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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 |  | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6674 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 39 05 September 2006 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sure, oral communication skills is one possible and valid goal but not the only one. And it would depend on what kind of oral communication you had in mind. Your comment basically refers to active vocabulary, and how deft you are at using it. That is very much applicable to one-way communication, whether oral or not, such as giving a speech or writing a letter. For both-way communication, it can be interesting to have a general ball-park idea of the size of your passive vocabulary which is what that test attempts to measure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6483 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 26 of 39 05 September 2006 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you define the active vocabulary as all the words that you can recall and use when you need them, then you have tied that number to the choice of situations you choose to get involved in. If you don't get involved in discussions about difficult subjects then you don't need many active words (the most difficult subjects in my experience are those that involves long lists of farm implements, animal or plant names and common household objects). But it should be a goal for language students to be able to cope with a wide range of situations, and then the larger the vocabulary the better.
As for the passive vocabulary it not only defines the range of what you can read and understand here and now, but it also functions as the stock of words that you can make active with limited effort, for instance if your discussion partner uses a certain word and you then start using it yourself. Therefore the size of the passive vocabulary is relevant even for oral communication purposes, and I can really not see why you shouldn't monitor its growth. It is one of of the few things in your progress that you can measure on a fairly objective basis. Edited by Iversen on 05 September 2006 at 11:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Demeter Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Portugal Joined 6436 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 27 of 39 05 September 2006 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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19040 on the test, 22265 on my Oxford dictionary.
There doesn't seem to be too big a difference between the two findings, actually. I might contest one aspect of the test, though. According to the site, "to go through one test carefully generally takes 30-40 minutes". In the advanced test, that would mean spending from 15 to 30 seconds per question. If you *know* a word, you recognize it immediately, and would never spend 15 seconds thinking about its meaning - if you do, you're entering Guesswork territory. I don't think the Intermediate or Advanced tests should take anyone more than 4 minutes to complete (2 seconds per word), nor should the Beginner test take more than 3 minutes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6674 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 39 08 September 2006 at 4:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ouch, beaten by just over a thousand :o) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6883 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 29 of 39 08 September 2006 at 6:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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20,000 on the test and I didn't bother completing the "context" bit afterwards so I'm not sure what happens if you complete that.
However, having done it, I'm not quite sure precisely what it tells me. 120 words as a one-off is too small a sample to be sure.
Yes, I agree it should be a rapid reaction test - although with one of the words, I ended up with an answer by process of elimination and on a time limit of 10 sec/word I believe I probably went over that. Andy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6674 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 39 08 September 2006 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for putting my mind at ease there. I was a bit perplexed actually, and a little worried about having the highest score reported by anyone here, including a numer of native speakers, until you and Demeter publicly announced your results. Gratifying as it may be I started doubting a. the validity of the test as such, b. what kind of company I am actually keeping hanging out in a forum like this and c. whether something else might be wrong. Your contributions somehow restored my confidence on all counts.
Maybe it´s not rocket science but 120 is not such a small sample either. Probably good enough for a reliable ballpark value, provided the test is well-designed, as indeed it seems to be.
I agree too, and I might have misunderstood this but I thought that the time limit was an average, applied to your total time, not to each question. I selected the highest level and the shortest time and didn't see any "timeout" type of results on any of the questions even though I must have gone beyond the 10s on some of them in exactly the way you describe. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6067 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 31 of 39 02 October 2007 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This method of randomly opening up a dictionary to determine an approximate is not mathematically sound, simply because the sample size of 10 random pages is not enough.
Actually, the number of pages should not be a quantity, but moreso a percentage based on the total size of the dictionary itself. 10 pages on a 50 page dictionary is far more significant than 10 pages on a 400 page dictionary. These are apples and oranges. Considering the total size of dictionaries also vary as well. This may be a large enough sample on a small dictionary (10 random pages). But for a dictionary that has 52,000 vocabulary entries (like the one I have), this doesn't even come close. You can get a more accurate result by narrowing it down more, by taking a certain % of pages at random in each letter section, instead of the entire dictionary itself. If the same page repeats itself, do it again until you get another page. So lets pretend each letter on average has 4 pages (just for example purposes), if I take 50% of the pages as a sample on each letter. Then I have 2 random pages per letter. Therefore 26 x 2 = 52 random pages, then continue with the method originally outlined in this thread. Also adding 10% to the end is a very high margin of error. Realistically and statistically this should be under 5% (preferably under 2%) otherwise the method has too much variance and actually relies on the margin of error to produce the result. This larger and more specific the sample size is more likely to yield a more accurate result. Edited by xtremelingo on 02 October 2007 at 5:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Wings Senior Member Ireland n/a Joined 6134 days ago 130 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 32 of 39 03 October 2007 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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LingQ adds up all the words you Know. It may take a while though, and is likely to under-caculate, but not above-caculate. Edited by Wings on 03 October 2007 at 2:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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