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How to tell many words you know?

 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages Post Reply
39 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5  Next >>
yamaneko721
Diglot
Newbie
United States
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Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian

 
 Message 1 of 39
27 September 2005 at 9:54am | IP Logged 
I read many posts with people saying how many words they know in the language they are learning, and how many words are required for fluency in a language.

How do you come up with this number?

My french is improving, but there's still many words I don't understand while reading a newpaper. On the other hand, I can express myself very well, and I usually don't have to stop and search for a word while speaking.





Edited by yamaneko721 on 27 September 2005 at 9:55am

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morprussell
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
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272 posts - 285 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French

 
 Message 2 of 39
27 September 2005 at 1:06pm | IP Logged 
I once saw a suggestion that sounded good on this forum, but I can't find it no matter what I search for. So, I'll do my best to remember what was said.

1. Open a page of your dictionary at random and count the number of words that you know and could use in a conversation.
2. Repeat this for a total of ten times, then add up the total number of words and divide by 10 to get an average.
3. Multiply the average by the number of pages in your dictionary (Just the pages that list words in your target language)
4. Add 10% to each end of the number to get an estimated range of how many words you know.

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yamaneko721
Diglot
Newbie
United States
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Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian

 
 Message 3 of 39
28 September 2005 at 10:16am | IP Logged 
Thank you! According to this method, I know about 3200 french words!
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administrator
Hexaglot
Forum Admin
Switzerland
FXcuisine.com
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 Message 4 of 39
30 September 2005 at 12:00am | IP Logged 
Here is a program to estimate how many words you know in English.
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Bart
Triglot
Senior Member
Belgium
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155 posts - 159 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, French, English
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 Message 5 of 39
30 September 2005 at 2:41am | IP Logged 
Estimated vocabulary size: 11835

That's more than I thought but it could be true...

(only did one of the demo tests though)

Edited by Bart on 30 September 2005 at 2:41am

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victor
Tetraglot
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 Message 6 of 39
30 September 2005 at 10:09pm | IP Logged 
I did for fun as well: 11045!
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morprussell
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6922 days ago

272 posts - 285 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French

 
 Message 7 of 39
30 September 2005 at 10:46pm | IP Logged 
Hum... My estimated English vocabulary was 11,000 or 13,000 (I can't remember for sure) on the wordsandtools.com website. When I tried it with the method I mentioned earlier in this thread my estimated vocabulary was 27,816! Quite a difference. I guess the only way to know for sure is to count one at a time.


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Sir Nigel
Senior Member
United States
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 Message 8 of 39
01 October 2005 at 2:03am | IP Logged 
13350 in English, cool test. Even just a portion of that is still a lot of words.


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