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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

131–140 of 331 posts

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#131
Along with many of the flaws already adressed, the most relevant for me was "absolutely sure of" and also taking the words out of context. There were a good number of words that I was pretty sure I knew and had I read them in context would have been correct in my meaning and never given it a second thought.

I'm certain that if I took this same test using a base of 'novel in fulltext' vs. 'list of all unique words in the novel', my recog would be FAR better on the novel.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#132
Got 21,500 or so. Even as a non-native speaker I was slightly disappointed with this result. Many of the words were just ridiculously obscure and esoteric, and I haven't even seen some of them anywhere in the literature I read.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#133
post #85

22,000 Clearly my American public school education has served me well. >_<

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.

At a certain point, somewhere in the middle ranges of these scores, formal education at even the best schools will stop having any effect on your vocabulary. It becomes more a matter of where someone's interest lies. Do they read? A lot? Outside of the usual curriculum?

And at the upper end, it's more about personal predilections than anything else. Are rare words like little gems that you save and collect?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#135
post #108

I'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…

Spanish here. Got an estimated vocabulary size of 17,7000 words. I lived and worked in the U.K for a couple of years. I think I might be in a better position than some of you when it comes to words derivated from Latin, as they are almost always the same in Spanish. Leaving those out I am sure I would get similar results.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#136
post #108

I'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'm in similar situation: 9,780 words.

I knew general meaning of many words I didn't check, but I couldn’t exactly define them. I know that I will understand the meaning from the context when I see them in some sentence.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#137
post #108

I'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 Dutch, and the estimated vocabulary is 15,600 words. It's really humbling, but on the other side surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary. But I bet the distribution is not very similar to an American kid with a vocabulary of that size ;). It's easy to notice the difference in vocabulary in practice. Native speaker's speech is much more varied. Also, it's maybe go…

> surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary

Not really surprising since most of English scientific vocabulary comes from greek or latin roots and is more or less the same in other European languages.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#138
post #108

I'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…

The biggest difference between natives and non-natives is the amount of "passive vocabulary". Sure, we non-native English speakers can express ourselves well enough, we can participate in discussions, even on a high scientific level, as long as we're familiar with the problem domain. But because we've (I'm generalising, of course) read fewer English books, been exposed to the lingo for a lot less than natives, we're limited in our passive vocabulary. Having been exposed to a language for every waking hour of your lifetime doesn't just enable you to speak it better, it also teaches thousands of words you never use, but nevertheless know the meaning of.

On a side note: this makes me feel better about my 25k score ;-)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#139
Ah, cool I know 80 english words. There must be something utterly wrong with how this test works in opera mini, clicking on continue on page two brought me to page one, going back and clicking continue again gave me just a subset of the choices from page one... (at least I guess it is 80, the number was displayed right over the middle of the word "words" in the result captcha).
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