Assessment of the number of learned and memorized words of a foreign language is primarily interesting for understanding how far a person has progressed in "passive" perception of information: texts, speech, films, etc. I suggest that you familiarize yourself with several methods that I used, found on the net and "homemade". Below are a couple of vocabulary tests, a technique for finding important words that have not yet caught on in the brain, some reasoning and some links.

Online tests

Of the many word count tests, I liked two. A couple of years ago, I came across a fairly simple Test Your Vocabulary. Going through three screens with words, you check the boxes that (as you think) you know, and then you get an estimate of the total number of words learned. Many of my acquaintances complained about its inadequacy - they received less quantity than "the one about which I know for sure that he knows worse." But during the passage, there may be a mistake of a different kind - it seems that you know the word, but in fact you have already forgotten. They say that the hand itself reaches out to put a tick next to a word that seems vaguely familiar, so you can subconsciously overestimate your overall assessment.

You know at least 10,500 English word families!

What do my results mean?

In general, there is no minimum vocabulary size. Language ability is related to vocabulary size, so the more words you know, the more you will be able to understand. However, if you want to set a learning goal, Paul Nation "s (2006) research suggests that the following sizes might be useful:

How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?
Skill Size estimate Notes
Reading 8,000 - 9,000 word families Nation (2006)
Listening 6,000 - 7,000 word families Nation (2006)
Native speaker 20,000 word families Goulden, Nation, & Read (1990)
Zechmeister, Chronis, Cull, D'Anna, & Healy (1995)

What is a word family?

There are many different forms of a word, so this test measures your knowledge of the most basic form of a word and assumes that you can recognize the other forms. For example, nation, a noun, can also be an adjective (national), a verb (nationalize), or an adverb (nationally). There are also forms which can be made with an affix such as de- or -ing which also modify the way that the word is used or adds to the basic meaning. For a test of receptive vocabulary knowledge such as this one, word families are considered to be the most accurate way of counting words.

Frequency dictionaries

After registering at www.wordfrequency.info, you can download the excelnik of the American English frequency dictionary. There is also a text version.

Like this:

Rank Word Part of speech Frequency Dispersion

1 the - a 22038615 0.98
2 be - v 12545825 0.97
3 and - c 10741073 0.99
4 of - i 10343885 0.97
5 a - a 10144200 0.98
6 in - i 6996437 0.98
7 to - t 6332195 0.98
8 have - v 4303955 0.97
…
…
4996 immigrant - j 0.97
4997 kid - v 5094 0.92
4998 middle-class - j 5025 0.93
4999 apology - n 4972 0.94
5000 till - i 5079 0.92

The file contains 5000 English words, sorted by frequency of occurrence. The frequency was counted on a huge heterogeneous array of English texts. I recently saw a friend of mine looking for words he didn’t know, checking his vocabulary... After looking through the first 500, I did not find any unknowns. He showed the extract on his smartphone - about a dozen words from the second thousand (that is, from 1000 to 2000) and about 20 from the third. It's funny that, walking down the list, you come across sequences of words that are successfully added to phrases or even short sentences. The logic is very simple - if the word is very common according to statistics, and you do not know it, then it is better to learn and see examples of use.

After reading the list of words unknown to him (already with translation), I saw the following thing. I knew about 50-60% of these unknown words to him, but some of the meanings of the translations recorded there were unknown to me, there were several words completely unknown to me.
In general, the site is trying to be commercial, they sell lists of more than 5000 in length, but this is not so interesting anymore.

So far, this friend of mine is writing a program with a user-friendly interface for searching for unknown words - for educational purposes. I suggested that he use not this list for a global assessment, but a thinned one: every seventh word from the total list of 60,000 words is given. In fact, even watching the first couple of thousand drives you into despondency, not everyone will get to 5000. Although I do not presume to say 100%, the thinned dictionary will surely show at least one word from the "family", and the time will be spent, respectively, 7 or 10 times less (depending on the frequency of decimation).
By the way, such frequency dictionaries of the Russian language contain about 160 thousand words, including abbreviations and abbreviations. There are several different, similar "corpora" of English words from different organizations.

I'm interested in another question: how accurate are the tests that give an estimate of the number of words you know? It is possible that this could be determined just by checking the frequency dictionary, as well as comparing the list of selected unknown words - their number and occurrence in different "families".

There is general laws remembering and forgetting. One of the main things: if a person has learned something and does not repeat, does not use, the information is forgotten exponentially from time to time. On the other hand, a few repetitions lengthens, stretches the falling exponent to an acceptable level. I was very surprised when an acquaintance who worked as a tutor for schoolchildren told me that there is a sequence of time intervals for deep memorization: say, after 20 minutes, then after 8 hours, another day, etc., after which the information is firmly planted in the brain ... That is, the brain provides a statistically maximum level of the excitation signal when it encounters this information.

Ebbinghaus Curve, from Wikipedia.

How I learned words at the institute.

Without taking into account the standard course, where the requirements for the first three years were quite strict, I tried to read fiction. The first big book was Conan Doyle's old Soviet edition, The Lost World. I don’t know how much it was adapted, but there was an abundance of Victorian words and expressions in the text, and this greatly delayed progress towards the end ... I quickly got tired of every new word. Tablets were not common then, pocket electronic translators are an expensive rarity, so I worked out a paper system for myself. In a thick 96-sheet notebook, the spread was divided into 6 columns. Now I tried to find a notebook - I got lost. We'll have to describe in words. Divided the alphabet into groups of letters, for example - a..d, e..f, g..j, k..n, o..q, r..t, u..w, x..z. Approximately, by eye, I estimated the statistical percentage of words that begin with these letters and divided the columns in the spread into rectangles. For example, group a..d gave 2/3 of the first column, and so on. Group x..z was assigned the last remaining smallest piece in the 6th column. Then everything is simple. Met an unknown word - enter it with the translation in the desired rectangle. Nothing that is inside the block is not alphabetically - it will not take long to find. To get the translation while lying on the bed, you need to go into the book dictionary. That is, the value of receiving a translation is quite large, more than now look at Lingua or an online translator like

Vocabulary test Puzzle English

A quick way to check vocabulary is Puzzle English test. In general, Puzzle English specializes in developing listening comprehension skills through audio exercises, videos, TV series. But for listening, you need, of course, some kind of minimum vocabulary.

You will be given a list of 96 words and asked to check the box which you know. I advise you to mark only those words that you recognize instantly and without hesitation. There is no need to choose or write the correct answer - they take their word for it, but from time to time there is a test of honesty - you need to choose correct option of the four suggested to confirm that you are not cheating on the virtual teacher.

At the end, you will learn not only the vocabulary, but also the honesty index - the program assesses how honest you were with it. If you re-pass the test, the words in the assignment will be different.

I passed the test for fun 3 times. The first and second results were about 11-12 thousand words each, and the third time I specifically answered all the questions correctly, peeping into the dictionary, and they gave me as much as 29 248 words and a 94% honesty index (apparently, the mustachioed uncle suspected something was wrong) ... 29,000 is, of course, an unrealistic figure, it is believed that an average native speaker knows about 20,000 words, but if you do not cheat and mark only those words that you recognize without hesitation, then the result is quite true. The next two tests confirmed this.

LinguaLeo word knowledge test

Of course, we must not forget that vocabulary is only one of the components of language proficiency. Even simple text will not be understandable if you have no idea about grammar.

P. S .: How to determine your level of English

If you are wondering which one you have level of knowledge of English language , it is not enough to measure vocabulary and pass the grammar test, you need to comprehensively assess speech skills (reading, listening, writing and oral speech). For more information on how to find out your level of English, see.

Test control is one of the most popular forms of English language proficiency testing. Undeniable benefits tests - the speed and ease of assessing knowledge, as well as the obligatory presence of keys (correct answers) to them.

English vocabulary tests can be:

a) to determine the number of vocabulary units in your passive and active vocabulary;

b) to determine the acquired vocabulary on any topic.

Let us give examples of some online tests.

Test http://testyourvocab.com/ allows you to determine your vocabulary. It consists of two compulsory parts: the first determines the mastery of the general vocabulary of the English language, the second - the special one. On average, non-native English speakers score between 2,500 and 9,000 words, while native speakers score between 20,000 and 35,000 words.

Why know your vocabulary? The answer is very simple: each level of language proficiency corresponds to the approximate number of words that need to be learned. So, for the levelBeginner- this is 500-600 words... In order for the language level to be close toElementary, the student needs to know about 1000 words.

Level	Word Count
Beginner	500-600
Elementary	1000
Pre-Intermediate	1500-2000
Intermediate	2000-3000
Upper-Intermediate	3000-4000
Advanced	4000-8000
Proficiency	more than 8000

Test http://www.efl.ru/tests/formal2informal-1/ will show you how well you know the colloquial vocabulary of British English. What 'comfy‘And how to dress if you’re invited to‘barbie‘You’ll learn by taking this fun test.

Next test http://www.efl.ru/tests/colours/ will help you better understand English colors and shades. In the first part, the knowledge of the colors of the main palette is tested, in the second, attention is paid to shades of colors, in the third part, the knowledge of English idioms containing the name of the color is trained. Why is it bad to get ‘pinkslip', and what is the color of the lie? You will find all the answers in this test.

Test How strong is your vocabulary? by Merriam - Webster consists of only 10 questions, the content of which is constantly changing. The test checks synonymous vocabulary at the advanced level, but it is thanks to it that you can significantly enrich your vocabulary.

Test MyVocabularySize It is distinguished, first of all, by its impressive size: it contains 140 questions. The test has an option to choose a language: when choosing Russian, you will need to choose the translation of the word given in the context; when choosing English, you find a synonym phrase.

On the site Quizlet.com presents a huge number of vocabulary tests created by teachers from all over the world. Some of them are based on vocabulary from English textbooks, which you probably study yourself. Other tests check the knowledge of special vocabulary, which can also be useful for those who want to deepen their knowledge.

A few tips for those looking to increase their vocabulary

1. Read in the original! Whether it's fiction, world news, culinary recipes, or advertisements, it doesn't really matter if you've gotten into the habit of working with a dictionary while reading. Each new word is another step towards learning English.

2. Work with a monolingual dictionary! Do not immediately, but gradually train yourself to abandon the usual "word-translation" scheme. Sometimes it is difficult to explain a concept, even in native language... However, when working with a monolingual (written in one language) dictionary, you have a chance to better understand the meaning of many words.

3. Learn words in context! While maintaining your personal dictionary, write down not individual lexical units, but phrases and sentences. Thus, your language will play faster with new, lively phrases.

Where to train vocabulary?

On the site LearnEnglishTeens there is an opportunity to practice words on a wide variety of topics. Each topic is presented at three language levels - from A 1 to B 1 - and is accompanied by five exercises.

On the site http://lengish.com/tests/vocabulary there are also exercises for training thematic vocabulary needed in everyday life.

Resource Merriam -Webster offers not only dictionaries and tests, but also a huge number of vocabulary exercises and games.

In conclusion, we invite you to take our vocabulary test based on vocabulary from New Headway Elementary.

1. If you… somebody, you take care of this person.

a) pay b) look after c) lose

2. My sister and I are very ... and we phone each other every evening.

a) happy b) independent c) close

3. How many languages ​​do you…?

a) speak b) say c) tell

4. This book is really ...!

a) interesting b) interested c) bored

5. I'm ... in reading books.

a) interesting b) interested c) bored

6. Hey! Let’s ... a cake!

a) do b) make c) mix

7. New York is older… London.

a) then a) of c) than

8. If the weather is bad, we can….

a) have a picnic a) go for a walk c) watch a dvd

9. Let’s go to the ... and buy some stamps.

a) library b) post office c) police office

10. How about having lunch?

a) I'll have some pizza and a coke. b) That sounds great! c) I can help you.

The keys to the test:

b	c	a	a	b	b	c	c	b	b

And finally, remember that objective can only be called a comprehensive knowledge assessment.

I use Puzzle-English as an additional learning source. I love the "songs" section very much, I hope it will be replenished! Even today I thought that it would be very interesting to take part in filling the service.
I also love the exercise section, alas, I rarely get to watch the training videos themselves, but I go through the tasks with pleasure! Thank you very much for your work!

Margarita,
26 years old, Moscow

• I really love to learn English, and the Puzzle English site is really the highest quality and most thoughtful resource that I have come across !!! Every time I feel a lot of gratitude to the creators and developers of the site for your work. Most of all I like working with listening and videos, and in general, the fact that it is possible to highlight any word and add it to its dictionary is, in my opinion, amazingly useful! Thank you very much!

  Violetta,
  36 years old, Rostov-on-Don

• I have been striving to master English for a long time. I need it for my studies and work. I went to courses, tried to study in various computer programs but the results were not encouraging. I learned about Puzzle-English on the Internet. I liked the project. I decided to try it. Having already passed 50 lessons (listening, videos, serials) I noticed that I began to understand English well enough by ear. It inspired me, because could almost independently understand lectures in English. In this, I believe, it was Puzzle-English that helped me a lot. I continue to study English in Puzzle-English further and I am sure that the results will be even better. It is interesting and exciting to do it. The authors are great! We approached the creation of the site creatively - from idea to practical implementation... I am glad that the guys do not stop there, but are constantly improving and developing services.

  Igor Vayzian,
  53 years old, Volzhsk

• I am a housewife, far from young, practically - of pre-retirement age and I DO NOT need English anymore, and for travel there is enough of a meager school and institute base, BUT - sov. Accidentally stumbling across the networks on the puzzle English site, plunged there with something unexpected for myself pleasure. I do not have a specific motive for learning the language, but almost every evening my hands are typing "Paz-In" and I go to lessons and exercises. The idea of ​​the sentence constructor is so fascinating that my daughter (9 years old) sits down at Peppa's pig herself and, now, for Muzzy and asks me not to prompt. Many thanks to the creators of the site, we are looking forward to new lessons and cartoons for girls. Good luck!

  Irina-yori,
  Moscow

• I mostly watch only TV shows, first with Russian, then English subtitles in headphones. I check new words in the EN-Ru dictionary. I like grammar exercises, a variety of videos. The main thing is to do it every day. I am trying to silently conduct a monologue in English, using new words from Puzzle English. I want to learn English more and more.

  Victor,
  55 years old, Togliatti

• I have been learning English for quite a long time, both on my own and with tutors. But this gave almost no visible results: either it was boring, or the approach to the study was not correct. But since I got acquainted with Puzzle-English, everything has changed. Thanks to this resource, in less than six months, I began to fluently understand spoken English and translate texts of average difficulty. Learning on this site is fun, fun and always accessible. The "Series" section turned out to be especially effective for me. I thank the developers of the site for such a wonderful resource and a great opportunity to finally learn English!

  Sergey,
  24 years old, Kharkiv

• In the evenings, I like to sit at Puzzle English. I love the play space that the site offers. I love to sing songs, although they often change and sometimes I don't even have time to memorize or write them down. I love children's songs, especially since their author is a very talented musician. I like a series of programs about who lives in London and how. This broadens the horizons and gives a lot of frequently used words, in different versions. I liked the videos about Buddha and the Angkor Wat temple complex, I love the series about travel. I liked the new Sherlock, the only thing I regretted was that there was no Poirot series with David Suchet. The songs are the best. I began to understand English by ear, although if it is not native speakers who speak, but Asians, Latin Americans, Indians, I still have difficulty understanding. For me, this is gurgling in the cauldron ... The vocabulary expanded and it was done playfully, without any tension. And I am just happy to learn English on this site.

  Hera,
  Minsk

• I fell in love with English for a long time back in my school years. Unfortunately, when I was studying, we developed reading skills, so after school I read at a fairly good level, I understand about 80% of what was written. And such important skills as listening comprehension and speaking speech, they practically did not teach at school, or taught in a limited number. I came across this site by chance for about 2 years and I liked it for its gradation teaching material for users with different skill levels. The audio clips presented at Puzzle English helped to significantly improve the listening comprehension of English speech, especially in films, because if you take news clips, the announcers speak very clearly there and my listening comprehension level reached 60-70% when watching such clips. when watching films, usually all my words merged into an almost continuous stream and only a few familiar words can be made out. By watching movies on this site and parsing them in detail by phrases. During the second, third viewing, you already hear these phrases and remember that they are And if you watch a movie at least 10 times, phrases are already spinning in your head and not only, you can say they fly off the tongue. Thanks to Alexander Antonov and his team for such a huge and necessary work, and most importantly, for a not very large annual fee

  Vladislav,
  42 years old, Kiev

• When I found out that in 5 years I would need a decent knowledge of English, I went on an exploration job on the Internet. It was in October 2012 and in English I was almost zero (basic reading rules, 3 easy tenses, 500 words of vocabulary as a result of all my previous attempts). After trying a bunch of sites, I ended up on Puzzle English ... And I fell in love ... that I found such a wonderful notion here that it was not necessary to study in the classical sense, but you could just play with the words, trying to put them in the correct order. And to help and translation right next to the word, and the voice acting right there, and cool, clear. It's great that the words are all in context and therefore are memorized much faster. And besides, videos ... After watching a bunch of the most different, I forever got rid of the fear of whether I would be able to express myself correctly in English, as I saw that straight people often use a fairly free structure of sentences. When the movie appeared, I already understood the series by 50%, and TED by almost 90%. In short, my results surpassed all my ideas about them. Recently I passed a test interview with teachers from the USA, which identified me as a strong Advanced. And yet 2 years have not yet turned from the moment I ended up on puz-eng. And all thanks to such a wonderful invention - not to study, but to PLAY puzzle folding. Super! Now I am sure that staying with you, in a couple of years I will become good at English. I wish you to grow and develop, and I wish you and me.

  Irina,
  37 years old, Lviv

• Thank you very much for your site. Working with your site is very useful for developing your listening ability. I have been learning English for many years, but English comprehension has been my main problem. After studying on your site, I made a big leap in this area and became much better at understanding English texts by ear. An important innovation of the site developers is interactive exercises - puzzles. They allow you not only to watch the video and read the subtitles, but to actively act, making up the listened sentences from the words. The selection of videos and films is very impressive. Personally, I especially like popular science documentaries, a large number of which is available on the site. In the future, I would like to see on your site the Friends series (at least its first episodes) and classic English detective stories (such as, for example, Inspector Morse or Inspector Lewis), as well as films in which you can hear correct and competent English speech ("Royal English"). Also in my opinion it would be helpful to create general table rating of site members so that they have the opportunity, showing activity, to compete with each other. I would like to wish the site developers further success and further development of this very useful undertaking.

  Alexander,
  54 years old, Moscow

• Huge THANKS to the entire Puzzle English team for such a wonderful project !! I studied English like everyone else: school, institute, even some courses at work, I tried many sites, but the result was not like that, something was "mumbled" there, and no more)). About 1.5 years ago I accidentally stumbled upon Puzzle English, then the site was still very young, but from the first visit it attracted attention, I will not dissemble, firstly, the price, in comparison with other sites, is VERY democratic, and secondly, such a variety of materials like in Puzzle English, I have not seen anywhere else - this is a large number of videos of different levels, grammar exercises, service series (a truly unique service). Thirdly, you can practice at any time convenient for you. It is also worth noting that the site is aimed at Russian-speaking people who study English and the entire explanation of the material takes place in RUSSIAN LANGUAGE, which is important if your level of knowledge of the language is not so high ... In this regard, I would like to note one more interesting "thing" like "Tips-secrets", personally I learned a lot from them! After 1.5 years spent with Puzzle English, I finally start to speak English, and not "hum" as before, the fear of communicating with native speakers has passed, before that I was always afraid to seem stupid and avoided communication, I improved my listening comprehension skills ... In general, you can talk about this project for a very long time, but it's better to try it !! Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to those who are working on the project. I am very pleased with the way the whole process is organized. Administrators work very efficiently and quickly, the site is constantly evolving. I would like to wish the project a long life !!

  Anton,
  28 years old, Khabarovsk

• I usually don’t write reviews, I don’t like (or maybe I don’t know how). But for my favorite site Puzzle-English I will make an exception :-) In my opinion, Puzzle-English is the best site for independent learning of the English language, and even in a playful way. It's never boring on the site, you can always choose a video to your liking, regardless of the level of language proficiency. The site will be interesting for both a beginner and an experienced student: in front of you is a huge catalog of cute songs for children, cartoons, musical hits thundering all over the world, performances famous artists and politicians, fragments of TV shows, training videos and other videos of various difficulty levels. Your task is to listen to a part of the video, try to hear the phrase well and put together a mosaic of its words. I treat this service as a game, entertainment, when I want to distract myself from my main work and relax for ten minutes, I just go to Puzzle-English and collect the video I like. An interesting effect is observed with songs, when you UNDERSTAND what this song is about .. Those who are interested in English grammar can go to the exercises section and practice the selected topic, collecting specially selected sentences, of course, first listening to a short theoretical video explaining the subtleties of this themes. All phrases in this section are voiced by a speaker. The Puzzle-English website has a unique Serials service. Before you are several dozen episodes of famous TV series and programs: “Two and a Half Men”, “Sherlock”, “Great Expectations”, “Life on Mars”, TED conference talks, etc. You just watch your favorite TV series, and in difficult moments you press pause and it becomes possible to read the script of the series, listen to the phrase again, watch a video explanation of slang expressions and words. If you are a beginner, you can set to display subtitles in English and / or Russian. The site has a built-in player specially designed and therefore convenient for learning the language. All unfamiliar words can be placed in a "personal dictionary". It is noteworthy that in addition to the word, a corresponding phrase with a translation into Russian is placed in the dictionary. And at the end I want to recommend you the Puzzle-English channel on YouTube, the guys share there tips for independent learning of languages, and there is the entire collection of educational videos of the site. PS. In order to use the site, you do not have to be a user with a paid account. Many sections can be used for free, just an annoying sign with a payment offer will be displayed all the time. PPS. And yet I urge you to pay for the services of the site, this money will help make the site even better, and its creators deserve to be paid for their work, in addition, you will have a lot of additional opportunities.

  Inga,
  Hero City Sevastopol

• When I started learning English in eighteenth last century we had only boring and incomprehensible English manuals. At that time didn "t exist the mp3 players, smartphones and laptops. I remembered even how People lived without the internet. And If I" d such stuff earlier, I "d been probably speaking English fluently now and could understand the English speech, movies and songs. Modernity has given us awesome facilities to study English. We can read the authentic books and newspapers, hear the English songs and audio books, watch the foreign movies and TV, communicate with native speakers. But we haven "t any time to practice this. Because I was glad when I found the site Puzzle English. On this website you can take a maximum of English stuff for yourself and spend a minimum of your time. Where are huge plenty of useful and interested English lessons, exercises, TV "s serials and so long. All of the ones were carefully prepared for education purpose. You can instantly find translation and pronunciation each English word or phrase and add one in your private vocabulary to try it later. All workouts are doing easy and fast. And I "m visiting on every day this site to improve my English language. Of course I use not only this website, but Puzzle English is my favorite one. And I hope with Puzzle English my awful English will have been reached the perfection.

  Vladimir Schepkov,
  49 years old, Sergiev Posad