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Disappointed about English vocab test | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4658 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 57 of 69 15 October 2012 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I got a similar result to Ari on the test Arguelles recommended: 21,900
I believe I only got a good score because of similarities between German and English, because I've been reading almost exclusively English books since I was 14 (lots of them; now I'm 25), because I'm a British studies major and because I studied Latin at high school. I wouldn't despair if you didn't get a good result - you don't need to know a lot of those words to function perfectly in an English-speaking environment. If you want to improve your vocabulary size, I recommend that you read more English books on a wide variety of subjects. There's no need to look up words, the problem will take care of itself. Edited by druckfehler on 15 October 2012 at 5:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| internetalias Newbie United States Joined 4322 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* | Message 58 of 69 15 October 2012 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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i'm a native speaker in English; it's my only language i know.
i scored 14,900 on the first test and 19,900 on the second one chin up! sometimes, the standards are incredibly conflated... or atleast i hope so, otherwise i would be worried about my own scores! :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Amun Triglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 4848 days ago 52 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, French Studies: Spanish | Message 59 of 69 17 October 2012 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I scored 10,000, which isn't too bad for me considering I never seriously studied
English but mostly learned from movies and games. I think that English vocabulary tests have a bias favoring Romance speakers, let me explain why. The ''simple'' everyday English words are usually of Germanic origin and quite easy for Germanic speakers (like the Dutch and Germans) to recognize, but the more advanced/academic words tend to have Romance roots (which are quite removed from Germanic equivalents), making it easier for Romance speakers to score high on these vocab tests. I remember a few years ago (when my English was less developed) that I had no clue what ''abbreviation'' meant while a French student I was coincidentally talking to knew it (it’s Afkorting in Dutch while Abréviation in French). Even though her overall English fluency was much lower than mine she still had advantages when it came to the more advanced words because they are mostly of French/Latin origin. Just my two cents.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 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 60 of 69 18 October 2012 at 10:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Amun' objection is correct: those tests have a tendency to test the limits of your vocabulary with supposedly difficult scientific terms of Latin origin. This could be compensated by using more dialectal words, words with an Anglosaxon background and (not least) words from current popular culture. But drawing the words or word families randomly from a large sample ... but hey, that's exactly what the authors of my.vocabularysize.com claim they do (see the FAQ under "How is the VST different from other tests of vocabulary size?"). And if that's the case then the apparent bias towards learned Latin (and to some extent French) words is caused by the composition of the wordstock itself. On the other hand most of the very common words are of Germanic origin so to give a proper picture of a learner's vocabulary you ought to have two tests: one that tested the most common 1000 or so words (with harsh penalties for any lacunes), and another that tested for all the words in a large corpus.
My own assesments based on dictionary headwords at least have "all words in standard dictionaries" as their base, but even this base is flawed because it largely omits modern slang and words for institutions and inventions which didn't exist when the dictionary was printed. However the last time I did a round of word counts I added something which should be incorporated in the 'big' questionnaires, namely the triple choice: known, 'halfknown (or better: guessable) and not known. You might even add a fourth category: "probably active", reserved for words you could see yourself using even before being reminded about their existence. And then you should of course also have tests based on idiomatic expressions, drawn from a corpus based on new and old sources from all over the globe. And ideally even tests of grammar, but that's more difficult to quantify. Edited by Iversen on 18 October 2012 at 10:52am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6372 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 61 of 69 18 October 2012 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||
This I agree with. These tests tend to equate "having a large vocabulary" with "being able to speak about obscure stuff in detail". Why no "regifting", "unfriend", "rickrolling" or "fugly"? This is how people manage to claim "kids today" have small vocabularies. They might not know the word "prithee" but they know fifty words for "attractive woman". And you might not like that vocabulary, but you can't claim it's small unless you've made a fair test. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Heavyweight Diglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4355 days ago 12 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 62 of 69 18 October 2012 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||
I scored 13.200 on that one. But I don't think you should read too much into these kind of tests. Some of the words in it are words that you never use anyway, you might know them or be able to guess what they mean, but you'd never use them in conversation. If you can speak English well enough then who really gives shit if you "only" have 10000 words? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 63 of 69 18 October 2012 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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While I agree that most English vocabulary tests tend to look biased towards the Romance side as soon as technical words enter the picture, I didn't find any of these two to be especially biased — I've taken others that obviously were and I know the difference.
That said, I'd like to point out that if words are avoided altogether because of being Greek/Latin compounds etc. you're practically banning any technical fields and large vocabulary areas of which any educated native (or foreign speaker) could be expected to have at least *some* knowledge and command. Which would be just another way to bias the whole thing just for the sake of, well, I'm not sure, really. A very good example could be "abbreviation". Foreign speakers [not] knowing it because of their background has nothing to do with the whole question —I've had students from Spain who wouldn't recognize cognates for their lives— the question is, how many English natives don't know such and such word? A tough question if you ask me. ---- About current popular 'culture' and such... sure size matters, but there's more than one such 'size' to be taken into account. In short: if a f***tard knows fifty ways to say 'hot chick', er, I mean... 'attractive woman' and he has a vocabulary of 100 words, he'll still look like a f***tard to all except --of course-- other f***tards like him. OK, seriously. Sheer vocabulary size can't be the be-all, end-all no matter what areas it covers *if* it only (or mostly) covers those areas. Just like the f***tard above, a surgeon must have an excellent command of his area (probably full of technicalities) and he may still not be up to par with the f***tard in his own 'field'. Unless the f***tard goes under the knife, both guy's areas of vocabulary expertise are mutually irrelevant. Mind you, the situation is probably not symmetrical. In the example above I have the feel that one of them may have it easier to bone up on the other's guy vocabulary if necessary. OTOH I probably can't go actively into the tiniest details of many fields in a conversation, but I think I could do fairly well in most, just because some vocabulary areas provide a better base to understand things you may find 'in the wild' without resorting to dictionary lookups or asking questions. All of this should illustrate that it must be fairly difficult to come up with a valid and truly general measure of vocabulary size for comparison purposes, another reason why reasonable results shouldn't be much of a concern for anyone. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4447 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 64 of 69 18 October 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, here are my results:
my.vocabularysize 25.700 test your vocabulary 29.900 The result of the first one is, in my opinion, skewed high. I didn't miss many words just because I know some fairly obscure words through some of my hobbies neither I nor an average native speaker would know otherwise, unless they are browsing encyclopedias for fun. The second one is surprise as well, but the words were much more common in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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