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

301–310 of 331 posts

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#301

Post by tommyudo »

I took the opposite approach.

I checked all the boxes on the first page but one, "vibrissae" (roughly, whiskers), and saw even more boxes on the second page and groaned. So I punted, and went back to the first page, reloaded it, and checked only one box: vibrissae.

After finding 17 words on the second page, I left them all blank, following the same methodology. My vocabulary size was estimated to be 20 words.

From this, I deduced that my total vocabulary size was all the words ever known to any English speaker anywhere, anytime - minus 20.

This made me very pleased with myself, even though I knew my assumptions were pretty terrible.

(Interesting that the spell check in my browser doesn't recognize vibrissae.)

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#302

Post by rsaarelm »

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…

Native Finnish speaker, 31 100. Most of the books I've read in the last 20 years have been in English.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#303

Post by roel_v »

kmm wrote: post #285
roel_v wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I don't think I understand. How would we communicate without language?

That would be rather hard, even if we had neural interfaces - I hope to do away with most languages so that we have only a few (ideally one) left, and hopefully those wouldn't be too dissimilar either.

I'll admit though that that point was rather tangential to the post I was replying to.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#305

Post by kragen »

Troll_Whisperer wrote: post #174

I was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that. Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My colle…

What your friend's dictionary contains a hundred and fifty thousand of are almost certainly not the same thing that the OED contains only a hundred and seventy thousand of. Take a look at a random OED page sometime and see how many words you don't know.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#306

Post by [deleted] »

Troll_Whisperer wrote: post #174

I was really surprised by the result of this. I was flipping through a friends learner's Chinese-English dictionary that claimed to contain over 150,000 words and in a couple minutes of thumbing through it I didn't find any I didn't know. But on this test, I didn't even get 50,000. Then according to the info at the bottom, the median was far less than that. Honestly I think the evaluation method is terrible. My colle…

[deleted]

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#307

Post by kragen »

swehner wrote: post #141
diN0bot wrote: post #16

anyone know of something like this for other languages, eg german?

Actually they have a link at http://testyourvocab.com/about.php : "The companion Brazilian project can be found at howmanywords.com.br" Which right now just says "Calcule o tamanho do seu vocabulário em inglês / Coming soon"

I will be a lot more interested in the Brazilian site when it goes live! I'm not making any particular effort to expand my English vocabulary (having a smaller vocabulary is not among the top ten reasons my writing in English is worse than Shakespeare's) but my Portuguese vocabulary is muito terrivel. It would be great to have a way to measure my progress.

Edit: Oh. The Brazilian site is just a Portuguese version of the instructions for the English site? :(

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#308

Post by eru »

jsskate wrote: post #244
tokenadult wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliezer, I think you appreciate some of the ideas behind the FAQ I'll repost here with adaptation to the current situation: VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the data are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded…

I'm questioning the way respondents are classified. I chose 'Canada' as my region since I'm from Montreal. My first language is English and I'm fluent French. I did the first half of elementary school in French. Firstly non-Quebec anglophones tend to have better grammar and larger vocabularies than anglophone Quebecers. Secondly it doesn't take into account that English can be a 3rd language . Most immigrants to Queb…

> Doesn't China have the largest English speaking population now...

Doesn't matter. Look at the density instead.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#309

Post by eru »

zcid wrote: post #271
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…

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 t…

I don't know if you can blame it completely on school. They also watch their films subbed, not dubbed.

Re: Estimate your English vocabulary size

#310

Post by eru »

mnutt wrote: post #230
_delirium wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words. For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and anothe…

Definitely. I would have liked the test to be "would you be comfortable using this word in a sentence? (if you had to)" Even as a native speaker there are times when I know the definition of a word, but opt for a simpler word because I don't know all of the implications of using it.

And even if you were, you have to make sure that your listeners understand you, too.
Post reply on HN