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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#191

Post by mkr-hn »

stygianguest wrote: post #173
officemonkey wrote: post #166

Earlier 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…

Talkative people will bludgeon you with their thoughts. It's useful when you've already used other words like "harass" and "bore" and need a synonym.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#192

Post by wccrawford »

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…

I'm not sure it's valid for native speakers, either.

Your basic vocabulary will be the same as most other speakers because we have structured learning in our schools.

But the less-well-known words are generally learned in context... So if you haven't happened across them in a book, you probably don't know them... But there are probably many others that you do, instead. This test could easily hit a bunch you don't know and totally miss all the ones you do.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#196

Post by cdavid »

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…

While the exercice is interesting in that it is humbling for non-native speakers, it does seem dubious. I repeated the test 3 times, and got widely different results (10400, then 16700, then 18300). Since they are all quite outside the reported quantiles for native speakers, it may be expected to have high variance for non-native, but that means the numbers are not very useful as is.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#197

Post by VMG »

Su-Shee wrote: post #168
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 german - ignoring words I know but couldn't immediately place properly (raggamuffin for example) I got 19000. My english comes mostly from watching movies and tv series long after I graduated, reading novels, articles, handbooks and later by chatting in english. Due to movies and tv series, I adopted an us-american flavor of english. Also keep in mind that this test didn't ask for domain specific vocabulary - if…

24yo german with 19k here also. I'm not so sure if vocabulary size beyond a certain level is really that significant.

I got the feeling that that I could improve my score the most by thoroughly reading a 18th century novel.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#198

Post by mkr-hn »

StavrosK wrote: post #163
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?

Phallometry is nice when you have the big phallus.

Unless it's being used by a dystopian regime to decide who poses the greatest threat to the oligarchs.
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