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How many words to speak?

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kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
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Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 305 of 309
26 September 2014 at 2:34am | IP Logged 
I scrolled through the English section of the leipzig test. A lot of the phrasing is
awkward (e.g. management of a supply of money: finance) and there were a small
number where I question their definitions (e.g. to cover the inner surface of
something
: line, mount, bet, allocate, comprise, or inspire).

Overall, a literate native speaker should ace the test, but I could see how one might
know 90% of the words in context and still bomb the test.


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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
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 Message 306 of 309
26 September 2014 at 5:51pm | IP Logged 
patrickwilken wrote:
What is remarkable to me is how much reading helps, and for how long in vocabulary acquisition.

The Results


One thing I note is that Iversen was enough to put Denmark on top for the Average English vocabulary levels by country (non-native speakers).
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Lemberg1963
Bilingual Diglot
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United States
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41 posts - 82 votes 
Speaks: English*, Ukrainian*
Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish

 
 Message 307 of 309
27 September 2014 at 5:03am | IP Logged 
EMK's proposed method works more or less. Last year of college I took a Spanish I class,
which by my count introduces you to about 800-1000 unique words. After finishing the
course I started reading Cien Anos de Soledad with a dictionary and putting in the new
vocabulary into Anki. The first hundred pages was time consuming, I was looking up every
fifth word. By the time I reached the end of the book I was able to read most of the page
without a dictionary.

I'm not sure if I recommend doing this however, it was very inefficient. It might be
better to just get a Routledge frequency dictionary or a Lonely Planet phrasebook and
just Anki everything in there.
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Medulin
Tetraglot
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Croatia
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 Message 308 of 309
27 September 2014 at 5:42am | IP Logged 
iguanamon wrote:
Thanks, patrickwilken! I just took the Portuguese test and scored:

Passive (Recptive):

As palavras mais frequentes do português:
1000 29/30
2000 28/30
3000 29/30
4000 25/30
5000 27/30

Total: 138/150 = 92%

Active (Productive):

1000 15/18
2000 15/18
3000 15/18
4000 15/18
5000 15/18

Total = 75/90 or 83%

I still have more work to do.


My results for productive vocabulary in Portuguese:

1000 18/18
2000 16/18
3000 16/18
4000 16/18
5000 17/18

92.2 %

Some options are ambiguous,
for example you could use either MUITO or MEIO and it would sound perfectly fine.
Since, the key to excercises is not given, it is all very relative, and depends on good will of the ''banca examinadora''.

It's more of a ''collocation test'' than a frequency-ranked productive vocabulary test.

Edited by Medulin on 27 September 2014 at 5:52am

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 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 309 of 309
28 September 2014 at 11:33pm | IP Logged 
luke wrote:
patrickwilken wrote:
What is remarkable to me is how much reading helps, and for how long in vocabulary acquisition.

The Results


One thing I note is that Iversen was enough to put Denmark on top for the Average English vocabulary levels by country (non-native speakers).


Well, I must have had some help of my compatriots. According to the conditions there must be at least 300 respondents from a given country - else that country is excluded from the statistics. So one person can't change much in the results for a whole nation.

Btw. I did the test again - this time the result was 40.900 words. But given how much I read in English and how much Anglophone TV I watch that isn't really unexpected. In another thread Ari describes English as not really a foreign language in Sweden, and that certainly also is true in Denmark. But ironically knowledge of other languages is on the way down the drain here.

Edited by Iversen on 29 September 2014 at 5:37pm



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