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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: 13 4 5  Next >>
andee
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Japan
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Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French

 
 Message 9 of 39
01 October 2005 at 5:30am | IP Logged 
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 6860 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 
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
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 Message 11 of 39
01 October 2005 at 3:44pm | IP Logged 
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
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296 posts - 411 votes 
Speaks: English*, SwedishB1
Studies: Turkish

 
 Message 12 of 39
01 October 2005 at 4:10pm | IP Logged 
14,820. I answered one incorrectly.
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KingM
Triglot
Senior Member
michaelwallaceauthor
Joined 6951 days ago

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Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 13 of 39
02 October 2005 at 11:25am | IP Logged 
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.
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delectric
Diglot
Senior Member
China
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 Message 14 of 39
03 October 2005 at 10:06am | IP Logged 
15850
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wombat
Tetraglot
Groupie
Australia
Joined 6877 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 
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.


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Gordy
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 6745 days ago

6 posts - 6 votes

 
 Message 16 of 39
14 October 2005 at 3:22am | IP Logged 
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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