Extensive Reading and Vocabulary Range (video)

[edelweis]

@ludens: I did. 19600 word families which is equivalent to average native reading ability.

This after 12 years of formal instruction - but only 2 or 3 hours a week - and about 10 years of almost daily reading in English.

But as I stated above, having French as a native language is cheating... also I don't know how to properly pronounce most of those words (but that's another issue perhaps).

However I did feel my English improved greatly when I started reading novels in English. Which I would not have thought myself able to do (even after 10 years of classes) or even interested in, except that that year we had a sadistic English teacher who had us 背 long lists of thematic vocabulary every week, and at the same time the school's library had a display of fantasy and sci-fi books in English... I think the combination of intense vocabulary learning and having interesting things to read was the deciding factor. After that year I never learned such lists of English vocabulary again but kept reading in English...

[edelweis]

btw, I find that there are some low occurence words which meaning I understand in context only, and very fuzzily. I couldn't define their exact meaning or give a translation. However if prompted with several possibilities (as that website does) I can eliminate meanings that have nothing to do with it, and deduce the answer by elimination. But then perhaps the same happens in one's native language...

[Sarevok]

I also finished the test a few minutes ago. My result was 11 700 word families. My English education background is similar to edelweis (12-13 years of formal instruction, lots of reading by myself on daily basis), but my native language is Czech, which also has a fair share of Latin-based vocab (which European language doesn't?) but it comes nowhere near French or other Romance languages in this regard. For some unknown words, I could have made some educated guess but I tried to follow the instructions and clicked "I don't know" in such cases... though I probably didn't do it in all of them now that I think of it, don't know what impact it had an the overall accuracy...

Anyways, is there anything similar to "word families" in Chinese? Words like 现代 and 现代化 come close, but what about all those disyllabic words, which account for the major part of Chinese vocab?

Imron, you're a god. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find isolated tribes of Chinese learners worshiping you.

There is at least one in my country... though I'm not sure if it qualifies as a "tribe" as I am the only member I know of

[WestTexas]

Just finished my maximum vocab level test, got 23100. Not to be arrogant, but honestly this is lower than I expected. When I was 17 I made a perfect score on the verbal SAT. I majored in English literature in college. Yet my results are fairly average for someone my age (25). It does say the test isn't accurate for over 14000 word families.

One question that seemed wrong to me was:

That's a good gimmick.

A.clever plan or trick

B.attention-getting thing

I feel like both of these are correct, in fact Webster's has as a definition for gimmick both of the following:

a) an attention-getting device or feature, typically superficial, designed to promote the success of a product, campaign, etc.

B) any clever little gadget or ruse

[Silent]

So, did anyone take the www.vocabularysize.com test? I did, and the results seem to confirm the extensive reading theory. I'm not a native speaker of English, and got a score of "at least 10,800 word families".

I did and initially I felt disappointed as I was only above 31% of the native speakers that took the test. (15700 word families). I used to consider myself at (near) native level. Though I admit that my English has only deteriorated last 15 years or so due to communicating with non natives in low level English. Continuing the video after the test made me feel a bit better again as the score is pretty much in the middle of the well educated native range which is pretty much where I picture my English language skills.

Edit:

5 years highschool English

10 months backpacking in Australia

8 years international helpdesk (mostly low/medium level speakers from around the globe)

Read a fair number of books in English on various subjects (chemistry, engineering, IT, finance, management, popular science, travel, novels)

[jkhsu]

One question that seemed wrong to me was:

That's a good gimmick.

That one confused me as well. However, I think the better definition is "B. attention-getting thing" because that's the purpose of a gimmick. While a gimmick can be in the form of a trick or clever plan, the purpose is to get your attention. On the other hand, you can have a trick or clever plan that has nothing to do with getting your attention, and that wouldn't be a gimmick. Check out the wikipedia definition:

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

I thought the example on toothbrushes was pretty good.

[jbradfor]

I find that there are some low occurence words which meaning I understand in context only, and very fuzzily. I couldn't define their exact meaning or give a translation.

I think that is true of native speakers as well. At least I find that true for me when my wife asks me to define a low-occurrence word, I often hem and haw and give a vague answer.

[creamyhorror]

Just finished my maximum vocab level test, got 23100. Not to be arrogant, but honestly this is lower than I expected. When I was 17 I made a perfect score on the verbal SAT. I majored in English literature in college. Yet my results are fairly average for someone my age (25). It does say the test isn't accurate for over 14000 word families.

I think the test can easily be skewed by targeted word learning (as opposed to natural vocabulary acquisition through reading). I don't read a lot (only did when I was young), and I still got 25,700 words, partly because I love learning words (even artificially, like from A Word A Day). The trouble words for me were simple but rare words like "fens" and "weir", and British/ANZAC-specific words like "ruck". I do think the word "coven" was a bit tricky as well. Technically the main use of the word is to describe a group of witches (and not other things).

(I was actually disappointed with my score as well, since I was expecting to do as well as Prof Arguelles (28,300 or something).)

Anyway, have you guys done the Clavis Sinica vocabulary test for Chinese characters? It's fun as well.

[jkhsu]

For those interested, here's the link to the Clavis Sinica Chinese Character Test.

http://www.clavisinica.com/character-test.html

[Silent]

Clavis says I know 978 characters. With somewhere between 1100 and 1200 characters studied I think it's reasonably accurate. To me it feels realistic that a few hundred of those are not yet known.

[WestTexas]

Just took the character test. Not impressed. I got this character, 啄, which I had never seen before. But I guessed correctly because the choices were so easy. Also, 箩. Both of these had obvious pronunciation from the choices given, and I could guess the meaning from the radical and the choices given as well. Another one was 柒. Got all three of those right, never seen any of them. The test is entirely too easy to exploit if you know anything about radicals and phonetic components. Also, one of the definitions was (used in compounds), which can be said of pretty much every character.

According to this test I know 3590 characters... thinking probably 500-800 less than this would be more accurate. I only missed two characters on the whole test.

On the plus side this result has improved my mood greatly after I scored lower than I expected on the English vocabulary test.

[Glenn]

I agree with you about that test. It told me I know approximately 3273 characters, and I know that isn't right. I also got some just based on guessing from phonetic and semantic components. Oh well, seeing that I know approximately 3273 characters at least makes me feel kind of awesome. hahaha

By the way, I did the advanced and traditional set of 72, and missed 4 from the "rest of the 2200" set.

[Sarevok]

I scored 3514 and I would say that's quite accurate, it's in the right ballpark at least. My own guess was somewhere between 3500-4000. I stopped keeping statistics years ago. When you first start learning characters, passing of the the first hundred, then 200, 300, 500, 1000... are all huge milestones which might be good for motivation. After passing the 3000 or so mark, learning an additional hundred (or several) is like "meh, another bunch of characters... again"

For two characters in the test, which I have never seen before, I deliberately chose an answer, which I thought would be wrong. I think that trying to guess based on multiple choice answers is skewing the results with this type of test.

I would say that individual characters in Chinese not the same as "word families" in English. You often encounter a disyllabic or multisyllabic word which is comprised of known characters, but you still can't decipher it's meaning. At times, the individual parts will help you, but sometimes they won't. Therefore, in the end it all comes down to the number of words, i.e. compounds of two or more characters (as monosyllabic words are few and far between). Individual characters by themselves won't get you very far when it comes to reading comprehension (and for certain words, knowing the individual parts is downright useless, e.g. 蝙蝠). However, they are useful for the learning process and vocabulary acquisition (remembering a new word is much easier if you already know some or all of its constituents).

[Gleaves]

fyi -

of this video is out. Unfortunately, it focuses on selecting English texts, but still interesting. He does mention being contacted by someone at Yale developing a Chinese vocab test, but it was not clear to me what if anything has come of that.

For folks here that do extensive reading, I'm curious how you go about it and if you have any lessons learned. Do people here read in large chunks (1, 2, 3 hours at a time) or smaller chunks? I try to read for an hour a day. I find that for 30 minutes I am very focused. For the next 30 minutes a little bit less so. After that, it is sort of a dimishing return on what I am learning, espeically if I am tired. I'm beginning to think I should limit myself to reading in 30 minute blocks over the course of the day.

[Silent]

Funny, this video is pretty much what I've been doing the last few days while searching for some decent reading material. The result: I intend to dive in (and drown) on 余华, 活着 starting this weekend. It's recommended here in the forums and with a character count of less than 1900 and only about 1300 characters used more than twice 余华, 活着 looks like a good recommendation. I'm even tempted to say it's do-able:) The thread on it may be of help too though I will lag. I start later and probably read slower too.

[imron]

For folks here that do extensive reading, I'm curious how you go about it

I try to read for 30 minutes a day. I may read for longer periods, including several hours at a time, depending on how interesting the book is.

[c_redman]

fyi -

of this video is out. Unfortunately, it focuses on selecting English texts, but still interesting. He does mention being contacted by someone at Yale developing a Chinese vocab test, but it was not clear to me what if anything has come of that.

The vocabulary test was from my site. Unfortunately, I thought I could get away with emailing from my work email (I'm neither a student nor a researcher) if I explained it was just a hobby and not an academic research project. Lesson learned.

I was also hoping he would address the 98% figure in more detail, but it seems like he's taking it as given.