Posted by abnry 6 days ago
Most of the corpuses I've found heavily over-represent newspaper articles and books, obviously. So the frequency ranking is biased towards academic/crime/geopolitics, not spoken english. But even then, it depends what you most commonly speak about!
There's no better way to do it, though. I'm just providing context.
I'm curious how the difficult is chosen because "obfuscate" was included in the hardest difficulty but I would not consider that to me a difficult word.
Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.
Aside from that, I didn't like that most of the words only had one or at most two definitions that sounded viable.
A lot of these words have either Latin or Greek origins, for most questions you can deduce the correct answer by asking the question: "Which of these would make sense to develop into a separate word through the mostly non-modern history of the language?".
I would enjoy it way more if all four options sounded equally viable, and I couldn't deduce the correct answer without actually being sure about the meaning of the word. I understand that coming up with choices like that for each question is way harder if you actually validate all of them manually.
I got a score of 76000 best estimate with 85 being correct, even though English is not my native language and I'm not that good at it.
Regardless, this was fun.
I was once reading a posted notice in French, and can mostly understand it although I don't speak French.
I suspect most of the modern English words are not even Old English. This makes learning English very difficult [2].
In this regard English is very much like C++. Once you know how to use it can becomes a very useful tools and utilities.
[1] Is English just badly pronounced French?
[2] 10 Reasons English is Ridiculously Hard:
As a non-native English speaker, I found that result pretty good! Though being a native Portuguese speaker certainly helped me as many difficult words in English borrow from Latin, and in Portuguese the Latin influence is more pronounced.
Once you figure out the pattern of "one answer sounds like the requested word, two are opposites, one is unrelated", the test suddenly becomes easy. Not all questions follow that pattern, but many of them do.
Sometimes there are two or three answers that sound like the question, sometimes a word that is clearly an adjective relating to a person (ending in -us) has non-adjective definitions. I don't think there's even a single question where more than two of the answers make sense, even if you've never heard the word before. That leaves very little room for mistakes.