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How many of the 170k English words do you know?

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431–440 of 575 posts

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#431
post #341

Reading through the comments, I've noticed you can tell the native speakers by their scores in the word categories. A native speaker will score 20/20 in the first two bands and progressively less in the following ones. For those who have learned English as a foreign language, the scores are more evenly distributed. So it's not uncommon to see a native English speaker totaling 90 as 20,20,19,17,14, and a foreigner rea…

Not a native speaker and my scores are 20, 19, 19, 20 and 15 for a total of 93. Maybe I should consider myself as one :)

> Maybe I should consider myself as one

It depends: do you get its and it's right? :)

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#432
i wonder if multiple choice is the best method to test this. given the ubiquity of LLMs, perhaps an open ended, free text field would be better. that way you’re forced to define the word as you see fit and the LLM checks?

also, some of these words are actually not good ‘obscure vocabulary’ but trivia crap. overall a bit AI slop and too easy.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#433

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error. (context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score) I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words? Their "How is this calculated" page that…

What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100

I got 96. I think I knew about 87 of them just from knowing them, and the rest I got with a bit of Latin and Greek background (eg a word starting with “ab” is likely to mean “away from”), plus there’s a pattern to how they’d generated the wrong answers.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#434

They got the second word wrong, I got it right, but still scored against me. Haha. Impartial does not mean "treating all parties equally". It means "uninterested in the results". Fair would be "treating all equally". That's why there's a phrase "fair and impartial". "Partial" of course, doesn't mean "unfair", so negating it can't turn it into "fair". Partial means to favor one side or the other. This is why when peop…

In the end I correctly guessed what the quiz wanted me to pick, but came here to the replies to see if anyone else had the same hangup. The wording for me was "treating all rivals equally."

Never forget that we live among a bunch of B+ students that were told they were geniuses all through grade school. I'm actually surprised that I don't have five angry replies telling me that I'm wrong and stupid... this place can be worse than reddit when it comes to that stuff.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#435
At first I noticed that for many questions two or three of the answers are obviously wrong. So in many cases the correct answer can be guesses easily. But then I noticed that in 90% of the cases the correct answer is the longest of the four. This makes guessing even easier. The whole thing has a vibe-slopped feel to it.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#436

Too much time spent on the basics, honestly. I'm at word 20 and still on the basics? Each word is a double-click.

There are 5 different levels and 20 words per level. I think it was ok, just hold out for it if you think it is fun.

I completed it eventually, but until I completed the first 70 questions I was bored and it was a chore. I only started getting stuff wrong for the last 30 questions, and then it was interesting.

Maybe it should be designed to let you skip ahead if you want to.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#437
post #310

I flubbed a couple advanced/master and half of grandmaster, eh good enough. Be fun to start at Master and up, but is kerfuffle really grandmaster? Gaikwar and Kowtow are English words?

Kowtow certainly is. Gaikwar is arguable.

kowtow (叩頭) is a Cantonese word borrowed into English in the early 19th century.

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#438
post #118
post #30

Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored. I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust s…

It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.

It gets impossible. Yarborough is apparently not a town in England. I guess technically it's a village but come on...

Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?

#439
post #266
post #30

Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored. I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust s…

Also the explanations are too broad. F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top … Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning Ai slop

Seems like you don't know what frugal means at all!
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