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How many of the 170k English words do you know?

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Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#531

Post by ralferoo »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #380
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what high schooler doesn't learn about kinetic energy? 95% of Americans.

Sick burn bro. I can assure you that just about every American that has made it through middle school has been taught about kinetic energy. Let alone high school.

Being taught something has little correlation with learning it, and even less with remembering it years later.

Perhaps just because it suits my learning style, I find learning is actually easier if I attempt to work something out or guess it, and then am corrected when wrong, because then I have a memory to anchor it on. If I skip that part and just try to learn some facts, very little is retained. One consequence of this is that I prefer science / logic based subjects to things like history or geography (as in places, etc, not the science parts) where it's just a bunch of arbitrary facts that you can't just guess or work out for yourself.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#533

Post by miki123211 »

Non-native speaker of English here, got 81k. Mostly with intelligence, not language skills.

Once you figure out the pattern of "one answer sounds like the requested word, two are opposites, one is unrelated", the test suddenly becomes easy. Not all questions follow that pattern, but many of them do.

Sometimes there are two or three answers that sound like the question, sometimes a word that is clearly an adjective relating to a person (ending in -us) has non-adjective definitions. I don't think there's even a single question where more than two of the answers make sense, even if you've never heard the word before. That leaves very little room for mistakes.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#534

Post by bogwog »

tomrod wrote: post #346
guidedlight wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was clearly built with AI.

Is this a problem? I thought it was fun, personally, even if the author used AI to help build it.

It's obviously a problem because it doesn't work as intended/at all. What's point of building something like this if it doesn't work? At best its a waste of everyone's time, at worst it's misleading.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#535

Post by GolfPopper »

balazspeczeli wrote: post #453
taffydavid wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't already know what Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was, it's very easy to guess from four options. I agree there were too many clicks per word, I took me too long to finish. But I also found it too easy to guess the few words I did not know

Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?

It is not. Vocabulary is far from the binary of "you know this word or you don't". At a minimum, it is usually split into passive and active vocabulary, with passive being the words you understand when encountered, and active being the words you can use effectively. Wikipedia's entry is a pretty good overview.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#536

Post by olliepro »

miki123211 wrote: post #533

Non-native speaker of English here, got 81k. Mostly with intelligence, not language skills. Once you figure out the pattern of "one answer sounds like the requested word, two are opposites, one is unrelated", the test suddenly becomes easy. Not all questions follow that pattern, but many of them do. Sometimes there are two or three answers that sound like the question, sometimes a word that is clearly an adjective re…

This is the classic pattern of LLM generated MCQs.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#537

Post by ralferoo »

sandworm101 wrote: post #181
sd9 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually do 100 words? It wasn't two or three minutes. With good UX, sure. But I wasn't getting through 1 word per second.

I did. Missed two. If you know a word there is no thinking time. Im on tablet so i was probably fast on the clicking, but not like korean gamer fast.

I don't know, I read each option for the first 20 or 30 in case there were any trick questions. There were a couple later where 1 option was very close to the meaning and 1 was much better. I actually got one wrong (can't remember what now, shame there's no summary at the end) where I chose one and it said another answer was correct, but I knew the meaning I chose was also valid.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#538

Post by GolfPopper »

taffydavid wrote: post #496
balazspeczeli wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the ability to guess the meaning of a word (from four options or context) is the same as knowing the word and using it in your speech?

No, absolutely not, and that's my point. A real test would be having to type the definition, or pick from ten options

I think that picking the correct (or most correct, which is trickier) use of the word in context (out of, as you say, many options) might be a good way to test for receptive vocabulary.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#539

Post by ggorlen »

brianleb wrote: post #263

As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…

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