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Disappointed about English vocab test | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6493 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 41 of 69 30 October 2011 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have a couple of times made complete inventories of my vocabulary in my languages using the method mentioned by Palfrey above, and I put the result in my log thread (around April 2010 or something like that). Besides I have discussed the method and some of its pitfalls in my Guide to Learning Languages in the Methods section.
In itself a number gained by this method is only relevant if you also specify your selection criteria and the size and kind of dictionary you have used, so I did two things to get a better assessment: I used several dictionaries of different size for each language, and I calculated not only absolute numbers, but also fractions of known words. However I didn't separate "certainly known and seen words" from "maybe guessed words" so if I make a similar test again later that will be one thing I will remember to do. Comparing vocabulary found by this method with the number found from tests as those discussed in this thread is difficult. Personally I trust the dictionary method more because it also includes common words and because I know exactly what the source of the data is. I'm aware that there may lie a lot of statistical knowledge behind the results provided in the tests, but it is all something that happens outside my horizon - like in a black box. With the dictionary method I know at least what the data sample is. And one thing more: I want to know my rates across the languages I (more or less) know, not only in English, so tests that can't deliver them for small languages too (based on parallel criteria) are in my opinion less relevant. Edited by Iversen on 18 October 2012 at 10:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6227 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 42 of 69 31 October 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
As a native English speaker born and raised in America and who generally got A's on all English, reading, and writing in school, I got a 15,200 on that. I had never seen about a dozen or so of those words before. Was that test designed for British English speakers? I was a bit disappointed in my score; I usually do very well on things like this. Oh, for the words I didn't know, I guessed "I don't know." I wasn't sure if this test penalized for wrong answers or not so I didn't want to guess. To QiuJP, I wouldn't worry too much if you didn't score well on that test. In 30 years of life, including university and professional/corporate life, I've never even seen some of those words before. edit - I took the test at http://testyourvocab.com/ and got 20,000. I had never heard of about 1/3 of those words before and thought they were just making up random words to penalize people who checked every box to try and inflate their score. Haha! Edited by IronFist on 31 October 2011 at 5:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6062 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 43 of 69 31 October 2011 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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24,400 for me (English is my native language). I am a bit of a dictionary enthusiast but some of the words did throw me.
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| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5016 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 44 of 69 31 October 2011 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Took http://my.vocabularysize.com/ again -- I got 21900+ vs 20200+ 13 days ago, which makes some sense because I looked up some words after the first test, and I knew the important ones would probably stick. Anyway, going up an 8.5% at my level with no effort (been doing other stuff and couch potatoing) can't be realistic, especially because my results page reads "Your performance on this test ranks higher than 65% of all native English speakers who have taken this test..." which I find hard to believe. I have to wonder how many of those were just fooling around.
I think the interesting bit is right at the top: "This test was originally designed to accurately estimate up to a maximum of 14,000 word families" and it goes on "native English speakers and highly proficient non-native speakers of English, however, know far more word families than that." Given that, I wouldn't rely on any results above 14000 until further notice stating the test has actually been further polished. As a general tip, when in doubt I wouldn't say 'I know this word' because it'll very likely make my score go artificially up. This test won't let you do so and takes off no points for wrong answers, so your 'real' scores have a fair chance to be actually lower than the one you got which, as I said above, means pretty much nothing anyway if you're above 14000. I find the test process too long (i.e. prone to boredom and distraction) compared to http://testyourvocab.com/ and neither does it help that you can't go back when you realize you just clicked the wrong option. I just took the 'word part' tests and my score was 5 out of 6, when I can assure you I've never had any problems with grammar or word formation. So, all in all, don't take this too seriously -- test scores are great to prepare you for life, but in life -the ultimate test- you don't get a score to worry about. Edited by mrwarper on 01 November 2011 at 8:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jalarcon Newbie United States mercurypoisonin Joined 4984 days ago 5 posts - 4 votes | Message 45 of 69 01 November 2011 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Chinese Board of Education is putting a lot of weight for students to acquire English. I am sorry about your low
English verbal test results. Maybe if you read interesting books in English that might expand your vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tpark Tetraglot Pro Member Canada Joined 6836 days ago 118 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch, French Personal Language Map | Message 46 of 69 02 November 2011 at 5:03am | IP Logged | ||
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21900 with some fat fingers on the iPad. There were a couple of words I had not seen.
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| adann Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 4533 days ago 3 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 47 of 69 01 December 2011 at 6:41am | IP Logged | ||
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As a native English speaker I scored over 20,000 on both tests.
In my opinion these two tests aren't really a good measure of your ability to communicate or even understand English. Only that you know many dictionary words. A small portion of these words will never be heard or spoken by native English speakers. They will only be found written down maybe in some research study or article. Not very useful to say the least. I'm surprised that no one brought up what I thought were lacking in these tests. Mainly real spoken English used by native speakers. A better test would include: Idioms: a drop in the bucket, needle in a haystack Phrasal verbs: i ran into a friend at the mall Slang: any hot chicks there? I would like to see a test that incorporates 'real' English. What do I mean by real English? English that native speakers use when they talk and the English used in shows, movies and radio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| H.Computatralis Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6094 days ago 130 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Polish*, French, English Studies: German, Spanish, Latin | Message 48 of 69 01 December 2011 at 11:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Actually, I agree with you, but I think that such a test would be very difficult to design. Just read this to see some of the questions they have considered while designing the test. The main obstacle is to order the entries by frequency. If you just pick a list at random your test won't be very useful because native speakers will know almost all expressions, while non-native speakers might not know any of them because they aren't so common. So you need to order the expressions by frequency to have a graded evaluation. Now, ordering words by frequency is easy. You can just take various texts from millions of web pages, books, and so forth, and use a computer program to find all unique words and order them by frequency. But to do the same for expressions and phrasal verbs you need a human to analyze the meaning of the words and that would probably require years of work.
As for slang, it's often also context-dependent - like in the example you gave: "chick" has a formal register definition which is different from the colloquial register or slang definition. Edited by H.Computatralis on 01 December 2011 at 11:23am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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