What your known words mean

A known words count is the number of distinct words a reading app thinks you know, usually because you marked them as known or read past them without looking them up. In LingQ, it’s the main way you track your progress, and LingQ’s own level guide expects roughly 6,000 known words for Intermediate 1 and 22,000 for Advanced 1 in Spanish or French. That count is useful, but it counts word forms, not the word families researchers use, so it can’t be compared directly with vocabulary research figures.

How many known words you need and what the number actually means are two different questions. Here’s how to read your count without fooling yourself.

What a known words count measures

Reading apps that track vocabulary give every word you meet a status. Each app has its own scheme:

• LingQ marks unseen words blue, words you’re learning yellow at levels 1–4, and known words with no highlight. Its support article defines your known words count as the words you’ve marked Known plus those at level 4 (“Learned”).
• Migaku gives words statuses such as unknown, learning and known as you read and watch.
• Lumo, the app we’re building (coming soon), uses new, unknown, recognized, familiar and known, plus ignored for names and junk.

The count itself is just the number of distinct items in the “known” bucket. What goes into that bucket, and what counts as one item, is where it gets interesting.

How words get into the known bucket

There are two routes:

1. You mark them. You tap a word you already knew, or you graduate it from your flashcards.
2. You read past them. LingQ’s Reader is set by default to mark all remaining blue words as Known when you page. You can switch this off. Lumo will do the same: when you turn the page, new words you didn’t tap become known.

The second route is the one that makes counts climb fast, and it rests on an assumption: if you didn’t look it up, you knew it. Usually that’s true. Sometimes you skipped a word because the sentence made sense without it, or because you were tired. So the count drifts a little above your real vocabulary, more if you skim.

What counts as one “word”?

This is the big one. Most reading apps count each distinct written form as its own word. In Spanish, hablar, hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablé, hablaba, hablaría and hablando might all count separately. You learned one verb and got credit for a handful of words.

Vocabulary research mostly counts word families: a base word plus its inflections and close derivations, so all the forms above plus hablante are one family. Sometimes it counts lemmas (a base form plus its inflections).

The more inflected the language, the bigger the gap. You can see this in LingQ’s own targets.

How many known words LingQ expects at each level

LingQ publishes a table of known-word thresholds for its six levels. The table dates from 2016, and LingQ still links to it. Here are its rows:

Notice that Russian and Korean need roughly twice as many known words as English for the same level, or more. That isn’t because Russians or Koreans need twice the vocabulary. It’s because Russian nouns and adjectives decline through six cases, and Korean attaches particles and verb endings that produce many surface forms per word. The thresholds scale the count to make up for how many forms each language produces.

These levels are LingQ’s own scale. They aren’t CEFR levels, and they aren’t based on a published study. They’re a reasonable rule of thumb from a company that has watched a lot of learners read.

Known words vs research vocabulary sizes

It’s tempting to set your count beside the research: “Nation says I need 8,000–9,000 words to read novels, and I have 15,000 known words, so I’m there.” Not quite.

The research figures, which we cover in how many words you need to be fluent, are in word families. In English, each family has several members, and an app counting forms will rack up many more “words” than families. In a heavily inflected language the ratio is larger still. And the count includes proper nouns, numbers and borrowed words the research handles separately.

So a known words count of 20,000 in Spanish might mean somewhere in the mid-thousands of word families. That’s a solid intermediate vocabulary, but it isn’t 20,000 of anything a researcher would recognize. The exact ratio depends on the language, the texts you read and how the app splits words, so treat any conversion as a rough guess.

Why the count is still worth tracking

None of this makes the number useless. It’s just a different unit. What makes it valuable:

• It goes up with real reading. You can’t raise it much without meeting words in context.
• It’s consistent with itself. Your count this month against last month, in the same language and app, is a fair comparison.
• It predicts what you can read. What matters is what share of the words in this text you already know. That’s lexical coverage, and it’s what decides whether reading feels easy or exhausting.

That last point is the most useful thing a known words list can do. A count of 12,000 is an abstraction. “You know 96% of the words in this article” tells you what tonight’s reading will feel like.

Ways the count misleads

A few patterns to watch for:

• Fast paging inflates it. If you page through texts you barely followed, untapped words become known anyway. If the count jumps after a hard text, be skeptical.
• Names and noise inflate it. Character names, place names, numbers and typos all count as words unless you mark them ignored.
• Recognition isn’t recall. A known word is one you understand when you read it. You might not be able to produce it in conversation.
• Comparisons across languages don’t work. 10,000 known words in Russian and 10,000 in English are very different achievements, as the LingQ table shows.
• Comparisons across apps don’t work either. Apps split and group words differently, especially in Japanese and Chinese, where text has no spaces and the app has to decide where words begin and end.

Making your count more honest

If you want the number to track your real vocabulary more closely:

1. Tap anything you’re unsure of. Tapping costs a second. A false “known” stays hidden for good.
2. Mark names as ignored so they don’t pad the count.
3. Don’t page through text you didn’t read. If you skimmed, don’t let the app credit you with every word on the page.
4. Watch coverage, not just the total. Watch how texts you used to find hard start to feel easier.

How Lumo handles known words

Lumo isn’t available yet, but here’s how it will work. It tracks every word you meet through the levels new, unknown, recognized, familiar and known. Turning a page marks the new words you didn’t tap as known, and words you save become flashcards with the sentence you found them in. Instead of making the raw count the headline, Lumo uses your known words to label every text by coverage: Easy at 98% and above, Just right at 90–98%, Challenging at 80–90% and Hard below that. The count is in the background. What you see is whether the next thing you read will be comfortable.

FAQ

What does known words mean on LingQ?

It’s the number of distinct words you’ve marked Known or moved to level 4 (“Learned”). By default, LingQ also marks the remaining blue words on a page as Known when you page forward. It counts distinct word forms, so different forms of the same verb count separately.

How many known words do I need to be fluent?

There’s no single number, and a known words count is the wrong unit to answer it with. On LingQ’s own scale, Advanced 1 starts at 17,000 known words in English and 22,000 in Spanish or French. The research figures are in word families, a different and smaller unit, and we cover them in how many words you need to be fluent.

Why does LingQ need more known words for Russian or Korean?

Russian and Korean produce many more distinct forms per word through cases, particles and verb endings. Since apps count forms, you have to “know” more of them to reach the same practical level. LingQ’s thresholds for those languages are roughly double the English ones, or more, for that reason.

Is a known words count accurate?

It’s a reasonable estimate that runs slightly high. Words you paged past without really reading, names and numbers all inflate it. It’s most useful for tracking your own progress over time in one language and one app.

Can I compare my known words count across apps?

Not reliably. Apps split text into words differently, especially in Japanese and Chinese, and handle names, numbers and inflected forms in their own ways. Compare your count only with your own past count in the same app.