How many words do you know? Take this test and you'll receive an estimate, the value of which will be directly proportional to how honest you're willing to be with yourself about the limits of your knowledge ...
My own results are visible here - not surprising in the least, and certainly a decent indicator that the test isn't entirely without merit. Still, there's a legitimate question as to whether the percentile estimates provided with the test results really are on the mark, as the discussion here makes clear. I imagine most of the survey respondents would actually rank in the top 30% or so of the general population, vocabulary-wise.
Issues of ranking aside, I think that the primary point to take away from this test is just how vital reading - and, to be specific, reading "high literature" - is to vocabulary acquisition. Most of the rarer and more obscure words are of the sort one would never be exposed to in a verbal or everyday literary context, and my experience is that much the same sort of thing is true in other languages, including German and Japanese. To illustrate, although I am able to handle German TV shows and newspaper articles just fine, I find my assumptions of fluency completely undermined by reading Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg", whose pages I cannot manage to get through without frequent consultation of a dictionary.
PS: I've actually touched on this language/vocabulary issue before - 5 years ago, in fact ...
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