alt Hacker NewsHow many of the 170k English words do you know?
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Picking max(len(answer)) is the right choice almost every time at the higher level..
This reminds me of a learning resource that I can't find again: you start with an assessment of how many words you know and then you get new words in context with every session (and maybe some spaces repetition). It was mostly from newspaper articles and catered for every level of English. It was a website (ca 2013), not an app. Any ideas?
“You mastered 98 new words! THE VERDICT
You are a person of few words, or perhaps just a mysterious one. Quite intriguing.”
—- This sounds more like a cute assessment of only getting two words right. And what do you mean “new words”? It wasn’t until eighty-odd words in that I actually got a word I didn’t know and had to guess by ruling out multiple-choice options.
Gave it a try and got 78 correct out of 100, so it extrapolated it to me knowing about 55k+ words and saying most native speakers only get 15k - 35k...Interesting
Haha, just pick the longest option and it will be right 90% of the time.
I used to do this in school tests too.
Was excited to take the test, even at 100 words, until I realized I had to manually click every input.
Test could be completed in 1/5 of the time if the user could use numeral keys [1, 2, 3, 4] plus "enter" to input selections instead of the cursor.
I wish the option was just “yes I know this word” or “no I don’t”. Reading the definitions takes too long for so many words
Fun idea, I've been wanting to create something similar to track which vocab words I have mastered. Two nits: (1) no need for a "check" button as other commenters have noted and (2) the UI jitters a bit when submitting answers for each question - it's a bit disorienting!
Major flaw in the quiz: you can do great by just picking the longest definition.
Desperately needs a skip button for words I don't know.
The sampling needs to be smarter than make me pick the meanings of 100 words. If I get the first two correct, it should skyrocket the difficulty and assume I’m okay with the easy words, not make me sit through more.
The option with more words appears to be the correct answer for each question.
Pick the longest answer, you’re right 97% of the time.
This is true of any LLM-generated quiz.
I have recently worked on the same kind of similar quiz for German.
However I have some other ideas and my quiz isn't "science based"
- in my quiz there are only "yes / no answers" This way you don't spend eternity reading descriptions of the word "apple". It also means I can estimate separately my passive and active vocabulary.
The OP missing "I don't know button" which will overestimate any result by 25% percent.
- I'm adjusting dynamically how many questions to ask in each bucket.
the goal of my quiz is to estimate a number of German words an English speaking learner has learned.
So I have curated vocabulary to remove "free words" like rare compounds of common words and other rare words which satisfy "any European knows this word without learning".
The final vocabulary used in a quiz is approx 8k words only
Interesting but tiring, I gave up the first time, but was curious because of the comments here and tried again, without much attention and taking some breaks. On my device I had to scroll to reach the “next” button.
Super fun, got 70,250. Friends have always lightly ribbed me for having to go home and look up words i've used. Those remaining 100k words must be really obscure.
One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.
Some of the definitions offered are slightly short of what I expect. Like for "Obsequious" it offers "obedient to an excessive or servile degree" which isn't wrong, but it misses the expression of a sort of noisy eagerness in that servility.
I got 70,750 which is much higher than I expected. The early words were obvious. However, a lot of the later questions I could only answer because they were multiple choice. If I had to actually come up with a definition, I suspect my score would be much lower.
It might be nice if you could unlock a "hard mode" or ability to the first 1-3 levels after a first run. I scored a little over 81K and considered playing again because I like quizzes, but doing another batch of (to me) easy words seemed like a waste.
I think that this needs an application of Bayes Rule against the ¼ chance I guessed and got it right by luck.
I notice that the concept related to the right answer sometimes has an opposite counterpart.
The UX is awful - I bailed out at 25/100 JUST IN LEVEL ONE (BASICS)
Might I suggest adaptive difficulty? After getting 10, 15, 20 correct in a row it should scale up the difficulty immediately, rather than waiting for 100 in the basic level 1...
This is great. I look forward to going through it after some of the suggested tweaks are applied! 100 seems daunting though.
I got an estimate of 70,550, from a score of 87/100 (20/18/16/17/16). Not native English speaker.
I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.
Apparently I am Stephen Fry in disguise :D
My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.
apparently 54,000. Seems like it is including even fictional words though in this test (like from fiction novels). Ironically I scored higher on the expert words (18/20) than the "advanced" words (11/20)
Did the first 25, got all correct, got bored.
It needs some kind of auto adjusting difficulty...
This dearly needs a "Don't know" or a "Skip" option.
Also, as others have said, mixing easy and difficult words would make the process less boring.
For anyone who wants to take a real scaled vocabulary test, you can't beat the one given with Johnson O'Connor's aptitude tests.
I got 97/100 (80.5k) by picking the answer that has no relation to the word. Most of the incorrect answers bore some relation to the word, whether that be phonetic or a similarity to a root word.
I got too many Greek words which obviously I got them right( guess why). does this qualify me as someone good at English words and their meaning?
I got 84/100 right. Their "Scientific Estimate" was that I know 65,300 words.
Please move the continue button closer to the options. I had to make my window smaller to avoid having to run between them with the mouse.
Also add a keyboard focus state on the continue button.
43000.. It says I am a person of few words, and albeit true, I actually thought I did well... Until to started doing some crazy words...
It told me to read the dictionary.
76250, or 93/100. Native English speaker from London. Some of the last 10 words were seriously obscure.
Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!
70k, which I believe is a fine result for a second language.
multiple choice is a cheat. the real test is whether you can define the word without seeing a menu of options to pick from.
I ran through it twice, first time 91 second time 90, score: 69,500. Midwit confirmed.
This is something that could be done for other languages, word lists are easy.
I’m not sure how you’d gauge what knowing each word would indicate.
Also adequate options, that sound plausible.
Literally when I got to advanced and beyond just picking the longer and more complicated looking answer was the right one. I think this test is extremely flawed.
Some felt too easily guessable. Too many joke answers maybe?
Not native English speaker (Norwegian), score: 55500.
But many of the hard words were quite similar to more common words we have here.
88/100, scores were 20/20/18/14/16. Born & raised in western Canada fwiw.
I got 4 wrong but also I was getting weary and I made a couple of bad clicks.
Needs keyboard support ASAP. Using the mouse for something like this is a waste of time.
All the 3 incorrect answers are just indirect opposites of the correct one.Quite easy to determine which is correct, even without knowing the word
Nice. I want one in Spanish so I can compare results.
Not sure what this is measuring. I did 30-40 words and got bored because the words are really basic. There's no challenge here. Not even a fun 5 minute game. These are basic English words, nothing extraordinarily hard to understand.