Hacker News Reader

Comment by gimpf | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live).

This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-out), and use English on a daily basis. I also watch most movies in English (very seldom for people in a German speaking country to do), read some English novels, and also most non-fiction books I have are in English. Internet use is nearly English only.

Still, I probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker. After 17 years of learning and using the language, and at least 10 years of that using it _daily_.

Ouch.

View on HN

I got a score of 26,000. I'm Finnish, and actually learned French as a second language in school and English as third.

I've never lived in an English-speaking country, but English is so prevalent in Finland these days that I wouldn't be surprised if it gained some kind of official status within the next 50 years. Whether in formal meetings or informal bar encounters, people voluntarily switch to English if there's even one non-Finn present. In my field, this happens nearly every day.

I even use English to communicate with Swedes, even though Swedish is the second official language of Finland and I studied it for 6 years... There's no point in limping through the conversation with my childish Swedish, when it's 99% guaranteed that Swedes speak English.

Another Finn here... I got 25,200. I guess I need to read a couple books. :P

My Swedish is atrocious. I can't recall a single time that I'd have had use for it outside school. In contrast, English is useful every day, though mostly in written form.

And third Finn here, but my score was mere 13,000. At least I have the excuse of still being a student :)

Holy wowsers. I grew up in England, and i only scored 14,800 on the test! Although English isnt my native language, i did speak it from a very early age.

I was completely honest scoring 16,000, English is my one and only language. Depending on your field/background you could understand more words than this test suggests. Looking up the words that i did not understand coupling them with there relevance and the shear volume of test words or lack thereof makes this test inaccurate in my mind.

And I am a native english speaker and you got a higher score than me. I never prided my language skills but damn, that's a shot right in the ego!

This vocabulary test got me thinking about the last unknown English word I'd encountered, and that inspired a little post on my blog. Have a look if you're interested -- there's a bit of a coding angle, even:

http://lacquer.fi/pauli/blog/2011/07/the-ten-abominations/

Last year I met and associated with a Finn while traveling in France. He spoke extraordinarily good English and could have passed for a native of the USA with very little accent correction (it was more the timing of his speech that gave him away). I wouldn't have thought him to be exceptional until I discovered that I was the first native English speaker he had ever met and he had never even left his country before then.

I wish I had been given language instruction of that caliber when I was in school.

I don't know if you can blame it completely on school. They also watch their films subbed, not dubbed.

Some studies I have seen, showed that the average newspaper has a 6000-8000 word vocabulary.

Add another 2000 to cover technical/domain specific/slang words. And you should have no reason not to be able to communicate freely on day to day basis.

I got 26K (English is my 3rd language) and most of the 'strange' words are from reading too much science fiction as a kid.

+ on showing percentiles of non-native speakers tho

The Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary has a 'defining vocabulary' of about 3500 words. They claim most definitions are limited to the use of those words and proper names. So, that 6000-8000 looks believable.

Even writers of high-brow literature use a much smaller vocabulary than the one they can read. Probably more than the newspaper, but not likely 35,000 words.

For non-native speakers, I would guess that there are quickly diminishing returns past about 10,000 words. Much more important is how well you're able to use those first 10,000 (or maybe even 5,000). It's one thing to recognize a word when reading it, and another to be able to use it in a natural way, choosing words with the right shade of meaning, and avoiding awkward constructions or unintended connotations.

Definitely. I would have liked the test to be "would you be comfortable using this word in a sentence? (if you had to)" Even as a native speaker there are times when I know the definition of a word, but opt for a simpler word because I don't know all of the implications of using it.

And even if you were, you have to make sure that your listeners understand you, too.

Right, unless you want to ruin your point entirely by stopping to define words. Communication relies on shared vocabularies, not just one person's vocabulary.

There are plenty of words I know that I generally avoid in conversation for practical reasons. Entertainment reasons, though... I caught my wife teaching our not-yet-two-years-old daughter to use the word "etiolated" when referring to a green bean that was wilted and yellowish.

Googling says that Shakespeare used 31534 words , of which 14376 appear only once, 4343 twice: http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/3/435.abstract

Not a modern corpus, but reasonable.

Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (that would be the King James version) lists 8674 Hebrew root words for the pentateuch, and 5624 Greek root words for the New Testament.

Wikipedia suggests that full literacy in Chinese requires knowledge of about 4000 characters.

Note that in Chinese, character is not the same as word.

Most modern Mandarin words are bisyllabic, and represented by the combination of two characters, and their meaning does not necessarily derive in a straightforward way from the meanings of their constituent characters (for example, the word for "thing" is composed of the characters for "East" and "West" in conjunction)

Of those unique words, how many did Shakespear invent?

Making up new words is an easy way to boost vocabulary.

I am Dutch, and the estimated vocabulary is 15,600 words. It's really humbling, but on the other side surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary. But I bet the distribution is not very similar to an American kid with a vocabulary of that size ;).

It's easy to notice the difference in vocabulary in practice. Native speaker's speech is much more varied.

Also, it's maybe good for native speakers to realize that someone who may seem a bit rude or dumb on the Internet may be a non-native speaker who has difficulty expressing him/herself.

> surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary

Not really surprising since most of English scientific vocabulary comes from greek or latin roots and is more or less the same in other European languages.

This is actually not surprising since word Frequencies more or less follow a power law probability distribution. With a vocabulary of even 1,000 words you are very well covered. Anyone who engages in a discussion with words that are not very common is doing the very opposite of trying to communicate.

I choose words on the basis of how precisely they convey my desired meaning - which may exist at multiple levels, eg using esoteric words when talking about esoteric words. It seems to me somewhat anti-elitist of you to decry those who enjoy taking such care.

(I scored 35,300; of the words I recognized only about six were ones I don't either read or use with some regularity. I read a fair amount of literature though.)

The vocabulary you need for scientific discussions can't be measured in these kinds of tests, because it is really very specific. So your english vocabulary may stil be a bit bigger.

The words that are measure here are the words that you'd use in "general" conversation I guess.

Don't worry, this article (http://howlearnspanish.com/2010/08/how-many-words-do-you-nee...) says that for most people, 3,000 words will get you to 94% of oral communication and 10,000 words constitute the active vocabulary of native speakers with higher education.

The difference between 10,000 and 30,000 is knowing the words "uxorcide" and "tricorn". Before this test, I've never seen the first one and the only time I've seen the second one is in reference to pirate hats.

Frankly, I'd rather have 10,000 word vocabulary in multiple languages than my current situation.

Well, in many cases it helps to know multple languages. Case in point: uxoricide. There were quite a few other words I knew from other languages in the quiz (English is not my mother tongue).

That and the amount of words I know RPGs in the quiz really surprised me. How often do you use a bludgeon, wouldn't you use a bat in stead?

Finally, there's a huge difference between active vocabulary --the words you actually use in speach or writing-- and passive vocabulary that is tested here. In my humble opinion, passive vocabulary should be tested in context of a sentence.

I always thought of "bludgeon" as a verb. First I've heard it being used as a noun (and now my vocab has expanded!).

Talkative people will bludgeon you with their thoughts. It's useful when you've already used other words like "harass" and "bore" and need a synonym.

"tricorn" is an everyday word in Spanish. The reason behind is we have a kind of police force that still wear "tricornios". And in my opinion they are still ridiculous.

That's for Spanish, though, which generally uses a somewhat smaller day-to-day vocabulary since it doesn't have the same weird Romance/Germanic thing that English does.

Most languages end up having about the same information bandwidth, but make different tradeoffs between the number of syllables per second and the entropy per syllable. Spanish and Japanese, for instance, tend to be spoken rapidly and have a more regular set of sounds, but languages like English or Chinese tend to be spoken more slowly and have more different sounds in each syllable. I'd imagine that low frequency languages tend to have large vocabularies that they use, but that's just a guess.

uxorcide

"To change your software so the user experience becomes overwhelmingly worse. e.g. Some critics say Microsoft committed uxorcide with the Office Ribbon"

I knew “uxorcide”, but only from reading about Battlestar Galactica online.

My background is roughly similar to yours (German, 9 1/2 years of English in school, been living in the US for 10 month) and I got 10.900 words.

Especially seeing the second and third page surprised me as I can't recall ever hearing most of these words. My girlfriend noted that many of them are older terms, but still I expected to have picked up some through movies or books.

On the other hand: studying and working in the US with just 11k words works quite well.

I'm a French native, began English when I was 13 (German is my first "school language") although I used basics of English before (to play some games, use DOS). The test estimates my vocabulary size to be 21,100. There is _no way_ that I know that much words. I think it's biased a lot for foreigners, particularly French ones (which gives you a lot of formal English words "for free"). And even more when you have taken 3 years of latin, 1 of greek.

> that much words

that many

I only got an estimate of 11500 words, yet I can still correct you :). My native language is (Swiss-)German, spent a couple years in Montreal where you don't really have many chances to improve your english (at least not the vocabulary), otherwise only used the language in written form.

I'm in similar situation: 9,780 words.

I knew general meaning of many words I didn't check, but I couldn’t exactly define them. I know that I will understand the meaning from the context when I see them in some sentence.

You hit the nail on the head. There is a huge difference between knowing the general meaning of a word and being able to exactly define them. Simple examples: is a cow a deer? Why (not)?. Is a banana a berry? Is a blueberry a berry? A strawberry?

I used the former because I thought it was what people would do (as it is easier to do; people will not what to spend 30 or more seconds on each word), and got 26600. That is below, but about average. I am not a native speaker, but would have expected to score higher in the general population.

I am fairly sure that this test does not reach the general population, though (by the way, it is nice to see that the test adapts to one's level. Try answering almost none of the words on page 1. I got 'my' score down to 28 by confessing to know only one of the words)

Speaking of animals, how is names of plants and animals counted? Is that part of a vocabulary, or is that special?

I'm also not a native English speaker, and one area where I know there's a huge difference between my Swedish vocabulary and my English is when it comes to names of plants and birds and spices and animals and trees and fish and rocks and flowers and vegetables and fruits. I know maybe thousands of names of such things in Swedish, but in English I know much fewer names. That's a few thousand words I lack and probably will never learn because it's so specialized.

(Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )

Actually, you can refer to a female deer as a "cow" (though "doe" is more common).

> (Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )

Not sure if you're joking or not, but to be clear to non-native speakers: bananas are definitely not berries. Berries are smaller and rounder. For example: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. I guess strawberries, too, but they're outliers.

Also the plural of deer is deer.

Wikipedia suggests bananas are berries, at least under some definitions of 'berry':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry

Bananas ARE berries, so are watermelons and tomatoes. But strawberries and raspberries are not berries.

Berries have seeds on the inside; a strawberry's seeds are on the outside, and raspberries are little clusters they are called something else. It's a famous quiz question in the UK :)

It depends, of course, if you're talking as a botanist or as a cook. It's one of those words with multiple levels of truth.

Same with tomato - it's a fruit botanically, but in culinary terms it's a vegetable and definitely not a fruit. As long as you get your context right, you won't have problems communicating :)

The claims being made on the site that the median score of the whole population is 27k words is not substantiated anywhere else. E.g. http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.h..., which references 'proper' studies (but I haven't tracked the references), says

"Based on previous research, Nation and Waring (1997) estimate that the receptive vocabulary size of a university-educated native English speaker is around 20,000 base words, while Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words."

I'm a non-native speaker and got 18 700 words, which I found rather disappointing when I read that that was, according to the site, roughly equivalent to (or even below) the average 15 year old native speaker. Thinking a bit about it however I'm quite sure that that is nonsense - I am regularly asked by native speakers to review their English texts and scholarly articles and am relatively often commented on my broad vocabulary. When people review mine and I push them on why they suggested certain grammatical or stylistic changes, almost invariably it turns out that they are influenced by personal style preferences or local customs (as in, local to the area they grew up in). Now I'm not God's gift to the world and I'm sure that there is much to be improved on my English, but still I'm quite sure I can outperform the 5th percentile of the general population on English vocabulary knowledge. (I mean - that's people with an iq of 80 or less ffs, again not to say that I'm a genius but I find the proposition that I would score worse than most native speakers that qualify under many definitions as mentally retarded to be preposterous).

I'm highly skeptical of the site's claim that the 50% percentile knows 27k words. It seems to be from their own test takers, and I didn't find any references to other researcher's results, of which there are several.

Site creator here, again -- my research (small sample size) having Brazilians take the test is that a couple years of learning will get you around 1,500-3,000 words, several years around 4,000-6,000, and a good student with, say, 8 years of classes might get around 10,000.

Beyond this, it's pretty much necessary to live abroad for an extended period of time, or be exceptionally good (driven) at languages and watch TONS of TV, use tons of online chat, etc.

English is my second language and I got ~13,500 words. I was surprised that this was only half the average. I read a lot of scientific papers in my field and almost never come across a word I don't know. Writing technical papers well also requires not much vocabulary (it's more about clarity of expression). I believe to get beyond that number you simply have to read lots of books. I notice lots of words I've never heard of when reading, say, Bill Bryson but I very rarely bother to look them up because they usually make enough sense from the context.

> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker

I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.

But the average 3-year old Chinese speaks infinite better Chinese than I do (I can't even pronounce 'ni hao' correctly I'm sure, despite my colleagues kind praise of how I say it very understandably); I don't see how that's humbling. Language knowledge is imo rather useless; languages is a very inefficient idea transfer mechanism, and the amount of energy we collectively waste on translations and learning languages is staggering. I see languages as an unfortunate side-effect of human's poor natural communication traits, and I hope that we can do away with most of them asap.

I don't think I understand. How would we communicate without language?

That would be rather hard, even if we had neural interfaces - I hope to do away with most languages so that we have only a few (ideally one) left, and hopefully those wouldn't be too dissimilar either.

I'll admit though that that point was rather tangential to the post I was replying to.

Just so that anyone lower feel good, I did only 8500, I need to read non tech topics probably and never lived in a english country.

Be happy my friend: I've scored a shameful 5700. I see it is very low compared to many others reporting here, anyway my English is more than ok when compared to most of those around me.

I believe language knowledge is very influenced by the surroundings, the place where you live, the people you deal with.

Aware of the weakness, a few days ago I posted a call for suggestions on Google+; now the vocabulary test moved me to ask the same to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772950

PS: I'm from Bari, Italy.

25,500 ~ Dutch.

I'd hoped to score at least median, disappointing. My exposure to English is pretty much limited to TV, 19th century literature, day-to-day conversations, and tech articles.

I'm a native speaker. I read a lot. Fiction, nonfiction, literature, etc. I've got a master's degree in CS. I'm a published author at multiple respected conferences. I've been learning Spanish as a second language for ~2 years.

I scored about 33,000. I don't think the distributions are very accurate. I can't speak to where you should be, but I think you have an excellent score. I hope this point of comparison helps.

I also got 33K, ~80th percentile. But, I got 98, 99th percentile on the Verbal section of my GREs (which has a lot of vocabulary, though it isn't only vocabulary). I find it hard to believe there's that big of a gap, though I suppose a lot of foreign applicants could drag down the GRE average, pushing me up. But, it's also possible that people were liberal with their claims to understand words.

The biggest difference between natives and non-natives is the amount of "passive vocabulary". Sure, we non-native English speakers can express ourselves well enough, we can participate in discussions, even on a high scientific level, as long as we're familiar with the problem domain. But because we've (I'm generalising, of course) read fewer English books, been exposed to the lingo for a lot less than natives, we're limited in our passive vocabulary. Having been exposed to a language for every waking hour of your lifetime doesn't just enable you to speak it better, it also teaches thousands of words you never use, but nevertheless know the meaning of.

On a side note: this makes me feel better about my 25k score ;-)

For me it's the opposite. My passive vocabulary is rather big, but I can't think of all those words when I am speaking.

11.900, Norwegian. Worked in a multi-nation company where I spoke/wrote English daily for several years, and read books in English regularly. I guess this explains why I have to use the dictionary in the Kindle a lot, and probably should use it more.

I think I have assimilated enough US culture/vocab during a 10 yr stay. Of course studying English since the first grade probably helped a lot too. Non-Native (India) but scored 35,800 :)

I'm german - ignoring words I know but couldn't immediately place properly (raggamuffin for example) I got 19000.

My english comes mostly from watching movies and tv series long after I graduated, reading novels, articles, handbooks and later by chatting in english.

Due to movies and tv series, I adopted an us-american flavor of english.

Also keep in mind that this test didn't ask for domain specific vocabulary - if they would have made a section of computer related vocabulary, we probably would have all scored perfectly. :)

24yo german with 19k here also. I'm not so sure if vocabulary size beyond a certain level is really that significant.

I got the feeling that that I could improve my score the most by thoroughly reading a 18th century novel.

I have a good English. I can write emails, communicate with clients, write articles and blog posts. However, I noticed that I write only in IT related things. If you learned English for a purpose, then you are going to have a rather smaller vocabulary, but it'll be dedicated to the purpose you learned it for.

I got 5,490 words. May be my vocabulary is larger, but it's not broad: it targets specific fields.

While the exercice is interesting in that it is humbling for non-native speakers, it does seem dubious. I repeated the test 3 times, and got widely different results (10400, then 16700, then 18300). Since they are all quite outside the reported quantiles for native speakers, it may be expected to have high variance for non-native, but that means the numbers are not very useful as is.

I can't confirm your observation: my first attempt got me 11,500 words, the second 11,800. Of course I didn't check the words that I learned from the first run (I used a dictionary to verify whether my understanding was correct when in doubt, and to find out what some of the words mean that I didn't know).

I got 30800, and I am a native Dutch speaker. Though I have to say that I consider English my co-native language. Most of the media I consume is in English, and in my work environment (IT) English is the default language. But most of the words in this test I knew from reading books, as it is one of the few places where using a very wide vocabulary is not frowned upon.

Same here. Also a native Dutch speaker, but by far the most of my daily communication happens in English. I scored 25600 on the test.

My use of English is limited to daily-use for the most part. Apart from IT terminology, I rarely encounter field-specific words. Nor do I read literature.

Spanish here. Got an estimated vocabulary size of 17,7000 words. I lived and worked in the U.K for a couple of years. I think I might be in a better position than some of you when it comes to words derivated from Latin, as they are almost always the same in Spanish. Leaving those out I am sure I would get similar results.

French here, and I concur. Quite a few terms are directly borrowed from French or have very clear Latin roots, making them easy to understand even without having actually encountered them in English.

5,160 words here. I was expecting a worse result for a man who never really learned English in school.

Similar experience, 17,400 words.

German, speaking English on a daily basis, had 8 years of English in school and 9 years of Latin, which probably helped me a bit. (Though I hope my teachers don't read this)

Does anyone know a similar test for grammatical proficiency?

I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers.

I'm Russian by origin and have been living in Australia for the last 10 years. I think I read (and understand) a lot in English, but I still only got 13,000.

I'm a native spanish speaker, And I got 26,800. But then again more than half of the culture I consume is in english, and I spends an awful lot of time in forums and such.

German, 26 Years, 8 Years of English in school. Working for a US company, lived in the US for 3 months, American GF, lots of pirated american TV shows:

15,500 words

I'm French; my estimate is 39,400.

I've been reading English since I was 13 or so - quite possibly the bulk of my reading has been in English (a quirk of mine).

Native Finnish speaker, 31 100. Most of the books I've read in the last 20 years have been in English.

29.800, Greek. Judging by the replies of the other non-native speakers,I guess that's an okay score.

I am in a similar situation and my estimated vocabulary size is 10100 words. Doh! :D

I am at 10.200 being studying Enlgish for 8 years and using it on a daily basis for social and professional life. My level of English is above almost all my pears from I come from.

Pears, just like apples, usually don't speak at all, let alone in foreign languages.

Sorry for the pun but since this is a thread about vocabulary and it's sunday when most of the regulars are away instead of procrastinating at work anyway I hope I may be forgiven.

I am a non-native speaker, too, I got 10800. I guess when reading books, I should quit my habit I developed lately of skipping over those words I don't know :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com