Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 331 posts

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#211

Post by crazygringo »

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…

Site creator here, again -- my research (small sample size) having Brazilians take the test is that a couple years of learning will get you around 1,500-3,000 words, several years around 4,000-6,000, and a good student with, say, 8 years of classes might get around 10,000.

Beyond this, it's pretty much necessary to live abroad for an extended period of time, or be exceptionally good (driven) at languages and watch TONS of TV, use tons of online chat, etc.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#212

Post by Sparq »

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 got 30800, and I am a native Dutch speaker. Though I have to say that I consider English my co-native language. Most of the media I consume is in English, and in my work environment (IT) English is the default language. But most of the words in this test I knew from reading books, as it is one of the few places where using a very wide vocabulary is not frowned upon.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#213

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#214

Post by onan_barbarian »

4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs wrote: post #88

Shocking, 9885. I acquired current command on English via Internet, Harry Potter and Klan Academy - and I was pretty comfortable making points in English than in Japanese I could use some help boosting my vocabulary...

If you've been learning words from the "Klan Academy" you should be very careful when you first address an African-American.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#215

Post by clu3 »

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 back you up. Non-native english speaker here. My result: I know 10,600 words. I really doubt it, I have an english dictionary that contains about 4,000 words and I don't think I need another dictionary. Plus my computing terminologies, 10K words is still way beyond me

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#217

Post by exch »

Sparq wrote: post #212
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 got 30800, and I am a native Dutch speaker. Though I have to say that I consider English my co-native language. Most of the media I consume is in English, and in my work environment (IT) English is the default language. But most of the words in this test I knew from reading books, as it is one of the few places where using a very wide vocabulary is not frowned upon.

Same here. Also a native Dutch speaker, but by far the most of my daily communication happens in English. I scored 25600 on the test.

My use of English is limited to daily-use for the most part. Apart from IT terminology, I rarely encounter field-specific words. Nor do I read literature.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#218

Post by scscsc »

I got ~12K, but I highly doubt the accuracy... I suspect that I know ~1K words, maybe 2K. I remember hearing that people usually use around 100 or 200 distinct words/day.

According to http://math.ucdenver.edu/~wbriggs/qr/shakespeare.html, Shakespeare used ~32K words in all of his works.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#219

Post by crazygringo »

mdda wrote: post #43

Just as a test, ticking all the boxes scores 45,000 words. Which seems to indicate that they haven't seeded the quiz with fake words to weed out cheaters : Pity, since there was an opportunity to unbias it in at least one dimension. (I also tried deselecting just 1 of a few of the really tough words : Each one caused the score to lower).

Site creator here -- you're right, there's no cheating detection. I ask people not to fill out the survey results if they're not being entirely truthful, of course they are free to disregard the instructions.

But I created the site, less interested in absolute vocabulary size numbers (these vary widely depending upon methodology), and more in relative changes among age groups, SAT scores, etc. And hopefully, cheating would not be correlated to any of those...

But at the end of the day, this is not a controlled, scientific survey. It is a voluntary quiz, though I am doing my best to control for other factors.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#220

Post by johnsonjohnson »

Putting aside all the comparing. Many non-native speakers here say they read and watch many things in english. I do that do and I'm quite positive that 95% of all the reading and listening I do each day is in english.

Now with a low score of 17500 I wonder, if it isn't enough to completely endulge oneself in the language, what is?

Of course, watching the Simpsons all day won't teach me some of the rarely used words. But there must be some stepping stones. I still haven't read Wuthering Heights because I don't want to have a dictionary lying around just to understand the story. And looking up something, reading on and forgetting it at the end of the day is quite common for me.

Also I'm sure that 15 year old americans haven't read that many novels, still their vocabulary is supposed to be larger than most of the well read non-native speakers around here.

Post reply on HN