14,000 Words
I am non-native speaker. I guess that's a excuse for such poor score. Need to improve :(
Estimate your English vocabulary size
171–180 of 331 posts
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#172I'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 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…
Holy wowsers. I grew up in England, and i only scored 14,800 on the test! Although English isnt my native language, i did speak it from a very early age.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#173I'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…
Well, in many cases it helps to know multple languages. Case in point: uxoricide. There were quite a few other words I knew from other languages in the quiz (English is not my mother tongue).
That and the amount of words I know RPGs in the quiz really surprised me. How often do you use a bludgeon, wouldn't you use a bat in stead?
Finally, there's a huge difference between active vocabulary --the words you actually use in speach or writing-- and passive vocabulary that is tested here. In my humble opinion, passive vocabulary should be tested in context of a sentence.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#174I was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that.
Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My collection of sci-fi/fantasy books alone probably contain over 100,000 headwords. A single biology text book might be as many as they claim the median person knows. Avid WoW players would similarly destroy the curve (if the test included the kinds of words they'd know instead of archaic religious words),
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#175It appears that this is accurate within 4 or 5 thousand words.. I've taken the test a few times, and my results are relatively distanced..
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#176I'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
The Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary has a 'defining vocabulary' of about 3500 words. They claim most definitions are limited to the use of those words and proper names. So, that 6000-8000 looks believable.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#177I'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…
This is actually not surprising since word Frequencies more or less follow a power law probability distribution. With a vocabulary of even 1,000 words you are very well covered. Anyone who engages in a discussion with words that are not very common is doing the very opposite of trying to communicate.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#178I'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…
"tricorn" is an everyday word in Spanish. The reason behind is we have a kind of police force that still wear "tricornios". And in my opinion they are still ridiculous.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, in many cases it helps to know multple languages. Case in point: uxoricide. There were quite a few other words I knew from other languages in the quiz (English is not my mother tongue). That and the amount of words I know RPGs in the quiz really surprised me. How often do you use a bludgeon, wouldn't you use a bat in stead? Finally, there's a huge difference between active vocabulary --the words you actually us…
I always thought of "bludgeon" as a verb. First I've heard it being used as a noun (and now my vocab has expanded!).
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#180lots of people here are saying they scored lower than what they expected, and that maybe other people cheated. that could be it, but it could also be that hacker news folks tend to be overconfident. this would match the stereotype of this group being mainly male nerd entreprenuers, which could score worse on things like this but perceive themselves to score much higher (a feeling not a fact backed by studies that i c…
I got just under the median on this test, but I scored around the 99th percentile in the SAT verbal, and I feel it's reasonable to say the two test approximately the same things. It seems unlikely that I've slipped so far in just two years :) I never really considered Hacker News to be full of overconfident people. If anything, to me being part of HN is a humbling experience. It reminds me that there are so many peop…
i scored just over 90th percentile and i promise i didn't lie. it seems to me that a lot of the words were very old-fashioned - they were the kind of words i learnt from context while reading books by people like dickens. they're not words i would use in normal conversation, or when writing.
anyway, what i'm saying is that i suspect sat verbal is testing something quite different - isn't it much more aimed at ability to use the language rather than whether you can recognise obscure words?
[what surprised me the most was how graded it was - on both tests there was a pretty clear cut-off point where the words became unknown. i didn't expect it to be that ordered.]