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Estimate your English vocabulary size

testyourvocab.com

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Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#271

Post by zcid »

pavlov wrote: post #152
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 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…

Last year I met and associated with a Finn while traveling in France. He spoke extraordinarily good English and could have passed for a native of the USA with very little accent correction (it was more the timing of his speech that gave him away). I wouldn't have thought him to be exceptional until I discovered that I was the first native English speaker he had ever met and he had never even left his country before then.

I wish I had been given language instruction of that caliber when I was in school.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#272

Post by smallblacksun »

henrikschroder wrote: post #207
Someone wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special? I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names…

Actually, you can refer to a female deer as a "cow" (though "doe" is more common).

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#273

Post by smallblacksun »

white_devil wrote: post #157
RobertLowe wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 23, I took this thing half awake and came in at 24k. I'm not an avid reader. The test seems to pull random words from a dictionary and not words used in a general mannor. Not only that but it messed all the delicious skill-trade grammar I know and love. Bollocks.

Would you have checked the word "manner"?

or "messed"?

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#274

Post by [deleted] »

gimpf wrote: post #156
fhars wrote: post #139

Ah, cool I know 80 english words. There must be something utterly wrong with how this test works in opera mini, clicking on continue on page two brought me to page one, going back and clicking continue again gave me just a subset of the choices from page one... (at least I guess it is 80, the number was displayed right over the middle of the word "words" in the result captcha).

So you have used up nearly 70% of your vocabulary to write this comment? I have to admit, your proficiency in English grammar is extraordinary given this.

[deleted]

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#275

Post by Cyph0n »

nolite wrote: post #11
Cyph0n wrote: post #3

It seems to be fairly accurate. Maybe it isn't. My score: http://testyourvocab.com/?r=35822 Edit: I just had a look at the median word count for adults who took the survey. It's around 27,000. I wonder whether that's true or not.. it seems to me that I'm lacking.

Methinks these survey takers doth be liars

Bingo.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#276

Post by nuromancer »

krmmalik wrote: post #172
pavlov wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was completely honest scoring 16,000, English is my one and only language. Depending on your field/background you could understand more words than this test suggests. Looking up the words that i did not understand coupling them with there relevance and the shear volume of test words or lack thereof makes this test inaccurate in my mind.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#278

Post by losvedir »

henrikschroder wrote: post #207
Someone wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special? I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names…

> (Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )

Not sure if you're joking or not, but to be clear to non-native speakers: bananas are definitely not berries. Berries are smaller and rounder. For example: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. I guess strawberries, too, but they're outliers.

Also the plural of deer is deer.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#279

Post by angus77 »

schleyfox wrote: post #48
Terretta wrote: post #45

I only checked words that I can use in a sentence: left one blank on the first set, a handful blank on the second set. 42,500 ( http://testyourvocab.com/?r=37216 ) Apparently the OED has 7 times more words I don't know. That's offal...

"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." -- Dorothy Parker

That was one of Dave Sim's favourite lines. I think he thinks he made it up himself, though.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#280

Post by angus77 »

dspace wrote: post #53
wolfrom wrote: post #42

I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off. When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I…

> I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. This is what I was thinking. I scored 34K, and rarely encounter a word that I don't understand in regular speech or reading. I also know several thousand jargon words, none of which were on that test. I know what I need to know. Memorizing another 16K words to reach Shakespeare's magical 50K (and feel good about myself) would be a waste of…

As someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which was the number I was familiar with).
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