Israel Liebana asks in a comment to the blog, how to remember all the words that he is saving at LingQ.
Let's look at my Russian studies. This is the Progress Snapshot from the Overview page of LingQ (www.lingq.com). What it shows is that in the last 7 days I have added to my known words total by 4116 words, I have saved 1659 terms (mostly words), but I have only deliberately learned 45 words. I have learned most words incidentally. They just clicked in after a while. I do not worry about what I cannot remember. (Unfortunately I could not copy over the Progress Snapshot page from LingQ so I will just mention the numbers here.)
If I look at that last 12 months I see that I have over 28,000 known words, over 10,000 saved words and around 400 learned words. I apologize for the space here it has to do wih the limited flexibility of Typepad when it comes to editing.
So my answer to Israel is that it is difficult to look at a list of words, even if these come from content that you have been listening to and reading, and expect to deliberately learn them. They will become part of your passive and active vocabulary when they do, on their own terms. Listening, reading, seeing the highlighted words that you previously saved at LingQ, using flash cards, reviewing lists, writing and speaking using your saved words, all of these activities contribute to the process whereby the words will eventually click for you. When you least expect it, a word will pop up in your mind.
So just continue reading and listening and reviewing. Enjoy yourself. Save more words and do not worry if you cannot remember them. I save lost of words, even if I more or less know them. I click on most of the yellow highlighted words that I have already saved when they come up in my texts. I flash card previously saved words before starting to read a new text. I batch review my words, moving 30-40-50 of them up one status level in the Vocabulary section. Mostly I do what I want to do.
Bear in mind that in Russian there are more words to learn because the language is heavily inflected. There are many forms of different words, depending on case, gender, tense etc. I save the different forms of the words to better understand how they work. I edit the phrases in the LingQ widget in order to focus on the words that I have trouble learning. But in the end I know that it is only time and exposure that will gradually enable me to remember these words. And the more words I know, the more words I can pick up "incidentally". Here are some definitions of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning from an interesting article on the subject. If you Google incidental vocabulary learning you will find many academic papers which try to overly complicate the subject. This article is more practical. Note that the comment below says that it takes a long time. It does, but LingQ makes it a little easier, and makes the "incidental" learning a little more systematic. Intentional vocabulary acquisition is memorizing straightforwardly term after term with their respective translations from a list. Intentional learning is quick and therefore usually preferred by learners, but it is also superficial. Learners encounter vocabulary in an isolated, often infinitive form and remain incapable of using it correctly in context. Moreover intentionally learned vocabulary sinks faster into oblivion.
Incidental vocabulary acquisition, namely through contextual deduction in target language reading, meets these recommendations. Learners encounter terms together with syntactic information, which helps using the accurate words in an idiomatic way. Vocabulary in context often appears repeatedly under different aspects and hence engrains in the learners. minds. Unfortunately it takes long until enough vocabulary for fluent conversations is incidentally gathered.
