slowmoon wrote:1.000.000 Words Read Update
Second Leipzig Test Result: 118/150 correct
Dialang Reading Test Result: B1
Notes:
1. Both tests indicate that my reading level is around B1. This seems about right.
2. 108/150 -> 118/150 was not much of an improvement. Maybe not significant at all.
3. Maybe I would've made more progress with graded readers and deliberate study with flashcards, but I just don't want to do that.
4. It seems unlikely that I will reach nine thousand word families by reading two million more words, but perhaps B2 is possible.
5. We continue.
I think whilst the increase seems small, you shouldn't discount it. Frequency lists are corpus dependent, and it's clear that your personal corpus is translated fictional and biographical books from English. That you haven't made much of a gain in this small sample doesn't mean that you won't have made a significant gain in a corpus specific frequency list. To illustrate my point, here's a sample from around the 5000 most frequent words made by
wordfrequency.info showing the frequency a word showed up in their COCA+ corpus depending on media type. As you can see many words vary a lot between media and some are 10x or more likely to show up in one medium than another. This point is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that you're reading mostly in translation, and translators often try to use words that convey a direct meaning, even if they're not as common in the language they're being translated into.
Dispersion of frequency across media.PNG
It's clear you've made significant progress both with speed and comprehension, so I wouldn't sweat it that you haven't increased the number of words known in this small sample as you don't know their methodology for sure (although it seems to be based on the Routledge dictionary which gives equal waiting to spoken, literature, newspapers and academic writing, and the spoken part is very academically waited), and you might have got unlucky with the sample.
Good luck for 3 million!
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