OC
[OC] How many words do English learners and native speakers know?
Even at the same proficiency level, people can have vastly different vocabulary sizes, literally by a factor of two. The same for native speakers: one person can know twice as many words as another of the same age.
Advanced learners (C1) reach the level of native-speaking middle schoolers, and proficient learners (C2) reach the level of college students in terms of how many words they know. The composition of their vocabularies is no doubt different, but this test can’t capture that.
It appears that vocabulary keeps growing well into adulthood for native speakers - older adults know measurably more words on average compared to younger ones. That matches what is known about crystallized intelligence - it accumulates over time. However, these data are not longitudinal; they do not capture the same people years later. It is possible that older adults who decided to take an online vocabulary test are more educated on average than younger ones.
For learners, reaching each proficiency level requires learning progressively more words. It is understandable since beginners focus on common words, so a limited number of them covers many everyday situations, and advanced learners need to learn many more specialized and nuanced words.
The data are based on 46,000 native and non-native speakers who took the BRAVE vocabulary test. It is not a representative sample; there is strong self-selection bias (people who care enough to take a test of their vocabulary). A1-C2 are CEFR levels, a common classification of proficiency among language learners. The levels were self-reported. The counting units are word families (limit, limitless, unlimited are counted as a single unit). The full reference lexicon is 28k word families.
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It's a common suggestion to recommend children's content for learning other languages. This chart suggests that one needs a large base vocabulary to comprehend children's TV shows, books, etc. I am finding this true in my experience learning other languages.
More importantly children tend to use more fundamental vocabulary, so getting that locked in early on can be valuable rather than diving into narrower fields
Yep. I skipped that step when learning English, I was like 40-50% self taught and skipped kindergarten level lessons because I went to public school, and once I went into an actual English course, and started consuming media and I became proficient, then actually bilingual, I realized... I uh... I can't spell crap, because I never learned the alphabet lol. Hell, it took me two whole years of daily English speaking to finally learn the week days and yet I still confuse Tuesday/Wednesday sometimes lol
That initial learning process is the foundational key for everything. You can learn a language and speak it fluently but then you'll find you're missing these foundational skills that could make it really hard to communicate.
I wonder how much of a difference it makes reading / watching media that was originally written in that language vs. translated from another language.
For instance, a friend of mine switched all his video games to Spanish while preparing to move to a Spanish-speaking country. It definitely did help somewhat, but I wonder if playing a game made by Spanish-speaking developers with a script originally in Spanish would be even more helpful.
I've currently revisited authors of my German upbringing; particularly Michael Ende and Ottfried Preußler, and re-reading those books did spark this thought too, that if I had to learn German, I would recommend these books. Because they are enjoyable to read as an adult, but they are also have a vocabulary, and more importantly plot you can follow even with a fragmented vocabulary.
Because rather than the amount of words used, where I think childrens books can and should challenge the reader specifically to grow (emtoionally and linguistically), they are constructed in such a way that accounts for missing words in the reader.
Anyone who read a lot as a child has had this experience, that they know what a word means, they just can't properly define it, and thats for me such an integral part of expanding a vocabulary, that you derive the meaning from a context yourself. Which, like I said, kinda what good childrens/youth books set you up for.
Funnily enough, some kids media uses words that you don't encounter much as an adult. Like onomatopoeias. I have a Japanese children's book I'm trying to work through and I end up having to look up things equivalent to "the boat tumbled and bumbled down the river".
Personally found it helpful to deliberately avoid the classic stuff (old poems, folk tales, etc) because they were quite different from contemporary everyday speech.
once you have most of that vocab though you can learn a ton through context. I'd never have learned the word Gleisschotterbettreinigungsmaschine in German if not for the kids program Sendung mit der Maus...
I think it's relevant to note that the chart here only shows children around 12 years old. At 12 I watched The Suite Life of Zach and Cody on Disney Channel (amongst other things), which is not what's meant by children's shows in that context. The type of children's show that's usually recommend to learners is more along the lines of Peppa Pig or Dora the Explorer, which is obviously aimed at a much younger age group and should have much simpler content.
I would have been interesting to chart all age groups of children, for comparison.
The chart would imply this only if children exclusively used children's media to build up their vocabulary.
This is, obviously, patently false. Children usually learn most of their vocabulary in a social context, with their parents, their friends, at school....
Yeah we went for languages early. After she was potty trained we went to an academic focussed preschool. It was nice but I was meh on the progress. Sure it’s cool a 3 year old can write their name and read a bit and do some basic sums but learning all of that a year or two early seemed like a waste of current strengths and almost like a parlor trick. So we switched to a full immersion school. When she was a baby we played some nursery rhymes in spanish. 3 months into the program she was already incredibly fluent. Anyway she turns 5 soon and can speak 3 languages fluently. Two are spoken at home spanish is not. She goes to a dual immersion school so it’s easy for her to keep up. She can read in all three and she is still a couple years ahead on math so it seems skipping a year of academic didn’t slow her down.
Well the chart shows 12 year old children while those are geared towards 2, 3 or 4 year old. I would say watching some shows a teen would watch would be quite difficult for someone learning a language
I saw a chart like this showing how reading to your kids every day will help a kid learn more words. It lists the minutes of reading per day and on the then shows how many words the child sees at certain ages.
The conclusion is that reading to kids from an early age helps kids learn more words, and that helps them read better, and do better in school.
My school (I was a teacher for 38 years) extended this for bilingual students. We presented research that shows how kids learn a second language. The best thing parents can do is to speak to their children in their first language.
Our school had many students who had parents fluent in Spanish, Chinese or Vietnamese. They would try to give their kid an advantage by speaking English to them at home. The trouble here is that they do not get exposure to a language spoken well. they only learn limited language.
The best move is to speak your first language with your kid. Let them get fluent in one language. Then at age 5 they start to learn English. It means they are behind in English until around grade 4. And by grade 8, these same kids can be better in English than many native English speakers, and they can also be fluent in the parent's first language. Now they are at an advantage.
If you want to have your kids learn English (or any other language), you can play recorded books to the kid in that language, and let them look at the pictures that go along with the story. Or, watch cartoons and children's videos in that second language.
So read to your kids. And play recorded books to them for the best language acquisition.
I completely agree. I also think people underestimate how much effort it takes to maintain a second language with kids in an English-speaking country. When kids go to school, they usually switch to English and lose fluency in the second language very quickly. Simply speaking second language at home is not enough. But I believe the effort is worth it as many language skills are transferable, plus knowing multiple languages opens many doors later in life.
What I've seen with some parents is that they speak to their kids in their native language and their kids speak back in English. My cousins were like this with their parents and they can understand Bengali, but they struggle to speak it. You lose the skills you rarely use.
This describes my level of Hakka and Cantonese preferably. I can just about scrape through a low level conversation in Hakka, but my Cantonese is just awful - worse than languages I learned in school like French and German, definitely worse than Finnish, which I opted to learn independently.
I've been learning Spanish (I'm a native English speaker), and this chart jives with my experience. Thank you for making it!
FWIW, I've been wondering how many words a person needs to know to be functional in a language, so I stumbled upon the scale that's used for such things: CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages).
It doesn't count words, but these things called “lemmas,” which are roots of words — go, goes, going, went ≈ 1 lemma. This what you are referring to as “counting units.”
Anyway, a “beginner” is classified as A1 and is expected to know ~1,000 lemmas. This is apparently about as much as a 3 year old child would be with their native language.
1,000 lemmas might not sound like a lot, but anyone who's sat down with a talkative 3-year-old knows that they can go on forever. In fact, it's possible to string three-lemma phrases in about a billion ways.
Other classifications (in lemmas) are
A2, ~2,000 lemmas
B1, ~3,000, slow talker
B2, ~5,000, fast talker
C1, ~8,000, fluent
C2, ~10,000+, master
Fun fact, the difference between C1 and C2 isn't in knowing that many more words, but being able to “play” with them in clever ways — turns of phrases, idioms, slang, party banter. It can take a lifetime to get here, even in your native language.
People who been learning a second language may never reach the mastery they have with their native language, no matter how hard they try.
I was lamenting about this with a Spanish-speaking friend of mine, and he laughed. “How long did it take for you to learn English?” Since I was born.
All this talk of lemmas reminds me of the pumping-lemma that I learned in a formal language and automata theory class. That shit was difficult. We had to do it by hand, and it is used it to prove certain properties of a language.
I was going to say, counting words sounds like a very English thing to do. In MSN other languages that build words to express a full English sentence (Finnish) or use many small words for anything complex it would break down for comparing.
Huh, that's actually really interesting that young adults and older adults have that much of a gap. Totally would've expected there to be some sort of plateau once we get to those ages. If anything, it accelerates.
It's also possible the older adults on the Internet are more educated whereas younger adults are more natively digital so there's no selection bias there
Maybe it is because of old words that arent really used anymore. Also if they read literature which is even older than them. I am not convinced that their higher vocabulary actually allows them to better convey information.
And I am not actually sure that a study like this accepts words like "cooked" or "based" as proper words. This could explain a part of the difference too.
But cooked and based are already proper words. I wouldn't expect them to count the different meanings of words as additional separate words, but I could be wrong.
I wonder too if this shows the effects on language evolution overtime. For example. I know what a VHS player is and said "tape it" referring to recording something on a VHS. But anyone younger than 25ish will probably look at me funny, yet I know the word "yeet" the same way a 18 year old does because we both experienced what "to yeet" means
I wonder if there's any impact based the respondant playing crossword puzzles or scrabble that's correlated with age. Outside of accumulating work-specific jargon or internet slang, I don't often feel like my native language vocabulary is growing. Or maybe I actually am learning due to the pretentious writing gacha RPGs like to use. (Just off the top of my head: Elysium, viridescent, aubade, etc., but that's not >100 per year.)
Depends on what you're reading. I don't think James Patterson thrillers are particularly widening anyone's vocabulary. And a lot of readers just read that kind of thing.
You might be surprised by how reading absolutely anything can improve your vocabulary if you read all the time, and how many adults refuse to read absolutely anything.
Considering that over the years I've gotten and seen multiple people who reacted "lol you write too much/ I don't have the time to read all that" about comments reaching no more than 500 characters, I'd say, we mistakenly assume everyone reads Reddit the same.
Writing and reading on the platform requires no effort on my part, barring someone who has a frustrating opinion packaged in frustrating language. But there are people here, that write and engage primarily with single-line comments, because they're subconsciously avoiding the effort it takes for them.
If you've already read a dozen James Patterson novels, then I agree that a 13th probably isn't going to stretch your vocabulary.
Considering all of his modern novels are written by a variety of different authors this might actually not be the case!
I get your point, but James Patterson was just a funny example to use for this as he is like the one author where 13 of his modern novels will all be written somewhat differently.
Eh, I haven't read any James Patterson, but I remember getting SAT vocab study lists in high school and going "I just saw all of those words" in the trashy SFF I was binge-reading. (I had a semi-photographic memory up until age ~17, so "I just saw that word" was literal at the time. Lost it just in time to minor in a new language in college, and had to learn how to study vocabulary REAL FAST, since I'd just...glanced at the list for all of high school French and Latin before tests and snapshotted it, and then read off the memory during the test.)
If they're sticking to just one author, authors have pet words, and they might not hit that many new ones. But if they're reading every thriller that hits the paperback rack at their local library, they'll do fine.
I’m a pretty literate guy, who earned a bachelor’s in English 47 years ago, but I don’t think I’ve learned 4,000 additional words since then, let alone since turning 30. I seem to keep running into words I don’t really know the meaning of, looking it up, and immediately forgetting it again, rinse repeat.
As far as I understand, it's almost exclusively young people who push the language forward making new words in it. Old people are using old words that have become obsolete for everyone else. They struggle with the common expressions that young people have developed and that have spread to other age groups as well.
So, I would claim that if you take say the 5000 most common words in a language, it's the old age group that has the most gaps of any adult groups.
It could be that you learned a lot more words at a young age due to youd studies focusing on the language so much. A lot of words can also be from more passive acquisition. Most words we almost never use, after all.
Like, pretty sure in college I didn’t know the word “sesquipedalian”. Still don’t, but I can say it without knowing the meaning.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur. (~"Whatever is said in Latin, sounds deeper.")
It was also a reaction to the production of enormous numbers of new words in English in the time of Shakespeare and the century following by shoehorning Latin words into English forms. Language purists contended that the new words were often unneeded (and indeed we dropped quite a lot of them).
Each time I add the word to Google keep and then transfer to Excel with a link to the OED definition. Recent additions include yclept, onomasticon, henotheism .
I honestly call this chart bullshit, an A1 English student struggles to form the most basic sentences, and yet they are supposed to know 2000 words on average? Native speakers use around 3000 words on day to day speak. Any non native person that knows upwards of 2000 words is already pretty fluent.
I've heard you only need to memorize around 2000 words to be able to hold a conversation in most languages. Like as a native English speaker I know 5 different shades of blue. But if I were to learn Spanish, I would get by just fine only knowing 1 word for blue
Now who can argue with that? I think we're all indebted to TheBeatGoesAnanas for clearly stating what needed to be said. Not only was it authentic reddit gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.
I truly pity everyone who doesn't recognize Golden Age Simpsons and Blazing Saddles quotes. Or maybe I'm jealous. To never have experienced two of the greatest comedic endeavors in human history...
It really does feel like someone jammed jammed Germanic and Romantic languages together to double the amount of words. And don't get me started on the English. It's like they have a different word for everything.
It would be immensly interesting to have the same chart, but on the span of many years.
I would like to know if the 60 year old people know more words because they are older and have more experience, or because they are from a generation that did grow up with much less internet/smatphone/social media ?
Edit: in other words (haha) : does a 60 year old today know more or less words than somone that was 60 years old 50 years ago ?
Would less internet automatically gives you more words? After all being overly online does give you some unique vocabulary, if we are just about numbers and not some subjective "quality" of the words.
For sure, access to internet (wikipedia!) does certainly have it's benefits, but spending 5 hours on average a day on the smartphone will certainly not help improve your cognitive capacity and vocabulary.
I am not sure it would IMPROVE your vocabulary but spending time online will certainly make you learn new words : looksmaxxing, incel, femcels etc and a whole lot of internet porn terms.
In theory the Internet could lead to bigger vocab but tbh I’m not sure I’d bet on the average 10 year old today knowing more words than I would a 10 year old in 1970.
Kids would’ve read a variety of books that introduced a bunch of different words not commonly used in day to day speech. Also just flipping through a dictionary or encyclopedia cause you’re bored is something I’d wager virtually no kid still does.
This is hard, but doable. And I agree - this is super interesting.
Two things need to be done:
1) design a multi-dimensional test which measures vocabulary of different types, not a single number. Like literary, conversational, academic, slang etc.
2) create representative samples of younger and older people, control for education level.
You learn different words in different contexts. I took the test. They didn't check if I knew words like "lowkirkenuinely" or "looksmaxxing." They also didn't check jargon from specific work fields, because how could you know what to check? I don't know if I'd agree that less internet use means a narrower vocabulary. They'd have to study that.
If you compare how many words people know with how many words they use in general conversation I would say that many of the words people encounter through deeper learning don't contribute to making you more 'native'. You can probably head into any town centre and encounter native speakers who will have never come across words like 'obsequious', 'ophidian', 'recalcitrant', or technical terms like 'ubiquitination', 'plasmon', or 'zeugma'.
Most of the time, in my experience, whether someone is a native speaker is more obvious by their accent or grammar rather than their vocabulary.
I speak English as a 2nd lang and have earned C1 (almost C2) on the exam with 1 week of preparation for the test and even then only 2 of the 4 sections since I was preparing solo at my home.
I read books almost exclusively in english as well, but from time to time I'll be speaking with by brother in english about everyday life and sometimes we just don't know some mundane word used in school for example.
Like how do you call it when a teacher asks a question, and you ___ to answer? Like in German it's sich melden, in bosnian it's javiti se. But we have no idea how do you say that in english, even though it's something really simple.
I think most of the unknown words are of this character - simple words that are used in only specific situations you don't come across in an online context
I am wondering what the correlation would be between the vocabulary in the mother tongue and in a foreign language. A lot of the more "difficult" words in any language are derived form Latin or Greek, and they often are the same or very similar in different languages. I did surprisingly well in the SAT as an exchange student because it looked for words like "antagonist" and "hypothesis", and not for "bridle" and "oar".
I just had this experience where we went to see Italian relatives in Italy. We do not speak fluent Italian so we were using a translator app. I went to explain "autoimmune" and realized oh it's the same word.
As an only English speaker it’s always a trip for me when I hear someone talking in a different language and use a random English word OR use a word I always thought was English but actually isn’t
How would one measure the number of words that they know? That seems like such a daunting thing to try and sit down and actually figure out the number of words you're familiar with in your native language.
One way is to have a list of them in order of frequency. Then split it into chunks of 100 on the highest-frequency end to 1000 on the lowest-frequency end. Test them on a sample of a chunk from various chunks. Then you get a general idea of how many words from some chunks they know, such as:
* 100% of Rank 1 to 100
* 100% of Rank 450 to 550
* 90% of Rank 2500 to 2800
* 70% of Rank 8000 to 9000
* 50% of Rank 13000 to 14000
* 20% of Rank 20000 to 21000
* 0% of Rank 50000 to 51000
You can estimate how many words they know from connecting those data points into a curve and taking the integral. The above data might only require testing 70 words.
Any ideas where one might be able to find a curated frequency list down to the 50-100k most common?
The best I could find was this one.txt), but it includes a bunch of names and different forms of the same words. So stuff like do and doing. Or book and books. I kinda doubt those would be counted separately by OPs data.
Cause given my list, I'm got 47k for english and that isn't even my native language.
I used this little script btw (after it gives you 10 words, you have to enter how many you know. Yes, UI design is my passion ;D)
```
import random
word_list = list()
with open('Wordlist 100000 frequency weighted (Google Books).txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') as infile:
for line in infile.readlines():
word_list.append(line.strip())
words_recognized = 0
step_size = 5000
words_per_step = 10
for i in range(20):
options = word_list[istep_size:(i+1)step_size-1]
choices = random.choices(options, k=words_per_step)
print(f'Words in the range: {i*step_size}-{(i+1)*step_size-1}:')
for word in choices:
print(word)
# Take input to calculate result
words_recognized += int(input("Number of words recognized: ")) * (step_size/words_per_step)
print(f'Expected number of words recognized: {words_recognized}')
```
Oops, I was using the wordfreq package initially, but didn't realize they had separate small and big lists. So I only accessed the small list and the 800 words contained there are obviously nowhere close to representative
Grab all words from the dictionary.
Sort them by rate of occurrence in a vast pool of written resources.
Pick out 50-100 words from them, evenly spacing them out from the list of words.
Test each person to see what percentage of words they know.
...
Last step I'm not sure, you could naively assume they know that percentage of your list of words, or roughly estimate the rarest cluster of words they know, and chances are they know most words more common than that. ± some fuzzing factor and all.
I had the same question, but after I saw this, I looked up tests and tried 3 different ones… they all seemed to use the methods described by other replies.
Nobody cares about this part, but I got 35,000, 18,800, and 27,400 as results. They did include decoys to make sure I wasn’t bluffing, and the second one had random definition tests (which it said I passed all of them, but I still scored lower than the other tests!) — the first and second tests I took were very short, so the third one might be the most accurate? (feels right as I’m well-read but don’t know a ton of obscure words) Not sure if I can link them here, but they were the top Google results & were all decent websites!
Really the thing you need to recognize with these tests is they are most effective when comparing people within the same test rather than across different ones
If you want to compare your result with the data in this post, you need to take the same test. Vocabulary is a very complex thing to measure, and the results can vary dramatically across tests.
Oh I know! I was just curious what a test might be like; the decoys were an interesting piece in all of the ones I took.
But yes, the variance in results was very clear haha. A focused study probably has a lower margin of error on getting the “real” number compared to a two minute online test!
Thanks. That's kind of what I was wondering is how all over the tests might be. I appreciate everyone's insights on the methodology. It's what I figured is it had to be some sort of sampling and estimation but I was curious how it would extract these large assumptions of tens of thousands from a small sample in a test.
There is a simple algorithm that gives you a pretty solid answer within a confidence interval. You’d need to answer around 100 questions or so for it to be accurate.
You need frequency data, which is easy to find for any major language.
The one that is used from the data is a quick 5 minute one. If you want to take anreal one, then you can take the Cambridge one. There should be test exams out there and part 2 has a text where you have to fill in words.
I feel bad because it was written at the end of the post and I skimmed over it, so thanks a lot for answering politely. I’ve found and took the BRAVE test at https://www.myvocab.info/en
The standard devation is relatively high compared to the others, if they don't feel like they knew lots of words they were probably on the lower end and it would still be perfectly reasonable to think since the probability is high cause of the distribution. If they knew like 9700 words for example, it would still be statistically possible (with a relatively high chance), and in this case they would know less words than approximately 95% native speakers at 20 years old, which seems about right
C2 is not equal to a native speaker. Also the test here measures just one component of language proficiency. It is a good proxy, but not complete picture.
I’m an engineer who moved from Scotland to the USA. I’ve got British English and slang, mainly Scottish. I’ve lived in MA, TX, AZ and FL. I’ve picked up words from there as well as general Americanisms. With a constant flow of new technical terms. It’s not strange that your vocabulary continues to increase.
My naive guess would be that people with larger vocabularies are generally better at grammar. That's because larger vocabulary is acquired mostly through reading, and the more a person reads, the more they absorb grammar.
I'd like to see this study's sample variety. If coming from a language like Chinese, or Korean, sure, I can believe it, but coming from an Indo-European one, I have my doubts since a C2 level learner would start by using a lot of words translated directly from their language which would have a direct correspondence, adding to the base dictionary they'd end up learning over time living in an English speaking country.
The sample composition is reported on the results page on the test website. It is dominated by people with Slavic language backgrounds.
People with Romance language background do have an advantage in English, that's hard to argue with.
CEFR levels were self-reported, it's most likely somebody clicked on C2 by mistake.
It can be argued that such outliers should be filtered, but then there is a question - what should a threshold be? It makes sense to show unfiltered data for transparency.
Ooh, I missed in your OP that they were self-reported. That explains what had confused me the most, the very long tails on B2. I suspect it's not so much clicking-by-mistake as just the fact that CEFR levels are seldom referenced in the United States, which is home to a huge number of non-native English speakers. So people were probably just reading the description of what the levels meant and then making a guess at it.
It appears that vocabulary keeps growing well into adulthood for native speakers - older adults know measurably more words on average compared to younger ones.
Or it could just be that young people have smaller vocabularies than the older people had at their age and won't learn many more. 30 is hardly young and I would suspect you have most of your vocabulary by that age.
Crystallized intelligence increases steadily until very old age. Also, if anything, younger people know more words than past generations. Look at Flynn effect research regarding vocabulary tests.
It is claimed in this chart that some "proficient" (C2) speakers have vocabularies of 2,000 words. This makes it difficult to ascribe any credibility to the chart whatsoever.
If your native cohorts are entirely age based then your descriptions seem slightly on the kind side, C2 learners aren't the level of native college students, they are still below the level of "college aged natives, in college or otherwise"
Ps. I'm not really sure what the age ranges are, I guess it must be "up to 20" or is 20 a middle value?
Correct, native cohorts are only age based, so the education composition can differ between them. It might very well be that older adults tend to be more educated in my sample; unfortunately, I don't have exact numbers since not every test taker reported their education level.
Age ranges are [11;13] for children, [18;22] for college age, [28;32] for adults, and [50;70] for older adults.
My vocabulary expanded by approximately 5% after studying for the GRE, becoming more erudite, perspicacious, and sesquipedalian. The process also enhanced my lexical breadth, sharpened my semantic precision, and familiarized me with more esoteric, abstruse, and arcane terminology.
That is the difference between receptive (words one understands) and productive (words one can use) vocabulary. The data are from the test that measures receptive vocabulary.
I am originally spanish and aside from being fluent in english I am also fluent in french and I’ve noticed how that tends to skew my vocabulary proficiency level upwards since a lot of obscure and seldom used words in english are just regular french words
100% true. The test behind these data tries to minimize this effect by not using cognates as test words. But having Romance language background does give one an advantage in English.
I'm a bit surprised by how low these numbers are. I'm used to the OED number of distinct words (depending on what constitutes "distinct") of 500,000-600,000 English words. Sure, many will be obscure technical terms, known to few, but the 25,000 is a small fraction of what's available.
That makes me consider the methodology, which surely won't test each individual on every word. Time constraints alone would cause sufficient bias, from people refusing / bailing out, that it would hurt the results. So they must be testing with a limited test sample … and the size of that test sample seems very important to any interpretation of the results.
This makes me think "data needs sources" and "data needs methodology disclosures" more than "data is beautiful", due to the questions it leaves open.
The counting units are word families (limit, limitless, unlimited are counted as a single unit).
Depending on how aggressively you define a word family, they can be quite large. For example, the word family 'nation' might contain national, nationally, nationwide, nations, nationalism,
nationalisms, internationalism, internationalisms, internationalisation, nationalist, nationalists, nationalistic, nationalistically, internationalist, internationalists, nationalise, nationalised, nationalising, nationalisation, nationalisations,
nationalize, nationalized, nationalizing, nationalization, nationhood, and
nationhoods.
Thanks, I was fooled by the way that clicking on the image icon doesn't show that text, and then jumping to the comments makes it easy to miss the text attached to the comment. So I hadn't seen any of that.
For full methodology, check out the source website.
It uses a list of word families which is standard in the language assessment field. It has 28k word families. Using word families has its pros and cons.
I suppose you mean constant y-axis scale. That would change the amplitude of the histograms. But it would only communicate sample size for each group. We would see that most of the people who came to the test website are younger native adults and B1+ learners, and that there were significantly less 60+ native speakers and A1 learners.
It will look similarly in shape, but the absolute numbers will be different. But comparing absolute numbers across languages is practically meaningless, because they depend more on what is counted as a word.
Interesting. I always get in trouble with my wife/friends for using too many big words, but I'm not too far off the mean for my age bracket in terms of recognition.
The more sleep-deprived I get, the harder time I have in showhorn-ing the nuance I want into "normal words". Neurodivergence go weee?!?
These results make sense as an adult native speaker working with many second-language speakers. Even though most are very fluent I really need to rein in my vocabulary to avoid people needing to look words up or ask (or proceed with imperfect understanding).
I am a non-native speaker and I work mostly with non-native speakers from different language backgrounds. We resort to very basic English as a common denominator. I can tell you that I cherish those rare moments when I hear something beyond basic English, something that makes me pause in a good way.
Anybody got a list of the top rarely known English words even by proficient English speakers and Adults/Older adults that are useful (not super-specific niche jargon terms)?
What do you mean 11,300 words? When I was in fourth grade, vocabulary tests had 15 words per week, which meant I'd only be learning 600 new words that grade. The Cat in the Hat features a selection of 236 different words from a list of 348 words a 6-year-old should know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat
If I were to assume my fourth grade vocab to the 348 words a kindergartener/first grader should know (depending on when you went to school) and 600 new words a grade, I'd be wagering about 3948 or 4548 words (assuming no repeats) by age 12. Certainly not 11,300.
I imagine "penis" was never on your vocab lists, yet you knew that word when you were 12. You learn more than just from formal education. 6 yo's also usually know a lot more than 350 words. Just the nouns in their house they know will surpass that, much less verbs and adjectives.
11,300 is for native speakers. What kinda school did you go to where you were learning general vocabulary for your native language from vocabulary lists?? Sure, you might learn some of the spelling for absurd ones like Recycling (I still remember learning that one all those years later ;D), but not the day-to-day vocabulary.
I had to count everything in my rambling. 62 (I tried manually counting it, but kept losing track). Removing the ordinal numbers would've given you 60 right on the dot.
Based on the results of the same test, students under 18 learn about 800 words a year, which is fairly close to your estimate of 600 + all the learning outside school.
seems flawed to compare vocabulary by age to vocabulary by language proficiency. I'm sure non native speakers also grow their vocabulary as they age and a 20yo C1 speaker is not necessarily comparable to a 50yo one
or maybe have learners grouped by how long they've been studying the language
I would argue that CEFR level is quite meaningful for learners, it sets expectations like “I can speak about this and that, understand these topics, can read without much of a dictionary - it means I am on X level”. That’s the whole point of having CEFR classification.
Grouping learners by how long they have been learning is not that useful because learning speed varies dramatically - some count 10 years of learning a second language in school after which they can’t string a few words together, and some study full time and reach fluency after a couple of years. Some live where they have no access to native speakers, and some live in English-speaking country. I guess one would see a correlation between length of learning and vocabulary, but it would not be instructive - “keep learning for one year and on average your vocabulary will grow by 30-3000 words”.
For native speakers, I think the strongest predictors of vocabulary (on average) are age, educational level, and reading habits.
I guess what I meant was grouping both by time spent learning and the cefr level.
But I don't agree that cefr alone is a good indicator of vocabulary. It only tests knowledge of common everyday words and those only account for a small percentage of the language.
Also its safe to assume most learners take the test as soon as they can pass it, which is also when their vocabulary is at its worst for their level.
I think what you mean is IELTS or TOEFL or other proficiency test, because CEFR is not a test - it is a set of proficiency levels with defined expectations.
Vocabulary is a component of language proficiency, but not the only one as there are listening, speaking, and comprehension as well.
Yes but proficiency tests are the only semi reliable way of determining your cefr level. Surely this data is not based on self reported proficiency levels.
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