Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Test your Vocab

Check your Vocabulary knowledge here.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What range could be considered as bilingual? :)

6 May 2013 at 15:36
Miguel Ángel said...

Difficult question to answer...
I'll ask you 2 more:
What does "bilingual" mean?
How many words does an average speaker know in their mother tongue?

7 May 2013 at 09:39
Anonymous said...

Those are also difficult questions!

Bilingual I suppose that means to use both your mother tongue and another language in a proficient way.

Although I have heard about different kinds of bilinguism I am not quite sure about that.

As regards the numbers of words an avarage speaker knows, it is quite difficult to guess. But, if we take into account that test and a native speaker friend of mine who did it, it would be around 38000 or 40000.

Maybe this is a bit off-topic, but is this test reliable? I mean, I don't think so, but I haven't found any reliable data about this idea of the amount of words used by an average speaker.


7 May 2013 at 16:10
Miguel Ángel said...

I don't really know how true the following data are, but that's what I found...
How many words do you think there are in the English language?
Oxford English Dictionary: 616,500 word forms + Scientific words: would total 1,000,000
In common use: 200,000
German: about 184,000 in common use French: around 100,000 Italian: 190,000
How many words do you think the average English person knows?
At 2 years of age: 200
At 5 years of age: 5000
At 12 years of age: 8,000 (the average number or words used by tabloids)
Graduates know: 60,000 – 75,000 Shakespeare used: 31,534
An ordinary person knows: 35,000

10 May 2013 at 18:59

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