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Disappointed about English vocab test

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69 messages over 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 7 ... 8 9 Next >>
Camundonguinho
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Brazil
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Studies: Swedish

 
 Message 49 of 69
02 December 2011 at 2:14am | IP Logged 
I don't like the testyourvocab.com test because it was made by Brazilians for Brazilians users of Engllish and the authors created an artificial data base: English words devoid of its Romance base.

The http://my.vocabularysize.com/ was made in New Zealand, by native speakers of English, and it's based on the frequency corpus, so it represents the real language better.


I got 17 500 on the NZ test, and only 9000 words on the Brazilian test.
I prefer the test made by native speakers of English and not my fellow Latin American English professors.

it's better to know 15 000 words and know how to pronounce them correctly and how to use them correctly than recognize many words you don't know even how they are pronounced.

Many Americans would check the word SPUTUM, because they understand it. But most of them would pronounce it in a wrong way, just like the newscaster Katie Couric once did (while on air).

It would be better to test the knowledge of common things (like phrasal verbs) than some obscure vocabulary you find only in 19th century literature or conservative political magazines.

Edited by Camundonguinho on 02 December 2011 at 2:21am

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QiuJP
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Singapore
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 Message 50 of 69
14 October 2012 at 6:45pm | IP Logged 
Dear all, I have started a new thread in the Advice Center which is related to the issue
I raised here. The link is here: language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34000&PN=1">Help me to have a real "native
language"


Edit: For some reason the link doesn't work properly, even though I followed the syntax
of placing a link.

Edited by QiuJP on 14 October 2012 at 6:47pm

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mrwarper
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 Message 51 of 69
14 October 2012 at 6:57pm | IP Logged 
Clickable link:

Help me to have a real "native language"

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QiuJP
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Senior Member
Singapore
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428 posts - 597 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 52 of 69
14 October 2012 at 6:59pm | IP Logged 
QiuJP wrote:
Bao wrote:
I'm curious what result you get with
http://testyourvocab.com/.


I will test myself when I am more prepared.


I only get 11700 for this test, which is better than English as 2nd language learners but
much worse than English native speakers! Please note that English is my strongest
language, as I used them for various purposes in work than my native Chinese.

Edited by QiuJP on 14 October 2012 at 7:00pm

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Medulin
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Croatia
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 Message 53 of 69
15 October 2012 at 5:38am | IP Logged 
I got

You know at least 14,700 English word families!
from
http://my.vocabularysize.com


Your total vocabulary size is estimated to be: 17,400 words
from http://testyourvocab.com/?r=2128694

The last column of testyourvocab.com includes a lot of technical vocabulary, for example
hypnopompic (unless you're into sleep medicine and psychiatry [I am], you're not likely to know it)

''A hypnopompic state (or hypnopomp) is the state of consciousness leading out of sleep, a term coined by the psychical researcher Frederic Myers. '' (WIKI)

Edited by Medulin on 15 October 2012 at 5:47am

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mrwarper
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 Message 54 of 69
15 October 2012 at 8:06am | IP Logged 
Medulin wrote:
[...] for example hypnopompic (unless you're into sleep medicine and psychiatry [I am], you're not likely to know it) [...] a term coined by the psychical researcher Frederic Myers.

I beg to differ. Pompous gits may feel clever coining needless terms all the time (well, maybe half the time), but anyone at an 'educated native' level should be able to guess at their meanings quite accurately because they're usually compounds of a few well-known Latin and Greek roots and affixes. My parents speak no English and they are not into Medicine either, and they'd have nailed* that one as easily as me.

* (Given the nature of the test, there's no practical difference between 'pretty close' and 'nailed' -- at the advanced levels I'd put a lot more 'trick' questions like ingenious/ingenuous, fry/fray, -phobia/philia, penta/hepta-, etc. where similar choices can't be ruled out unless you know for sure so there's no 'close enough')

Edited by mrwarper on 15 October 2012 at 8:07am

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Iversen
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 55 of 69
15 October 2012 at 1:22pm | IP Logged 
22,500 word families according to http://my.vocabularysize.com. Not disappointed - my dictionary estimates gives somewhere above 30.000 headwords, which is to be expected after almost 50 years of study and use.

38,000 words according to http://testyourvocab.com/ (haha, they thought they could trick me on learned loanwords in English, and they couldn't)

adann wrote:
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?

H.Computatralis wrote:
Actually, I agree with you, but I think that such a test would be very difficult to design. (...) 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.(...)


I would also like to see such a test. If the all-encompassing humongous stack of information on Google could be tapped the frequency count shouldn't be a problem, but using smaller samples frequency numbers would be too small to be relevant. Furthermore: to go from wordforms to dictionary headwords to word families would be a serious problem - not everything that halfway looks like something else is a family member!

And then we should of courser have similar tests for other languages as well.

Edited by Iversen on 15 October 2012 at 2:00pm

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Ari
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Norway
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 Message 56 of 69
15 October 2012 at 1:37pm | IP Logged 
21 something thousand. "Better than 65% of native English speakers who have taken this test". Haha, awesome! That test was fun. Haven't done the second test yet.


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