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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#201

Post by kiiski »

chousuke wrote: post #164
pavlov wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a score of 26,000. I'm Finnish, and actually learned French as a second language in school and English as third. I've never lived in an English-speaking country, but English is so prevalent in Finland these days that I wouldn't be surprised if it gained some kind of official status within the next 50 years. Whether in formal meetings or informal bar encounters, people voluntarily switch to English if there's ev…

Another Finn here... I got 25,200. I guess I need to read a couple books. :P My Swedish is atrocious. I can't recall a single time that I'd have had use for it outside school. In contrast, English is useful every day, though mostly in written form.

And third Finn here, but my score was mere 13,000. At least I have the excuse of still being a student :)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#203

Post by sek »

apl wrote: post #188

I strongly doubt that their methodology has any validity at all for non-native speakers. Extrapolating from a selection of 60-80 words presupposes a relatively normal developmental history; otherwise one would not be able to draw the primary inference at work here, namely that somebody who knows a definition for "mawkish" knows definitions for all words of similar difficulty and frequency. Atypical language acquisiti…

Non-Native speaker here. I found out that in almost all cases i knew a synonym of the words is didn't know. The problem is these are the ones that are used very frequently so i am rarely exposed to the other forms. While i know high literature in German, i must admit i just have read non-fiction in English so far. This is really a shame and i am going to change this.

This test made me aware of that fact, regardless of it's scientific accuracy.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#204

Post by Symmetry »

officemonkey wrote: post #166
gimpf wrote: 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…

Don't worry, this article ( http://howlearnspanish.com/2010/08/how-many-words-do-you-nee... ) says that for most people, 3,000 words will get you to 94% of oral communication and 10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education. The difference between 10,000 and 30,000 is knowing the words "uxorcide" and "tricorn". Before this test, I've never seen the first one and the only time…

That's for Spanish, though, which generally uses a somewhat smaller day-to-day vocabulary since it doesn't have the same weird Romance/Germanic thing that English does.

Most languages end up having about the same information bandwidth, but make different tradeoffs between the number of syllables per second and the entropy per syllable. Spanish and Japanese, for instance, tend to be spoken rapidly and have a more regular set of sounds, but languages like English or Chinese tend to be spoken more slowly and have more different sounds in each syllable. I'd imagine that low frequency languages tend to have large vocabularies that they use, but that's just a guess.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#205

Post by robert-boehnke »

paulnelligan wrote: post #151
robert-boehnke wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is multiple choice a REAL test? In all the exams I had in my life, from 1st grade to BS in CS, I only had one multiple choice test.

Let's think about it logically. If you were to actually test the users instead of asking them 'which of these do you know?', the ONLY option is multiple choice since analysing text-field input from the user to determine if their definition is correct is at best extremely difficult, and more than likely impossible ... right ?

I agree that the quality of the result is highly dependent on the honesty of the person tested, but with multiple choice, wouldn't you be able to deduct the meaning of the word from choices you are given?

E.g.: One of the words I encountered in the test was 'terpsichorean'. While I knew that Terpsichore is one of the Muses, I did not know which one and left the box unticked. Had there been multiple choices, I might have guessed the correct solution.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#206

Post by _delirium »

Murkin wrote: post #128
gimpf wrote: 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…

Some studies I have seen, showed that the average newspaper has a 6000-8000 word vocabulary. Add another 2000 to cover technical/domain specific/slang words. And you should have no reason not to be able to communicate freely on day to day basis. I got 26K (English is my 3rd language) and most of the 'strange' words are from reading too much science fiction as a kid. + on showing percentiles of non-native speakers tho

Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words.

For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and another to be able to use it in a natural way, choosing words with the right shade of meaning, and avoiding awkward constructions or unintended connotations.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#207

Post by henrikschroder »

Someone wrote: post #183
GvS wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You hit the nail on the head. There is a huge difference between knowing the general meaning of a word and being able to exactly define them. Simple examples: is a cow a deer? Why (not)?. Is a banana a berry? Is a blueberry a berry? A strawberry? I used the former because I thought it was what people would do (as it is easier to do; people will not what to spend 30 or more seconds on each word), and got 26600. That i…

Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special?

I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names of such things in Swedish, but in English I know much fewer names. That's a few thousand words I lack and probably will never learn because it's so specialized.

(Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#208

Post by coolestuk »

http://testyourvocab.com/?r=55953

37,100 I'm ashamed I didn't do better. I'm considerably older than the average HN reader. I did degrees in 4 different subjects (mind you, I was classed officially as retarded at my high school - in the same classes as the arsonists).

So no-one should feel the score is that important. I'm a very mediocre programmer. I'd much rather halve my vocab score to double my maths ability.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#209

Post by crazygringo »

apl wrote: post #188

I strongly doubt that their methodology has any validity at all for non-native speakers. Extrapolating from a selection of 60-80 words presupposes a relatively normal developmental history; otherwise one would not be able to draw the primary inference at work here, namely that somebody who knows a definition for "mawkish" knows definitions for all words of similar difficulty and frequency. Atypical language acquisiti…

Hi, creator of the site here -- I worked for several years teaching English to foreigners, and my own (informal) statistical research has found that native and non-native language acquisition, while certainly somewhat different, is not tremendously different. I've run this test on Americans and Brazilians at all different levels, and the size of the progression from known to unknown words is rather consistent.

That being said, cognates between languages can give an artificially inflated score. I intentionally avoided any words with the same roots in English and Portuguese (my second language), which should hopefully also be true for most Romance languages. This way, you shouldn't be able to "guess" meanings you've never actually learned. However, it wouldn't surprise me if German speakers, for example, were able to "guess" an additional number of words correctly.

Also, the 60-80 words are only what you are tested on -- the word selection on pages 2-4 changes depending on your answers on the first page, so it attempts to narrow down your vocab knowledge "at the margin".

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#210

Post by onan_barbarian »

astrofinch wrote: post #96
onan_barbarian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is _very_ full of over-confident people, believe me. During a discussion of 'whether open source contributions were being overly important to job seekers' a while back, a surprising number of HN commenters automatically put themselves in the role of employer, peering dubiously over their glasses at me. Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect…

"Many of these commenters were hilariously under-qualified to be taking on that kind of role with respect to anyone." You inferred this based on user profiles?

Correct. Most of the folks in question had filled in enough to be able to be straightforwardly findable in terms of linkedin, blogs, etc. It wasn't rocket science.
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