"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use"
Estimate your English vocabulary size
181–190 of 331 posts
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#182I am a non-native speaker (NNS) and got 15.700.
I think this test is not very telling for NNSs as it doesn't consider specialist vocabulary which many of us have a lot of of, because of how we /really/ learned the language.
When I left school my English was very average. When I started communicating with email with people from all over the world, but mostly the US, it improved a lot in 1-2 years. When I first went to a congress in the US in my med 20's I was blown away by my aptitude to communicate in that language.
But these were all people from my field. What I'm saying is that the distribution of words pertaining certain subjects in my vocabulary is severely skewed by the field I work in -- visual effects (and IT). I believe this goes for many NNSs.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#183I'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 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 is below, but about average. I am not a native speaker, but would have expected to score higher in the general population.
I am fairly sure that this test does not reach the general population, though (by the way, it is nice to see that the test adapts to one's level. Try answering almost none of the words on page 1. I got 'my' score down to 28 by confessing to know only one of the words)
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#184I got 35,900, and haven't lived in an English-speaking country in 10 years. I often get frustrated at myself when I feel like I'm losing my vocab. There were a couple of words on the list that I'm sure I once knew, but couldn't conjure up the meaning on the spot, so I skipped them. I was never a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I do like to read literature for fun.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#18537,200 I am a non-native speaker
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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#186I got 35,900, and haven't lived in an English-speaking country in 10 years. I often get frustrated at myself when I feel like I'm losing my vocab. There were a couple of words on the list that I'm sure I once knew, but couldn't conjure up the meaning on the spot, so I skipped them. I was never a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I do like to read literature for fun.
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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#18719,600. I'm willing to accept this, although I'm not going to lie -- I'm very upset at myself. I'm used to scoring 99th percentile in every standardized test; it's kind of a shock to realize that I'm nowhere near the median of even my age group , let alone the general populace (I'm 20). That said, I'm currently reading A Dance with Dragons and there are tons of words in this series (A Song of Ice and Fire) that I'm n…
GRRM tends to use a bunch of unusual words pretty frequently: "dandle", "garron", "palfrey", "hauberk", "solar".
I thought in aDwD that "leal" was just yet another Kindle OCR mess-up for "loyal" until I found out it actually really is a word - an old English word for "loyal"! Goes to show... something, I guess! :)
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#188I 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 acquisition (e.g., as a second language, or through a non-standard channel like technology or fantasy literature) disrupts this extrapolation step. For instance, a German programmer that knows the word "polymorphic" via OOP is less likely to know similarly frequent and difficult but programming-unrelated words than British or American peers. So adding, say, 100 to the total would be utterly unfounded. Same thing for a science-fiction nerd: Acquaintance with obscure words from one domain doesn't extrapolate to other domains.
Unless they somehow control for domain specificity and atypical acquisition, let's not get too frustrated. (Disclaimer: Not a native speaker -- result around median.)
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#189I'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…
Be happy my friend: I've scored a shameful 5700. I see it is very low compared to many others reporting here, anyway my English is more than ok when compared to most of those around me.
I believe language knowledge is very influenced by the surroundings, the place where you live, the people you deal with.
Aware of the weakness, a few days ago I posted a call for suggestions on Google+; now the vocabulary test moved me to ask the same to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772950
PS: I'm from Bari, Italy.
Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size
#190[deleted]