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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#311

Post by eru »

Tharkun wrote: post #138
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…

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…

For me it's the opposite. My passive vocabulary is rather big, but I can't think of all those words when I am speaking.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#313

Post by Morendil »

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 French; my estimate is 39,400.

I've been reading English since I was 13 or so - quite possibly the bulk of my reading has been in English (a quirk of mine).

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#314

Post by lawn »

I'm a non-native speaker and I fare pretty well with reading stuff but I'm a bit chocked at my result (The thing I find a bit funny is that of all the words I didn't check I've seen almost all of them in books and articles. When I see them in a sentence and in context I do understand them fine but I can't give a definition for them.

I wonder if this is common when reading another language? It might be a better idea to look up the words in a dictionary when seeing them but I just can't be bothered, after seeing them in context a few times I can usually get a feel for their meanings. There are a few exceptions to be sure, adjectives are particularly bad at this.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#315

Post by Robin_Message »

Eliezer wrote: post #29

I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked…

I just counted, and you've used at least 12685 dictionary words in HP:MOR [1]. I was expecting it to be more to be honest, but it didn't seem right not to post just because it didn't match my expectations.

It certainly seems unlikely that someone who can produce an excellent 500,000 word work of fiction (aside: thanks very much by the way,) in addition to reams of technical writing, has a vocabulary not in the 95th percentile of the population. OTOH, HP:MOR has fewer words in it than I expected, and even the upper bound of 14795 seems low. Maybe the working is wrong; it's shown below.

    $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
    tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
    sort --uniq | cat - /usr/share/dict/words | sort |
    awk '{count[$1]++; if (count[$1]==2) print}' | wc -l
    12685

    $ cat Harry\ Potter\ and\ the\ Methods\ of\ Rationality\ 1-72.txt |
    tr -cs 'a-zA-Z' '[\n*]' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
    sort --uniq | wc -l
    14795
[1] http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M... — Eliezer's amazing Harry Potter fanfiction in case you're missing out.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#316

Post by spreiti »

antirez wrote: post #228

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…

7830 here. (Swiss-German native speaker) Like you I don't have enough exposure to other domains outside of programming and technology.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#317

Post by gjm11 »

swehner wrote: post #129
Toucan wrote: post #120

43,300. I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than a little with this particular test.

At http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample they hint at omitting a lot of Latin words: Quote: No cognates or false-friends with Portuguese. This probably knocks out at least half the dictionary, since Romance languages have plenty in common with English. False friends need to be avoided as well, since a Brazilian beginner will see "pretend" and assume he knows it means pretender, which actually means "inten…

Even so, many of the most obscure words are potentially guessable by someone with a good knowledge of Latin and Greek. Funambulist, opsimath, hypnopompic. I don't think a classical education will be much help with cantles and williwaws, though.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#318

Post by jtheory »

crazygringo wrote: post #213
Eliezer wrote: post #29

I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked…

Site creator here -- you're right, survey participants are incredibly literate. I suppose that's Internet users in general, disregarding YouTube commenters :), or else the particular people who have spread the test, or are interested in taking it. Average verbal SAT score on the site is 700 (out of 800), far above the population's average of around 500.

Right; most people with "normal" or worse vocabularies are emphatically not going to see a "test your vocabulary" link and say "Hey, instead of doing something fun, let's see how poor my vocabulary really is! Then I'll tell all my friends!"

And when they see some egghead friend on Facebook has posted their vocabulary score and is challenging them to respond... they'll roll their eyes, and move on to their Farmville updates.

Don't get me wrong -- I love these things, and it came back with 37K for me -- but there's no way I'm posting that score, or even the link, to Facebook. I know how to maintain friendships, and saying "look how smart I am; I'm probably smarter than you" does not figure into it.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#319

Post by jtheory »

Robin_Message wrote: post #315
Eliezer wrote: post #29

I got 37,300. They claim this is not quite 95th percentile, which I am a tad skeptical accurately represents my vocabulary-size percentile relative to the general population. Perhaps this survey is being forwarded around unusually literate people at the top end, or more than 5% of responders are cheating. Where are the fake words to catch cheaters? I Googled a lot of what I didn't recognize, and everything I checked…

I just counted, and you've used at least 12685 dictionary words in HP:MOR [1]. I was expecting it to be more to be honest, but it didn't seem right not to post just because it didn't match my expectations. It certainly seems unlikely that someone who can produce an excellent 500,000 word work of fiction (aside: thanks very much by the way,) in addition to reams of technical writing, has a vocabulary not in the 95th p…

There's a huge difference between writing something targeted at a selected audience, in a given time period, limited range of topics the characters will discuss, etc. and listing out all of the vocabulary words you know personally across all domains of knowledge. Even though HP:MoR Harry has a broad vocabulary, for example, and may use some words not all readers will know, there are still tons of topics (with their own specialized vocabulary...) that will never come up in the written storyline -- even if Harry would know them well.

Harry also presumably does some practical limiting of his vocabulary in conversation, because only shared vocabulary is useful if you're trying to actually communicate and don't want to stop to give definitions all the time.

It might be more interesting to compare the unique word count of HP:MoR against some of the "real" Harry Potter books, if you can get your hands on the text.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#320

Post by jtheory »

eru wrote: post #310
mnutt wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And even if you were, you have to make sure that your listeners understand you, too.

Right, unless you want to ruin your point entirely by stopping to define words. Communication relies on shared vocabularies, not just one person's vocabulary.

There are plenty of words I know that I generally avoid in conversation for practical reasons. Entertainment reasons, though... I caught my wife teaching our not-yet-two-years-old daughter to use the word "etiolated" when referring to a green bean that was wilted and yellowish.

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