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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 |  | |
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7107 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes  2 sounds | Message 17 of 39 14 October 2005 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Well some words don't have the same spelling and pronunciation (naturally), so the amount of French words you already "know" is difficult to answer.
BTW, doing that test, I'm supposed to know about 4315 French words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cheemaster Newbie Canada Joined 7048 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes | Message 18 of 39 14 October 2005 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to the dictionary test I know 20016 English words.
Words and Tools tells me I know 15920. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dysphonia Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 7164 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, German Studies: Russian | Message 19 of 39 19 October 2005 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||
well, if I try my pocket dictionary my vocabulary by this method is 20,000 If I use my regular dictionary I get 50,000 If I use my 2 volume dictionary this method says my vocabulary is 80,000! Part of this is obviously explicable by the greater number of words in each. It's not ramping up in exact proportion to the increases in words in the dictionaries as an increasing proportion of uncommon words or obscure usages arise in the larger volumes. I like the method but there is a flaw in it :( Oh well, it made me chuckle as I envisioned my knowledge of vocabulary swelling by the second as I went from one dicitonary to the next! Edited by dysphonia on 19 October 2005 at 1:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 39 24 August 2006 at 9:15am | IP Logged | ||
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One more sleeping thread that deserves to be resurrected!
I think it will be impossible to define the limits of a person's passive (or active) vocabulary. One problem is that some languages (Danish, German) construct long composed words, while others rely on combinations of single word (English, French). The remedy against this problem is that you accept more word combinations as lexical entries in English than in German. But this opens a whole Pandora's box of idiomatic phrases and hidden or overt quotes that in principle could figure in a sufficiently large dictionary. There is no limit upwards if you start accepting word combinations. And what about brand names or technical terms? Some people know the names of several hundred bird species, which you won't find in anything but specialized field guides. Others know scores of brand names in electronics or beer. These may technically have started out as proper names, but will then have moved into the role of generic names, and proper or not, now they are valid words. One of the few things we can trust is the number of entries in our dictionaries. To me it is (relatively) meaningful to say that you know 5000 entries out of 15.000 in one dictionary and 7000 entries in another with 50.000 (those are the numbers I found when I recently checked my Romanian vocabulary, - based on a sample of course, I didn't count them all!). If I know 6.000 out of 15.000 from the same book a month later, then I have progressed. On the other hand, if I recognize 9.000 out of 15.000 in another dictionary in a totally different dictionary then it would probably be safe to say that I have a bigger vocabulary in that language (in this case it just might be Catalan), even though I'm less fluent orally. The only problem with this method is that some dictionaries might list every form of irregular forms or list homonyms separately, while others would group as much as possible under one entry. But this would be irrelevant for measuring your progress, if you stick to the same dictionaries, and if you use series like the German Langenscheidt which have small dictionaries in many languages then you could probably even compare across language boundaries, as I did above. By the way: maybe there is a formula for how your presumed vocabulary size grows with dictionary size, but I haven't found it. Like Dysphonia in the preceding post I just know that it grows. Edited by Iversen on 24 August 2006 at 9:33am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6828 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 21 of 39 24 August 2006 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||
16640. not bad! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6687 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 22 of 39 25 August 2006 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
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If oral communication is the goal, it doesn't nearly matter as many words you know as what you can do with the ones you do.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| munus Tetraglot Newbie Poland my.opera.com/Munus/ Joined 6769 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 23 of 39 25 August 2006 at 9:01am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6662 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 24 of 39 05 September 2006 at 8:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I tried the intermediate test and got 14820. Some questions seemed to ask about British usage and at least one British spelling.
I suspect that the test may not be as effective for measuring very large or very small vocabularies. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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