i understand why i can't read Alexia Tsotsis articles on Techcrunch without a dictionary, with my shameful 8,560 vocab
Estimate your English vocabulary size
111–120 of 331 posts
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#112I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-o…
> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker
I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#11314,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#114Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one getting high scores did so because of or despite their education. They did it by having the sort of brain that happens to retains words like uxoricide and reading copious quantities of material in which such abstruse words are employed. I got a high score and went to public schools in the US, and didn't finish college either.
A proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic positive influence on ones vocabulary.
(Just over 30,000.) Personally, I learned far more of those words from reading George R.R. Martin or Guy Gavriel Kay than anything in my liberal arts education.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#116I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-o…
I am in a similar situation and my estimated vocabulary size is 10100 words. Doh! :D
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#117[deleted]
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#118I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live). This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-o…
My background is roughly similar to yours (German, 9 1/2 years of English in school, been living in the US for 10 month) and I got 10.900 words.
Especially seeing the second and third page surprised me as I can't recall ever hearing most of these words. My girlfriend noted that many of them are older terms, but still I expected to have picked up some through movies or books.
On the other hand: studying and working in the US with just 11k words works quite well.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#11914,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!
to read your post i looked up the word 'vernacular' in the dictionary
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#12043,300.
I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than a little with this particular test.