Estimate your English vocabulary size • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#221

Post by Fargren » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:20 PM UTC

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…

I'm a native spanish speaker, And I got 26,800. But then again more than half of the culture I consume is in english, and I spends an awful lot of time in forums and such.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#222

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:22 PM UTC

martingordon wrote: post #26

I'm almost 26 and I scored 26,500. Not sure I buy the results though. I would think that the rate of increase would start to decrease quite significantly after high school/college but it appears to stay pretty much linear throughout the data.

Site creator here -- That has been the most interesting finding so far -- I certainly didn't expect it. Unfortunately I haven't had enough participation yet from children, or older folks :), to see how it continues to extend in either direction.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#223

Post by paulnelligan » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:27 PM UTC

robert-boehnke wrote: post #205

paulnelligan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

True, but it's still much better than just relying on people submitting accurate results without even testing them ... at least with multiple choice everyone is being tested to approximately the same metric, and you can get a more accurate percentile

BTW, the word is 'deduce' ;)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#224

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:28 PM UTC

Site creator here -- what a surprise to wake up this morning, see my inbox full of messages about this site, and discover that everyone was coming from Hacker News, which I visit every day!

Thanks for all the participation, and comments -- I didn't submit this myself, so thanks, mike_esspe.

I've responded to a few points down below; there's a lot more info on the details of the test at:

http://testyourvocab.com/faq.php http://testyourvocab.com/details.php

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#225

Post by pygy_ » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:31 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #209

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 b…

There were around 10 french words in the list I got. Maybe more, maybe less, I didn't count exactly.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#226

Post by mml » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:36 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #62

The psychology of these things is interesting to me. My reflexive reaction was, of course, "I have to know!" and then my immediate counter-reaction was "This is just intellectual phallometry and is ultimately of no consequence to me." Of course, I very quickly rationalized away the counter-reaction and took the test anyway, and then considered sharing it with my friends. What drives this?

Yes, it's amazing how many people are "casually" posting their scores. Dick measuring indeed. (98,750)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#227

Post by robert-boehnke » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 1:45 PM UTC

paulnelligan wrote: post #223

robert-boehnke wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

True, but it's still much better than just relying on people submitting accurate results without even testing them ... at least with multiple choice everyone is being tested to approximately the same metric, and you can get a more accurate percentile BTW, the word is 'deduce' ;)

haha, got me :-)

To my defense, they are both derived from 'deducere', to lead away, and 'were not distinguished in sense until the mid 17th cent' according to my system’s dictionary

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#228

Post by antirez » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 2:10 PM UTC

I just just "5,340" as a result, this is an hint for me that I spend too much time trying to improve my hearing skills and too little trying to learn words outside the domain I mostly use English for (computers, programming, technology, ...).

I wonder if there is some good web site that helps you learning new words. An iPhone application will also work for me, but I need one that is able to also tell me the sound of the word. I searched a bit in the past without good results.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#229

Post by deadmansshoes » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

toot wrote: post #109

I realise that the ego-stroking scoring is the driver behind this site's popularity , but I would also like to see definitions of words that I missed. It's pretty daunting to spend hours copying and pasting words into Google (well, ahem, maybe it is for some of us!)

I felt the same. Also there were some words I thought I knew what they meant, but my definition would only be partially correct.

Also some definitions you can guess at - do these count as part of your vocabulary or not? E.g. Clerisy, can be easily deduced to be the class of clerics, but not sure if I'd be able to say if it was a real word or not.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#230

Post by mnutt » Sun, Jul 17, 2011, 2:51 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #206

Murkin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anothe…

Definitely. I would have liked the test to be "would you be comfortable using this word in a sentence? (if you had to)" Even as a native speaker there are times when I know the definition of a word, but opt for a simpler word because I don't know all of the implications of using it.