Comment by stbullard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stbullard | Hacker News Reader

In addition to everything everyone else has said: their math is off by half (or 100%, depending on how you count), due to a structural error.

(context: native English speaker, big reader, huge nerd, perfect SAT score)

I got all 100 correct on the first try without looking anything up! Confusingly, that only resulted in a "SCIENTIFIC ESTIMATE" that I know 85,000/~170,000 words?

Their "How is this calculated" page that appears at the end explains their error:

> According to the Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), there are approximately 171,476 words in current use.

> We use Stratified Sampling. Instead of testing random words, we divide the language into 5 distinct difficulty bands based on frequency of use:

> 1. Core Basics ~3,000 words > 2. Intermediate ~7,000 words > 3. Advanced ~10,000 words > 4. Expert ~25,000 words > 5. The Obscure ~40,000+ words

> If you answer 2 out of 3 'Intermediate' questions correctly, we estimate you know roughly 66% of the 7,000 words in that band.

> Total Score = Σ (Accuracy in Band × Band Size)

Their strata add up to 85000, not ~170k, making a perfect score still give a 50%.

They're also using a pretty limited and perhaps non-difficulty-representative subset of the language.

Cute, but wrong on many counts.

A lot are also just guessable because 3 out of the 4 definitions are obvious nonsense. I'd rather have a "I don't know this word" button than just pick the one that's obviously correct out of the 4, if the goal is to get a real estimate.

Yeah I scored well enough and only missed 3, but that’s just because it was very easy to “guess well”.

There were many words I didn’t know though.

Funny enough, usually the correct answer is the option with the most number of letters/words. I found myself just picking the longest answer and by a wide margin it was the correct answer.

I wanted to know my real score so I intentionally picked the answer most likely to be wrong in those instances.

Exactly the same feedback: I got all 100 correct, and the results were the same as yours.

As it usually happens in this kind of "check your vocabulary" tests in English, being Greek gives you an advantage in higher levels ;-)

I'm Greek too and I got 81 (well technically I misclicked one in a hurry, would've been 82). It did help a bit though. Surprisingly enough I've learnt many of the more advanced words from technical blogs!

I rely on being Geek for advantage.

It was clearly built with AI.

Is this a problem? I thought it was fun, personally, even if the author used AI to help build it.

It's not fun because it isn't challenging. I have an expert-1 level of English as a native speaker and heavy reader. But absolutely nothing in this is challenging at all. The one question I got wrong was because the 4 proscribed answer options weren't specific enough. So overall there's no value in this.

It's obviously a problem because it doesn't work as intended/at all. What's point of building something like this if it doesn't work? At best its a waste of everyone's time, at worst it's misleading.

As an aside, I am also an avid reader, always have been, 790 on the !math part of the SAT back in the very early 2000s.

I attribute most of my success in life to reading early and often. Bartending in college rounded out the social skills (for me) but those two skills have carried me further than I anticipated, coming from a poor background.

Have you found the same to be true?

How did bartending improve your social skills? On the surface, it looks like a regular customer service job.

The length and breadth of conversations you tend to get into as a bartender far exceed nearly any other customer service job. Not to mention it's frequently with the same people.

There are few professions where it's not unusual to have an hour+ conversation about literally any topic, and then potentially do it again the next day with the same person about a different topic. More similar to a therapist than customer service.

Guessing you've never worked a service job. It's a good way to learn how to interact with the public early on. The success model is not being fired for bad social customer interactions.

Even if you're an introvert, working for a couple months at Olive Garden when you're 19 helps you to smile and be polite when 80% of the customers are mouth breathing idiots. Turns out they aren't all mouth breathers and those para social skills come into play later during your career.

I highly support kids of all origins working in service for a bit. Ain't a class thing, but is very helpful in getting used to the breadth and depth of people.

I agree with the others

But the choice of "advanced words" seems a bit odd. Obscure, isnt that obscure.

Sure there are some speciality words, but most of these words are just the stuff you're gonna hear on radio4 in normal conversation

I had that discussion with my high school English teacher. We used USA oriented books and they often introduce "advanced vocabulary" which should have been trivial for Spanish speakers, or any latin language speaker for the matter.

I suppose they evaluate difficulty based on origin of the word. If you already know German or Spanish you may have a head start when learning English, but on a different subset of it.

What background you all have that contributed you think to scoring 100

I read a lot, and have since I was a child

edit: also, native English (well, American) speaker

Same here. Also, I studied Latin and Greek in school and have kept studying them in various ways since then. I think this test is significantly biased toward vocabulary with these origins; dozens of tested words are directly recognizable as the "ordinary" Latin or Greek words for some concepts, or direct combinations of common Latin or Greek roots.

A lot of prestigious and scholarly vocabulary in English has come in through Latin and Greek (at various points in the history of English!), so you can learn that vocabulary or make it more memorable or more transparent either by studying Latin and Greek as languages, or just by studying some of their common morphemes (e.g. there are lists of Latin and Greek roots that may be given to medical or life sciences students to help them learn to recognize the meaning of terminology coined from these languages, even without speaking the languages).

But I think it's actually unrepresentative of the English language as a whole if we're literally thinking about vocabulary size rather than historical prestige of some part of the vocabulary. For example, foreign foods like "nori", "pandan", "dolma", "vichyssoise"[1], or "berbere" are often used as English words and would probably appear in large English dictionaries nowadays. None of that was tested in this quiz. I saw one foreign political term which I guessed at, and one or two German loanwords which I knew (I've also studied German), and almost everything else was Latin or Greek origins!

[1] apparently coined by a French-speaking American based on French roots?

I missed two, but I’m willing to be tthey’re similar to me - I read a lot and whenever I encounter a new word I don’t know, I usually look up its etymology.

I got 96. I think I knew about 87 of them just from knowing them, and the rest I got with a bit of Latin and Greek background (eg a word starting with “ab” is likely to mean “away from”), plus there’s a pattern to how they’d generated the wrong answers.

Confusingly I got three wrong but got the same vocab estimate.

I think I got 80 correct and got 57k.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com