russian,(which I have studied, also in the same way at LingQ). By that I mean this is the number of words that are the same or recognizable, like zitra/ zavtra for tomorrow. English has 60% Latin based words, so I think that an English person who put the same effort into French or Spanish, could learn the same number of words in those languages.
100 words a day, if you are willing to put in the time.
