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How many words do you need to learn? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7246 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes  | Message 9 of 64 10 April 2005 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Francois, there is excellent information in this thread. Your frequency chart and Ardaschir's bullseye chart need to find their way permanently onto your site.
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| evan Diglot Newbie United States evanosborn.tripod.co Joined 7167 days ago 20 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 10 of 64 10 April 2005 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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While you may be able to get by understanding 2000 words it is important to remember that each of those 2000 words can have many definitions depending upon how they are used. This is especially true for simple words such as "dar" or "sacar" in spanish.
It is certainly possible to "know" every word in a sentence and still not understand its meaning. Just because you recognize the word and you know some of its primary dictionary definitions does not mean you will always be able to understand the sentence due to the numbers of expressions and phrases in each language. Often words that are used less frequently have more precise meanings. Not sure if this adds anything to the discussion, but I think its helpful to keep in mind that one word does not equal one meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7151 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes 7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 11 of 64 11 May 2005 at 8:41am | IP Logged | ||
But, when saying 75 most common words make up 40% of occurences, I imagine these 75 most common words are conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and other such invariable words, insufficient to form even the simplest sentence. I think the question is not how many words does a language really use in normal speech, but the number of nouns, verbs and adjectives (that is, variable words), which carry most of the meaning of the sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7375 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 64 11 May 2005 at 10:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Raistlin, yes the very most common words are not nouns nor adjectives. If you want to compile a statistic of the most common words by word type I am of course interested. I think this statistic exists for English. Edited by administrator on 11 May 2005 at 10:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7151 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes 7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 13 of 64 11 May 2005 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I've found this list of the 250 most common words in English on this webpage, which I deem to be reliable:
http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/bl1000_list1.htm (edited because of possible copyright infringement and poor legibility) Edited by administrator on 11 May 2005 at 10:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7187 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 14 of 64 11 May 2005 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, I find some of those results suprising. Words like "sentance" and "port" are deffinatly not words I would expect to be some of the most common words in english. I wonder if such a list stands true for other languages. I also wonder if certian words are adjectives or verbs. Is number 170 the noun "land" or the verb "to land"?
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| pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7246 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes | Message 15 of 64 11 May 2005 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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That list is not accurate. There is no way that sea and port are in the top 250 words. They must've scanned a very narrow sample.
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| Seth Diglot Changed to RedKing’sDream Senior Member United States Joined 7223 days ago 240 posts - 252 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Persian | Message 16 of 64 11 May 2005 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, or maybe they used "Moby Dick" as their reference. ha
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