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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#231

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #213
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.

[deleted]

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#232

Post by marcinw »

natural219 wrote: post #61

19,600. 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…

I must admit, as an American male, a little older than you, my score was also so low, I'm too embarrassed to even mention. All those years of cheating on vocabulary tests (merely by memorizing the words 5 minutes prior to taking the test) in high school did not help. It's one of the those things I look back on in life and regret. Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to catch up ?

edit: forgot to mention, while I am a native English speaker, both my parents tend to speak Polish most of the time, while I always reply in English. I have to wonder how much this had an affect on me.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#233

Post by jvdh »

microtonal wrote: post #123
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 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…

The vocabulary you need for scientific discussions can't be measured in these kinds of tests, because it is really very specific. So your english vocabulary may stil be a bit bigger.

The words that are measure here are the words that you'd use in "general" conversation I guess.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#234

Post by roel_v »

Someone wrote: post #183
GvS wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The claims being made on the site that the median score of the whole population is 27k words is not substantiated anywhere else. E.g. http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.h..., which references 'proper' studies (but I haven't tracked the references), says

"Based on previous research, Nation and Waring (1997) estimate that the receptive vocabulary size of a university-educated native English speaker is around 20,000 base words, while Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words."

I'm a non-native speaker and got 18 700 words, which I found rather disappointing when I read that that was, according to the site, roughly equivalent to (or even below) the average 15 year old native speaker. Thinking a bit about it however I'm quite sure that that is nonsense - I am regularly asked by native speakers to review their English texts and scholarly articles and am relatively often commented on my broad vocabulary. When people review mine and I push them on why they suggested certain grammatical or stylistic changes, almost invariably it turns out that they are influenced by personal style preferences or local customs (as in, local to the area they grew up in). Now I'm not God's gift to the world and I'm sure that there is much to be improved on my English, but still I'm quite sure I can outperform the 5th percentile of the general population on English vocabulary knowledge. (I mean - that's people with an iq of 80 or less ffs, again not to say that I'm a genius but I find the proposition that I would score worse than most native speakers that qualify under many definitions as mentally retarded to be preposterous).

I'm highly skeptical of the site's claim that the 50% percentile knows 27k words. It seems to be from their own test takers, and I didn't find any references to other researcher's results, of which there are several.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#235

Post by pflanze »

snippyhollow wrote: post #149
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 a French native, began English when I was 13 (German is my first "school language") although I used basics of English before (to play some games, use DOS). The test estimates my vocabulary size to be 21,100. There is _no way_ that I know that much words. I think it's biased a lot for foreigners, particularly French ones (which gives you a lot of formal English words "for free"). And even more when you have taken…

> that much words

that many

I only got an estimate of 11500 words, yet I can still correct you :). My native language is (Swiss-)German, spent a couple years in Montreal where you don't really have many chances to improve your english (at least not the vocabulary), otherwise only used the language in written form.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#236

Post by roel_v »

davidw wrote: post #112
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…

> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.

But the average 3-year old Chinese speaks infinite better Chinese than I do (I can't even pronounce 'ni hao' correctly I'm sure, despite my colleagues kind praise of how I say it very understandably); I don't see how that's humbling. Language knowledge is imo rather useless; languages is a very inefficient idea transfer mechanism, and the amount of energy we collectively waste on translations and learning languages is staggering. I see languages as an unfortunate side-effect of human's poor natural communication traits, and I hope that we can do away with most of them asap.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#237

Post by Inufu »

robert-boehnke wrote: post #205
paulnelligan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's think about it logically. If you were to actually test the users instead of asking them 'which of these do you know?', the ONLY option is multiple choice since analysing text-field input from the user to determine if their definition is correct is at best extremely difficult, and more than likely impossible ... right ?

I agree that the quality of the result is highly dependent on the honesty of the person tested, but with multiple choice, wouldn't you be able to deduct the meaning of the word from choices you are given? E.g.: One of the words I encountered in the test was 'terpsichorean'. While I knew that Terpsichore is one of the Muses, I did not know which one and left the box unticked. Had there been multiple choices, I might h…

Actually, the SAT also employs multiple choice, and quite successfully. You see, multiple choice can not only give you hints, but can also be used to lead you astray. In the end, it balances out.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#238

Post by flatline »

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…

I can't imagine that the percentiles are reflective of the general population...I got 27,000 which it claims is the median score, and from practical experience my vocabulary is quite a bit larger than most people's. If this is measuring, say, the HN crowd, then perhaps it's accurate.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#239

Post by joeyh »

"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of."

This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.

Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?

I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.

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