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Online vocabulary size estimators | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5864 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French | Message 1 of 13 01 October 2010 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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As I was making dinner last night, I was thinking of a way to test one's active or passive vocabulary in languages. I was going to post my idea here for a website that would do it, but as I went to search for something like it, it appears one has already been made (for English, anyway):
http://www.plenilune.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vocabulary.asp Does anyone know of any calculators like this for other languages? I found one for French here: http://www.abyssum.com/Mesmots/ And for fun, post your score on the English test, and post whether you're a native speaker or not. I'm a native English speaker, and I got 64782 words understood, with a further 9255 inferred and 9255 familiar. Edited by Liface on 01 October 2010 at 6:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5326 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 13 01 October 2010 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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It looks like these test were developed by statisticians, not linguists and I somewhat doubt their accuracy because they extrapolate the active vocabulary based on a very small sample. For example, my French test estimated an active vocabulary of 18K words and I'm pretty sure that I know only a fraction of that.
IMHO, the only way to find out your real active vocabulary would be to get queried on each word in the word lists. However, this would be not only very time consuming but also very boring. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6476 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 13 01 October 2010 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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English:
78246 known 8094 inferred 7195 familiar French: 23318 known 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 4 of 13 01 October 2010 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I got estimates of 77717 known, 16973 inferred and 8933 familiar words (but I don't acknowledge words whose meaning I have forgotten, so those 8933 socalled familiar words are irrelevant).
My own estimates - based on counting known headwords on sample pages in dictionaries af different sizes - would suggest a much lower number. In Webster's Unabridged Monster Dictionary I got 51.000 known words (around a third of the more than 160.000 headwords in that sublime creation of unfathomable industriousness), while I hovered slightly above 90% of the words in smaller dictionaries. I have written the actual numbers in this post in my log. But from those numbers you should subtract more or less automatic derivations because you get those for free, not by laboriously learning them. I don't know why the numbers are higher in this electronical test. EDIT: And an estimate of 35867 French words (out of 43.000). My one and only dictionary count gave 23.100 in a dictionary of the same size, but this time I think that the 'truth' is somewhere in the middle, maybe around 30.000 words. Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2010 at 10:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5864 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French | Message 5 of 13 01 October 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Isn't 100 a big enough sample out of 132208 total entries, though? 96 words would give you a +/- of 10 over that many entries. That's not bad at all. As long as it's random, you don't need a large sample to give an accurate result. That's why polling companies only poll 1000 or 2000 people and can accurately extrapolate that value over the population of the United States, for instance. The English one has an explanation of how it works here: http://www.plenilune.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/meta-calculator.as p Edited by Liface on 01 October 2010 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5853 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 13 02 October 2010 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||
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VOCABULARY SIZE ESTIMATOR FRENCH
I couldn't click on the English version, so I did the French test. There were 100 words presented randomly out of 43,000 words. I scored 29 %, which is equivalent to an estimated vocabulary of 12,553 words. Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6235 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 13 02 October 2010 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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VOCABULARY SIZE ESTIMATOR FRENCH
I don't speak French, but I do speak several other Romance languages. I tried the French test and scored 17,846 words. I imagine I was able to figure these out through cognates alone. How does this affect the validity of the test? I'm fairly certain I can't understand 17,846 words in French! :-) ( although it would be nice if I could!!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5339 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 13 02 October 2010 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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English: understood: 73967; inferred.: 12813; familiar: 0
Many of the words I actually knew from other languages, though. French: 28997 1 person has voted this message useful |
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