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How to tell many words you know? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7070 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes  3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 9 of 39 01 October 2005 at 5:30am | IP Logged |
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Wow.. pretty interesting website that... 15380 words in English... Wouldn't have guessed that many.
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| Shusaku Senior Member United States Joined 7093 days ago 145 posts - 157 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese | Message 10 of 39 01 October 2005 at 10:47am | IP Logged |
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Fun test... 13845 here. I just wish I knew half that many in my target language!
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| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7176 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 39 01 October 2005 at 3:44pm | IP Logged |
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I also like the test. My result was 13350 words.
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| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7117 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 12 of 39 01 October 2005 at 4:10pm | IP Logged |
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14,820. I answered one incorrectly.
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| KingM Triglot Senior Member michaelwallaceauthor Joined 7184 days ago 275 posts - 300 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 39 02 October 2005 at 11:25am | IP Logged |
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I did the dictionary test for Spanish in two steps. The first step was to count words that I would easily come up with in conversation and the second was a test of words that I might be able to conjur with a heavy pause and mental search, or that I would easily (without thought) recognize if someone else spoke them to me.
That gave me a fluent vocabulary of 3,200 words and a secondary vocabulary of about 4,500 more, for a total primary and secondary vocabulary of around 7,700 words. I was hoping to do better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7174 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 14 of 39 03 October 2005 at 10:06am | IP Logged |
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15850
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| wombat Tetraglot Groupie Australia Joined 7110 days ago 49 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Thai Studies: Mandarin | Message 15 of 39 03 October 2005 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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I had a quick look at the test, and while it looks very interesting, I still think it has some severe limitations.
Firstly it doesn't seem to contain any slang words. Without a pretty good slang vocabulary you won't do very well in English where I live. Secondly there are no phrases or idioms. You could have a wonderful English word vocabulary, but without also possessing a pretty good phrase vocabulary you would have big trouble understanding English. Finally, I think to do be able to enjoy English in an English speaking country, you need to have a command of the specialist terminology used for activities that you might be interested in or are commonly discussed, e.g. sport (think of all the terms used in golf or football, I won't even mention cricket - whoops just did), politics, computers, music (e.g blockbuster, hit, top 40, hip-hop, R&B, soul, funk, synth, boombox - I could go on !) Any native English speaker probably knows thousands of such words and phrases, but they are rarely measured in tests like the above. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Gordy Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6978 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes | Message 16 of 39 14 October 2005 at 3:22am | IP Logged |
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Using the dictionary method, I know 3375 words in French. Not sure if this tells me much. Given the majority of these are very similar to English. In fact someone once told me 50% of English words are from French. So if I know 15000 English words then surely I should know at least 7500 in French?
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