Just performed the English test. The result was that I am somewhere in the 3000 - 5000 region.
English Test A / 3000-5000 level => SCORE IS 77%, need to work at this level. OK for me.
HmmâŠthis is supposed to be my native language, but I only scored 88% at the 10000/university test! :-0
The score would have been higher if I hadnât screwed up the spelling of one word, but stillâŠ
From this post, I can tell that I know at least fourteen words in English.
Yeah, I also misspelled words but still I was far from a full score. Maybe you can help me out since you are a native speaker: Which word are missing here (from the test I took):
- The kitten is playing with a ball of yaâŠ
- The angry crowd sho⊠the prisoner as he was leaving the court.
- We could hear the sergeant bel⊠commands to the troops.
ball of yarn
shoved the prisoner
bellowing commands
This is an interesting case: âyarnâ was a new word for me, âto shoveâ and âto bellowâ were kind of passive passive vocabulary. If these are in the 5000 vocabulary size range I can only imagine what a person has to know with a vocab north of 20,000 words. This again brings me full circle back to the vocabulary size as calculated by Lingq and Steveâs (sorry for bringing it up again) vocab count for his recent languages.
The crowd shot the prisonerâŠ
To be honest, Friedemann, Iâm not convinced that these tests mean very much. It says that I only know 88% of words known by university graduates. This is, frankly, bulls***! I am a graduate with first class hons, and there is certainly no university level text in English that I would have the slightest difficulty with.
@Jorgis
Yes, âshotâ is possible (but pretty unlikely!) 
âThe crowd shot the prisonerâŠâ
In fact the test is rather unambiguous. I donât think one would refer to shooting someone as a collective act of a crowd. The sentence is grammatically correct though.
Yeah they refused it. 
I guess those who made the test are anti-gun activists! Itâs been a long time since the last pro vs anti-gun discussion by the way. 
EDIT: yes I knew âshotâ wouldnât work but still, I tried.
@Friedemann: ââŠI donât think one would refer to shooting someone as a collective act of a crowd. The sentence is grammatically correct thoughâŠâ
Youâre absolutely right - shooting would not normally be considered a collective action. (However there may be contexts where it is possible.)
The best part about learning foreign languages is debating how many words you know.
For some reason, the debate is always carried on in English. 
Just teasing a little. Pretend Iâm not here. 
Here is what I wrote on a recent blog post.
I know that you feel that vocabulary is the key to language learning. But how many words do I need to know?
It is difficult to answer this. It is a bit like saying how long is a length of string. It depends on your goals. If you just want to be able to say a few things when visiting a country, you probably donât need many words. If you want to understand what people are saying to you, whatâs on the radio, and whatâs in the newspaper, you need a lot of words.
Yes, but could you give me a number?
The problem is that it is difficult to define what we mean by knowing a word. If I can recognize the meaning of a word in even one context, I considered that I know that word. By that I mean that I have started on the path of getting to know the full scope of the meaning of that word, and eventually being able to use it. I know the word, but Iâm really only at the beginning stage of mastering the word. Most of the words that I know in a foreign language, and many even in English, I know only partially. I do not know all the different ways in which these words can be used.
Another difficulty lies in how to count words. Do we count the words ârunâ, ârunningâ, ârunsâ and âranâ as different words? What about âoutrunâ, or âalso-ranâ, or ârunnerâ? It is not clear whether we should count only word families, or each form of a word, as a different word. It is also not clear just what to include in a word family. So I prefer not to put too much emphasis on a specific number. Instead I just say we need to learn a lot of words. The more words we know, the better our potential ability to understand, and even to speak.
But you measure known words at LingQ. What does that number mean?
Our âknown wordâ count at LingQ is an accurate measure of your level of activity and your progress in the language. The more words you know, the further along you are in the language. You will find that as your âknown wordâ count increases, your ability to read and understand improves. In my experience, lots of reading, lots of listening and creating lots of LingQs, is an effective way of learning a language.
So to summarize, the accuracy of the total âknown wordâ count number is not important. The fact that the âknown wordâ count in some languages will appear inflated compared to other languages means that we cannot compare from one language to another. Furthermore, our ability to use words actively is not necessarily an indication of the size of our passive vocabulary.
The gist of this argument or disagreement should be on how important a large vocabulary is. Anthony said in the beginning of his presentation that vocabulary was the key to understanding any text, more than grammar or familiarity with the subject. Yet later on he seemed to imply that the goal of language learning was not just to acquire words, that one could be fluent with 400 or even 10 words.
So, I simply want to make the point that, to me, acquiring vocabulary is the most important activity in language learning. It is also, to some extent, measurable, even though the measurement is not absolute nor unambiguous. If we acquire this vocabulary through massive reading and listening, we will also acquire familiarity with the language and the ability to understand well.
As to the accuracy of our âknown wordâ count at LingQ, to some extent it doesnât matter. Itâs enough to know that the more words we know, the further we have progressed in the language, the closer we are getting to our goal of fluency.
Fluency also implies the ability to use the language. Therefore as our word count grows, we should be engaging more and more with native speakers and tutors, and using the language. The languages that I speak the best, are the ones that I have spoken the most. If I want to improve my level in a language, I sign up for lots of discussions in that language with our tutors.
With regard to our personal statistics here at LingQ, it is not possible to know with any accuracy what has been included in the âknown wordsâ count, in other words, how many numbers, names, non target language words etc⊠It is also not possible to know exactly to what extent different forms of the same word have inflated this number.
However it is possible to look at our LingQs. We can see them in the vocabulary page. We can choose to view the vocabulary page 200 terms at a time. We can choose to look at âphrases onlyâ, and count the number of pages of phrases we have saved. We therefore can deduct this from our total LingQs to arrive at the number of words we have saved. We can then look at our LingQs and see how many of them we now know. This is also not a bad way of reviewing our saved LingQs.
I did this for Russian just now. I did a quick sampling. I know perhaps half, or slightly more, of my saved words, it seems. On the other hand, I seem to know the vast majority of the yellow LingQs that show up in my lesson texts. This suggests to me that the more common LingQs are the ones that show up regularly in my texts, and the words that I donât know in my vocabulary list may not be that important. I have relatively few learned words (less than 10% of my LingQs) since I am not an active user of flashcards.
Just out of interest, I imported an interview from Echo Moskvi into LingQ about Moscow as a bike friendly city. I just shared this lesson. The URL is Login - LingQ.
Before I start studying this lesson, I can see the following statistics. Total running words 3524, new words 143, yellow saved links 121 (11.6%), known words 984. This share of new words is higher than normal for me at this stage in my Russian. I suppose this is because the text contains a higher number than usual of names, or words like âbikesharingâ and âcarsharingâ in both Russian and English.
I will now quickly go through the blue new words. Any words that are not genuine Russian words I will delete with the X key. Words that are genuinely new to me, or words, that I have any doubt about amongst the blue words, I will save by hitting enter on my keyboard. This takes about 10 minutes. Then I will try to find time to read the text either on the computer or on my iPad. The sound file has been downloaded to iTunes and from there I will download it to my MP3 player for listening in my car, while doing the dishes, or while exercising. I will do a few of these interviews a day. I will read one or two of them, and typically listen to more.
Many of the blue new words will in fact be known to me, as forms of words I already know. Some will be non-words. I donât know how many genuine new words will be added. If I look at my profile, I see that I have added roughly 1100 new words to my known words count in the last two weeks. In the same period I have created roughly 1100 LingQs. The statistics say that I have read 65,000 words in this period. However, this is not true, as many of these interviews are on my iPad and I have not yet read them. Very often I save the new words (create LingQs) and then listen to the interview without reading the lesson. It depends how much time I have.
I think it would be great - and I assume for everybody here at LingQ - if you could give the people here some more insight about your daily language learning routine: how much time do you spend with desktop LingQ, or mobile LingQ, how much listening while doing other things, how many new texts with what ratio unknown/known words, how many new LingQs per day, how much time reviewing old lessons, reviewing vocab, etc, etc.
Maybe we can learn something newâŠ
If anyone is interested, I just went through LingQing this article. It took about seven minutes. I added 35 new saved LingQs. My known words total increased by 143. It turned out that a lot of the blue words were in fact variations of words involving the component âveloâ, âvelocipedâ, âvelosharingâ , âvelomarcherouteâ etc. and corresponding inflections. This will no doubt unfairly inflate my âknown wordsâ count.
On the other hand I deleted any city names, proper names, or words for which I did not get a user hint or Google translate definition. (In Russian, unless a word is of particular interest to me, if there is no user Hint or Google translate definition, I just pass. I rarely look up the dictionary. I am more likely to use a dictionary in Czech, because there are fewer reliable user hints in that language.)
On the subject of vocabulary, I checked out the concise Oxford dictionary of the English language. It apparently has 240,000 words. The full 20 volume Oxford dictionary probably has many more words.
If I open my concise Oxford dictionary, vintage 1952, to any page, I know most of the words. Some of these words are foreign words, references to Greek mythology etc⊠If I only count one third of these words as words that I know, then my vocabulary is over 80,000 words. I suggest others try the same thing with other dictionaries.
I have the Lexin Swedish English dictionary. Right on the cover it says that it contains 28,500 words. If I leaf through it, I know a lot of the words, I donât know what percentage. I have a Czech-English dictionary published by SPN for schools. It doesnât say how many words there are, but a rough estimate would place it at about 15- 20,000 words. This does not include the inflected forms of words. My rough guess is that I know about half of these words, but I am not sure.
I think the average schoolboy dictionary contains 15 to 20,000 words. I think an educated person knows 50,000 words, passively, in their own language. But this all depends on how we count words.
@u50623
I will start a separate thread on this subject.
With regard to schoolgirl dictionaries, I can only say touché!!
With regard to your passive word count, let me know when you get to 50,000.