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When is word frequency irrelevant? | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Poll | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 36 02 February 2015 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Like iversen, who knows a thing or two about frequency lists, I voted for "irrelevant above the first
1000 words". Actually, I think lists are very valuable tools even above that 1000 cutoff figure. As Iversen also pointed out, their utility is really more in "mopping up", i.e. identifying holes in one's vocabulary rather than as a primary learning tool. In my opinion, frequency lists become more valuable when they are broken down by parts of speech or functional category such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions. For an insightful discussion of many of these issues, here is an excellent paper by the authors of the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. Vocabulary Range and Text Coverage I noted in passing that 1000 different words give 88% word coverage for a spoken corpus. In the same spoken corpus, 47 different verbs cover 75% of all verbs and 12 different adverbs cover 66% of all adverbs. As can be expected, nouns and adjectives require much higher numbers for similar coverage. With all this talk about word frequency, what is really lacking, in my opinion, is grammar usage frequency lists. It's hard to imagine what form this would actually take but the idea would be to measure the frequency of grammatical concepts in a corpus. We get an inkling of this in the breakdown of vocabulary lists by parts of speech but this could be pushed much further. We could look at tenses and moods. For example, I would love to see a statistical table for the usage of the Spanish subjunctive for guidance as to what is really important. Edited by s_allard on 02 February 2015 at 5:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 36 02 February 2015 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I actually made a general syntactic survey for a corpus consisting of 10.000 pages in French an appendix to my final thesis in 1981, based on my own somewhat ideosyncratic ideas about syntax - but it has never been published. Maybe I'll show some figures from it in Berlin, where I intend to speak about syntax. Besides I vaguely remember having seen one (and only one) book with a similarly broad quantitative survey of French grammatical structures, but after more than 30 years away from science I can't remember its name. Edited by Iversen on 02 February 2015 at 5:02pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 36 03 February 2015 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm looking forward to hearing iversen's talk in Berlin. If it's anything like the one at Novi Sad, I'm sure it
will be good. In the meantime, there are lots of things to talk about but I'll start a separate thread and not hog this one. But I'll just add that as a result of this debate, I've started using Routledge's Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. It's an excellent work, and I highly recommend the introduction where all the major theoretical and methodological issues of word-frequency list making are discussed. I can't vouch for the French edition that I have not yet examined. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 28 of 36 03 February 2015 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I voted for "I don’t worry about word frequency", like most others. I've tried to find uses for frequency lists, but they don't seem to be very, well, useful for language learning. High frequency words will be learned rapidly enough anyway, so you don't need the frequency lists for that. These words are taught in any course and in your readings they will pop up often enough that you cannot but learn them. And as many have poited out, a frequency list becomes increasingly pointless as frequencies drop. Pretty much the only thing I can think of is when you're writing and you know some synonyms and want to know which is more commonly used, but even in this case, I find usage examples from sites like linguee a lot better for deciding what word to use, and if it's just a matter of seeing what's more common (such as two variant spellings), a simple Google search will usually do the trick quite nicely.
As for mopping up operations, well, I tend to get most of my words from movies or written sources, and chances are the "holes" in my vocabulary are exactly the kinds of words that are not commonly found in the corpus, like kitchenware, names of plants, technical jargon and so on. A frequrency dictionary is not going to help me with that. It might be useful if there aren't many sources to learn from, but in that case there's unlikely to be a frequency list for the language in the first place. Edited by Ari on 03 February 2015 at 5:55pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 29 of 36 03 February 2015 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would agree that frequency lists are useless for learning purposes. This is the expectation of many
people; the idea is that a frequency list is a guide to the words one should learn. This doesn't work. I like to turn this idea around. A frequency list is a guide to what you should know or have learned. I like the Routledge Spanish frequency dictionary because it gives a pretty good idea of what vocabulary I should know. For example, in preparation for a test, it gives a very good idea of what vocabulary is essential. I especially like all the subcategories like the most common verbs, common nouns by thematic categories, most common triggers of the subjunctive. Something like this gives a complete panorama of the key words and concepts that you should have under your belt. Some things are missing, such as idioms and multi-word expressions but that's another problem. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| CelticBasque Newbie United States Joined 4596 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, French | Message 30 of 36 21 February 2015 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
8000 words in 4 months is crazy fast. Something like 65 words a day? Would you mind sharing how you learned that much new vocabulary in that short of a time without forgetting it? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 31 of 36 22 February 2015 at 12:52am | IP Logged | |||||
It was about 100 words a day because I didn't start on day 1; I learned pronunciation and grammar first. And I still remember most of the words now, 5 years later. A simplified explanation of what I do: * I start with a downloaded list of at least 2000 words I'm likely to learn as a beginner. * Each day, I study my textbooks like any learner would. * Each day, I read through my Word List to find, say, 10 words that I'm most familiar with (they'd be words from the textbooks, or cognates, or words that somehow felt easier). * I study these ~10 words for a few minutes (doesn't take long because I was already familiar with them). * Put them into SRS (Spaced Repetition System). That's it. So I probably pick 10 times a day, to get 10 words x 10 times = 100 words a day. For example, after studying the chapter "Conjunctions" in my textbook, I'd probably be able to pick "because", "however" and "nonetheless" from the Word List. ** I shuffle the Word List when picking words, but still I would have read through the List many times, such that some words become familiar even if I hadn't seen them elsewhere. And the vaguely familiar words become very familiar words easily. ** When I cannot pick ~10 words no matter what, I expand the List. ** When I need to practise conjugation, I pick verbs from the Word List. So, instead of practising "I speak, you eat" like learners usually do, I'd be practising "I moo, you quack". ** I use a home-made SRS so it suits my needs better than off-the-shelf ones. - Edited by smallwhite on 22 February 2015 at 3:28am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 32 of 36 22 February 2015 at 1:58am | IP Logged | |||||
That is a remarkable experience. I bolded two of the things that stood out to me. The "easiest words" approach sounds very smart for picking the ripest fruit du jour. I'd like ot hear more about your home-made SRS. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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