Is there a relatively objective way of telling how much you know?

[Cavesa]

I didn't like the cned test, I think it rates people too high and is not too balanced. (Actually, being pointed to the cned test was one of the factors convincing me not to attend any langauge courses for erasmus students, not even those meant for "advanced" students.)

Thanks for the oda link!

[Carmody]

Do people have any comments or additions to this thread? It has been a while since it was posted but I am still interested in the topic.

[DaveBee]

Do people have any comments or additions to this thread? It has been a while since it was posted but I am still interested in the topic.

TV5 Monde offer a TCF (Test de Connaissance du Français) test. RFI offer graded 'placement tests' A1-B2.

I believe both RFI and TV5 Monde are owned by the french state. Both tests carry some CIEP branding.

EDIT
In addition to their 'placement tests' RFI also have some TCF tests (These and the TV5 ones are dated, so they may be past papers: questions taken from the exams used.)

EDIT2
The RFI TCF tests only cover listening comprehension. The TV5 ones do listening/reading/grammar.

[Carmody]

For French, I think these websites might be of use:

delf a1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edR-HZ0SA2s

delf a2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPR5fLqum_Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTXRa8wLzYI

http://www.bonjourdefrance.com/exercice ... loral.html

https://www.lawlessfrench.com/listening/aime-cesaire/

[DaveBee]

There is a french vocabulary size test "Test de la Taille du Vocabulaire" (TTV)

https://www.lextutor.ca/tests/

[Iversen]

I have written about my own experiences with dictionary based wordcounts in my Guide to Language Learning, and I did so because passive vocabulary is just about the only thing you can quantify among your language skills. Even active vocabulary is a problem. You can look through some pages of a dictionary and ask yourself how many of the words you could see yourself using in a conversation (without having heard them just before from somebody else), but this is such a subjective estimate that it isn't even worth putting it to paper. I have however noticed that the percentage of potentially active words out of my passively known wordstock tends to go up the better I know a language, but I still don't trust my own assessments enough to publish them.

You could in principle do something similar for idioms, but as you certainly already have seen yourself the idiom collections and dictionaries tend to favour the colorful and unpredictable expressions, and most of these are not found that often in practice. And without a well-defined class of elements you can test yourself against there is no reason to do calculations.

So basically you are left with two or three possibilities: you can judge your passive level (spoken and/or written) simply by taking speech and texts intended for native speakers and honestly ask yourself how much you understand - and then you may attach a percentage while bearing in mind this percentage isn't really an exact measurement, but just another way to say "rotten" or "not too bad". The OP apparently studies French. OK: listen to a French stand-up comic and ask yourself how much you understand. Or to judge your level in written French: can you read the poems of Saint-John Perse without feeling lost? If yes, then you don't have to worry.

You can yourself judge some aspects of your active skills, namely the easiness of your production (fluency in the narrow sense) and to some also your error level (proficiency), though with the caveat that you probably don't catch even catch a fraction of all your gross errors and imprecisions. So to get a reliable estimate there is probably no other way to go than to let a qualified native or nearnative speaker judge you, and what you get there is really just a loose opinion concerning about your rank among all the persons that particular individual has been asked to judge - it can't be a quantitative estimate in any kind of scientific sense. Personally I wouldn't do it. I have passed quite a few exams earlier in my life, and that's that - I don't need to pass any more exams in my life since I don't need ever again to apply for a job (I hope), and why then go through the ordeal and humiliation of being tested ??

[Cavesa]

I agree it is very complicated to judge known vocabulary, especially the active knowledge.

The dictionary based methods definitely have merit. That made me think of using a big SRS deck, rushing through it and counting the known words. It would still be just partial information, as it wouldn't tell us whether we can actively use the word correctly with all that is needed (context, nuance, correct preposition, gender, and so on), but it would tell us whether we can actively remember it.

[reineke]

An English speaker should need a very thin word deck to follow TV5 in French. The difficulties lie elsewhere. In fact, these difficulties are such a muck of different issues and problems that the learning effort is better invested elsewhere. The same goes for most Westerners learning each other's languages.

[mcthulhu]

You could try to find out where you are with some spot checks to see where words you know and don't know in a text are ranked in a word frequency list. There are others, I think but the Leipzig corpora collection can also serve as one. It has a large French corpus at http://corpora.uni-leipzig.de/en?corpus ... mixed_2012, with word frequency rank and frequency class associated with each word. For instance, arbre is ranked 6,102 and ficelle is ranked 31,847, so if you knew arbre but not ficelle that would suggest that your vocabulary size is somewhere in that range. (This is a wide range, I know - I just picked a couple of words at random. You would need to do more than just two searches, anyway.)

I guess it's theoretically possible that a person might know ficelle and not arbre, but that seems less likely...

[Cavesa]

An English speaker should need a very thin word deck to follow TV5 in French. The difficulties lie elsewhere. In fact, these difficulties are such a muck of different issues and problems that the learning effort is better invested elsewhere. The same goes for most Westerners learning each other's languages.

But that is not an issue. I highly doubt the universal goal of French learners is to follow TV5 in French, no offence meant. The discussion about whether to focus on acquiring a large vocabulary or settle for small has already been here a thousand times. And it is not the subject of this question. Testing how much we know applies to both camps. Both people prioritising other stuff and those learning large amounts of vocabulary may want to test how far from their goal they are.

The general judgement "you don't need large vocabulary" simply doesn't apply to people who wish to get to the C levels, especially those wanting to pass an exam proving it. For learners who don't need the active skills too much, smaller active and larger passive vocabulary is a great goal. For yet others, just a few thousand words suffice. It depends. But all may want to test their progress.