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When is word frequency irrelevant? | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Poll | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 1 of 36 28 January 2015 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Frequency dictionaries can help you or someone creating a language learning course focus on the most common words. There is a point of diminishing returns. As one gets past the most common words, there is less and less "magic" in a frequency list.
Do you ever use a frequency dictionary? When do you stop? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 2 of 36 29 January 2015 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Word frequency is important, but I don't use frequency lists. I choose how hard I try to learn a word based
mainly on two factors: how often I've seen it so far in my studies, and how basic/important of a concept it refers to. These two factors are of course highly correlated with frequency. Some words of equal frequency are more important than others. If you don't know "fantastic," you can easily substitute "great" or "awesome." It's more of a problem if you don't know specific words like "pig" or "carpet." Ditto for comprehension; some words can be skipped without missing the message (with "foyer" or "commissar" it's often enough to deduce from context that it's a place/official ) while others less so. I find it interesting how some words that are very basic are actually not that frequent. You can get pretty far in a language without learning numbers, colors, or body parts. People spend a lot of time with little kids talking about these, but as a learner they're often not frequent words. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4443 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 3 of 36 29 January 2015 at 4:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Word frequency matters depending on the social group you are with. If you are around people who like history,
certain words & phrases about the past would come up. I play music with a local band and I would hear different music terms like Tempo, Dynamics, Articulation, etc. Many of these words are from Italian. In order to understand a conversation or programs on TV or radio, you need enough words & phrases. Beyond that you can get into very specific topics. The other day I was watching a program from Taiwan about ancient history. The term 奧爾梅克 for Olmec in Mexico came up. It was a translated term. I could recognize the giant stone statues but had never heard of the translated Chinese term. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5307 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 4 of 36 29 January 2015 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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I once learned 8000 German words within 4 months, yet understood only ~96% of the words on Yahoo news articles. The Japanese JLPT N1 had a vocabulary list of 10,000 words. So I aim at learning 8,000 to 10,000 words in each TL that I aim at B2/C1.
If I can't do it, I find better methods. If I still can't do it, I work harder. The goalpost stays put. I take my words from textbooks, vocabulary books, and daily reading. THEN, every now and then, I go through a Freq List to find unknown words to fill in the holes. So, I stop at around the 10,000th word. ("kiss" and "kissed" are 1 word, "to kiss" and "a kiss" are 2 words). The poll doesn't have this choice :( Edited by smallwhite on 29 January 2015 at 4:43am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5319 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 5 of 36 29 January 2015 at 8:30am | IP Logged | |||||
That's pretty impressive. Did you use special mnemonic techniques, an SRS app (e.g. Anki) or rote learning? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5307 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 6 of 36 29 January 2015 at 9:52am | IP Logged | |||||
It's not as hard as it sounds. I have a word list with about 4000 words, and an SRS. I skim through the list regularly, to pick ~10 easiest words to study a bit and then enter into the SRS. Now, since I skim through (parts of) the list regularly, the words would become easier and easier, and the 10 easiest words would be really easy. Or, I'd see on the list words that I encountered elsewhere during the day, and these words would still be fresh and thus also really easy. I study these ~10 easy words a bit, enter them into SRS, and SRS takes care of the rest. If I can't pick any easy words, I add new words to the list. Reading becomes easy, which in turn helps make words on the list easy. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 7 of 36 29 January 2015 at 10:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Meh. I prefer massive input over word lists. The meaning of the words will become clearer
and clearer the more times you encounter them. To me can be relevant to study the top 200 and then just if you want to read about specific topics with technical vocabulary. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gomorritis Tetraglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 4277 days ago 91 posts - 157 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French Studies: Greek, German, Dutch | Message 8 of 36 29 January 2015 at 11:25am | IP Logged | |||||
But it's not that easy to know which are actually the most frequent words in a language. The frequency lists I have seen are based on a corpus of literary works, or news articles, or encyclopedia articles, or from a comprehensive mix of all these sources, but I haven't seen any based on spoken language. If most communication actually happens in spoken form, then the most frequent words should be the spoken ones! Maybe the frequency lists which are closest to spoken language are those based on movie subtitles. Of course it's still not perfect, as in movies we are more likely to hear "They've got missile lock! Evasive manoeuvres! Break right! Javelins! Javelins! Shit! Break right! I can't hold out! We're going down!" instead of "Crap, the fridge is empty. I'm going to the supermarket. Do you want anything? Yes, bring some of those yogurts with blueberry that I like." 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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