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Size of my vocabulary in English? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes  Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 9 of 24 22 May 2009 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I knew the word "wily" but clearly not well enough! :-)
Edited by cordelia0507 on 23 May 2009 at 2:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6777 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 24 22 May 2009 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have taken the test and got 88%.
I thought it was "wily" tricks, too. But it is wrong, apparently - or at least they are looking for something else. The other one I didn't know "salve" - I didn't even have a guess for that one. Edited by Russianbear on 22 May 2009 at 5:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 11 of 24 22 May 2009 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is there any American spelling / vocabulary in this?
The test is at a Canadian site? Not that I could blame my mistakes on that, but I think American sometimes uses -ey when British uses -y. Russianbear - I think you didn't know salve, because frankly it's mainly used for lip-salve which is someting that women tend to use, and men probably don't. Anyway, that's how I knew it. Edited by cordelia0507 on 22 May 2009 at 5:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6777 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 24 22 May 2009 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I don't use salve, so I didn't know the word. It is surprising to me it is one of the 10,000 most common words, as I don't think I ever encountered it until now.
By the way, with help of a dictionary, I figured out they were looking for "wilful" tricks. Wilful - as opposed to "willful". It is kinda cheesy of them to test people on words with multiple spellings, though. And "wily" is probably a harder word, too. Edit. I aced TEST A, 10000 level, but got a couple wrong on TEST B: "viscount" (I knew this one, I just couldn't think of it somehow, perhaps the silent "s" threw me off) and "beneficence" (I tried "benefaction" and "benevolence" and gave up, thinking I was close enough). Edited by Russianbear on 22 May 2009 at 5:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6905 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 13 of 24 22 May 2009 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've heard about Nation test before and it's supposed to give adequate results. However, I tried two versions on the website - 10.000 and 5.000 test and got only 44% from the second test (the result from 10.000 one was even more miserable). And I know more than 5.000 words, that's for sure.
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| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6777 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 24 22 May 2009 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I don't know how accurate these are. Some words are perhaps too obscure to be among the 10,000 most frequently used words. It seems this also tests active vocabulary to some degree, and the guessing element may also hurt some people. So I wouldn't take this to be a definitive judgement regarding the amount of words you know. Edited by Russianbear on 22 May 2009 at 6:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6124 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 15 of 24 22 May 2009 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, according to the attached, there are 1 million words in English if you count scientific words. There are approximately 600,000 words in an unabridged dictionary. An average educated person knows about 20,000 words. English is among the languages with the richest vocabulary, so I would imagine that average educated speakers of other languages know less than 20,000 words… The words beyond 20,000 are likely words such as: pleonasm, syllogism, ontological, onomatopoeia, borborygmus, isagogics, hermeneutics, deipnosophist, tautology, sesquipedalian, etc.. You could be a successful educated speaker and not know or need these types of words. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml Edited by JW on 22 May 2009 at 8:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6896 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 24 22 May 2009 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can actually read directly what the expected answers are by inspecting the html source code of the frame.
In the A test it accepts wiley, wily and wilful, but the same question in the C test only accepts wilful or wilfull. Now as I was forewarned from reading this thread I already knew about whirred and salve and wily. Left to my own devices I am sure I'd have chosen wily and gotten it right in the A-test, but not wilful in C and I would definitely have missed whirred, and salve could have gone either way. Other slipups: mammoth - I actually thought it was spelt mammouth orchids - A word I know very well, but I just bungled it for some reason (dead tired, and a fancy latin-sounding plural orchidea came into my head instead) beneficence - I used benevolence on the first try - well it's close but I can partly blame the tiredness here too. illicit - Was in too much of a hurry here and didn't notice I was supposed to continue from after the second i instead of after the second l. What I am missing in this test though, is an estimate of the size of my vocabulary based on the answers. I also think the number of questions is too small to give relevant results. There was another test that many of us did a while back with something like a hundred questions and it came back with a ballpark number for your vocab size. It would be nice if someone could dig up that thread and post the link here again, or I'll do it myself if I can find it, but I haven't got the time to start digging for it right now. Edited by Hencke on 22 May 2009 at 8:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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