Here’s a test on English vocabulary that I swiped from seminarist‘ journal. You said you loved the challenge, huh? Try it.
I’ll tell you my score: I got 31,300 (74percentile), but it turns out I misremembered the meaning of 2 words (that I recall, there might be more), so 30,000 is probably closer to the truth.
The last column, in particular, gave me most grief: only terpsichorean was recognizable. Shame!
The Results
[envy/
But of course! Who else would know all those words in the last column!?
/ envy]
I have to admit, the very last column was a killer. If they had really wanted to make people look ignorant though, they should have just cribbed from William F. Buckley’s Word-of-the-Day calendars. Supposedly he once used a word in one of his columns that isn’t even in the OED. Do you know what “vapulate” means? I didn’t.
Not only “vapulate”, I didn’t know what “pule” was. And I took “potboiler” for “potbelly” and confidently checked it.
Their conclusions should be surrounded with disclaimers, though. No every young native would know half of their words, only a native who reads rather than plays games. I very much doubt my son would recognize “mawk”.
30,400. Hmmph. The test is kind of weird. The first page, the first three columns were all simple, common words, but the last column just went off into la-la land. I wonder if some those words are not even real words, they were just added to trip up those who think they know it all. Anyway, it looks like we are about on par, for English anyway, but since you also see to know Russian, you are way ahead of me. I did study French & Spanish in school, but I only know a few words in each.
Ah, Charles, it’s all passive vocabulary. It has to do with the way English was taught in Soviet school system: the goal was “read and translate”, not “understand speech and converse”. Besides, my memory is not what it used to be. I forget simplest words – like the other day:for hours I couldn’t remember “trip over”. Gave up and looked into online translator – but it said “stumble” and I knew that wasn’t it; it drove me crazy.
Sadly, same story started to happen with my Russian – which I spoke exclusively till I was 30.
Alas, all those words are real words. I checked…but immediately forgotten their meaning!
“… English was taught in Soviet school system…” !?!? I never considered the possibility. They certainly didn’t offer Russian in my high school, they only offered French & Spanish. The school my kids went to was a little larger. They offered French, Spanish, German & Japanese. Still no Russian.
But of course. America was (and is, I hear) 1) “potential enemy on battlefield” and 2) subject of envy and mimicking. Both. Officially we were told that English is an international language of commerce and science, hence its priority in Foreign Languages departments.
Our choices in school were English, German, French, in that order. Only very few specialized schools offered Spanish and none Latin.
In my mom’s school time Deutch was the first choice.
It’s funny, because I immediately thought of the adjective “mawkish” when I saw that word. Apparently, it’s a maggot.
Yeah, where’s the connection?!…and,
“adumbrate”? Srsly?
“Srsly”? Seriously?
yep, it’s the “texting generation” abbreviation
Heh. There’s a now defunct message board I used to belong to that had a thread entitled “Srsly” in its Entertainment Forum. Very amusing.
I think I know “adumbrate” from Shakespeare. Either that, or from all of the Latin classes I took in high school.
Gerard, you are a superior being. Titan of Thought (c),
hehe, I have not even tried, I do not know what does terpsichorean mean :)
I’m sure you do, with your Hermitage education. Terpsichore, muse of dancing! try it, don’t be shy
39,500. Of course, the fact that I’m a I’m a scientist so I know some of the Latin roots that other people might not maybe makes some difference. And the fact that I pretty much spent from age 4 to age 18 or so with my nose immersed in a book, often a book a couple grade-levels above me.
I will say with some pride that I’m >95% percentile…
And your pride is justified! Wow.
Yeah, I noticed several French-root and many Latin/Greek ones, but alas -not the ones I could recognize.
My nose was exactly in the same place at the same age, Erica – but apparently I was not paying attention to the right things
35800 here. Considering you are multilingual and English is not your first language, I’d consider comparing scores is pretty unfair to you. After all, home court advantage has some bearing, and I can guarantee you I’d fail miserably at any other language.
I was a pretty voracious reader as a child and teen living on a farm away from my peers’ society during the summers. I picked up quite a bit – I was the county spelling bee champ two out of three times.
The testers may not feel that they’ve got enough data, but it surely appears they’re on to something.
Aww, crap, but the hash tag on the wrong side in the closing tag in the previous post! HTML fail!
Jeffro, life is fundamentally unfair anyway. Nobody cuts me any slack in a workplace (or if/when I take the IQ test…), why this should be any different? You might fail in any other language – but that’s because you don’t practice it and don’t live in that language-dominated space. I am a resident of US for close to 19 years and I am an American citizen for half that time. English is a must for me, a matter of survival if not advancement.
See, that’s another difference between circumstances of my childhood and yours: in Russia and Ukraine, despite 70 years of Soviet rule and untold amounts of government money spent on universal education, the access to that education has been and remains unequal. The parallel situation to what you describe could not happen in Russia: a child in a rural farm somewhere in Siberia having all the books he ever wants to read. Of course, there is probably a school library, but it contains only what’s required by uniform reading lists, deemed suitable for children in far-away Ministry. There is no internet, and the closest bookstore is in 6-7 hrs of driving…besides, what is on the shelves in that bookstore?
Don’t worry about tags, if they are wrong I will fix them from behind the scenes.
[welcome to Pavillion. Glad to see you here]
Yeah, life is unfair. Doesn’t mean I can’t notice it. And the idea that a library wouldn’t carry a wide variety of material had never occurred to me, but of course it has to be that way in a repressive society.
I know I’ve been extremely fortunate being born in this particular place and time, but it sure doesn’t hurt to be reminded. I find it difficult to imagine how I’d have felt as a kid searching for his next fix at a library and not having anything there to assuage the hunger for further exploration.
And actually, I was certainly on no quest for knowledge or self improvement – reading was a means of escape and entertainment. The side effects were considerable. I and so many others do indeed owe a great debt to Andrew Carnegie.
It’s not so much a matter of oppression as indifference. There is no specific local property tax, as in US, where 90% of it go to local school. The money for school libraries come from Ministry of Education of the whole region (size of a state) centrally; naturally they have limited resources and allocate them according to size of population unit. Bigger town -> more funds ->bigger library. Other public libraries’ funds come from different ministries, with the same rationale.
At least that’s how it was at the time of my childhood. Don’t know how it is organized now.
I was lucky that my parents always moved to places with libraries and bookstores and generally encouraged learning/reading. I had class buddies who were not as fortunate.
Dumb test. Just check every single word and you’ll get over 41k
Only if you are a cheater.