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When is word frequency irrelevant? | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Poll | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 33 of 36 22 February 2015 at 3:22am | IP Logged | ||
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The other day I was watching a Chinese language TV series from Singapore "The Fringe" 边缘父子. The version
I got online didn't come with subtitles so I was on my own. The whole show was about criminal gangs fighting each other and innocent people caught in the middle. There must be at least half-dozen words & phrases in the show that you wouldn't use in your daily conversations such as: 1. 犯罪组织 (fànzuì zǔzhī) / 犯罪集团 (fànzuìjítuán): criminal organization 2. 帮派 (bāngpài): gang 3. 坐牢 (zuòláo): in prison 4. 吸毒 (xīdú): inhale narcotics A word like 抽煙 (chōuyān) or 吸煙 (xīyān) for cigarette smoking might come up more frequently but if your group are all non-smokers, that word may not come out in a discussion. You can't rely on word frequency alone. If you are with a group who are into history, science, technology, certain related words & phrases would come up in a conversation. 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 34 of 36 22 February 2015 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
Indeed it felt effortless. My home-made SRS is actually just an Excel spreadsheet. I type in the answer next to the question and hit enter to type in the next answer. A formula tells me whether my answer matchs the model answer which is hidden from sight. Takes only 2 seconds to answer a "card". Memrise takes at least 6 seconds each card, and needs time to refresh every 12 cards. The spreadsheet has scheduling, but I don't have to follow it. So I can overlearn or underlearn according to how hard the 10 picked words are, and according to whether I have time. Everything's on the same worksheet (the 2000 Word List, the 10 handpicked words, the SRS), very handy, so whenever I feel like it, I can pick 20 words to practise - going through them once takes 40 seconds, twice, 80 seconds. I think I used to pick 7 words to learn, or whatever that golden number was. 7 words x practise 5 times = just 70 seconds. Edited by smallwhite on 22 February 2015 at 4:09am 3 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 35 of 36 22 February 2015 at 4:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds brilliant.
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| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4872 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 36 of 36 13 March 2015 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm torn about the value of frequency lists for learners. Obviously you're going to have
to learn a lot of words, and presumably you'll learn all of the top 1,000 or 2,000 because coverage. As far as how many words you need to know at a given level, a 2009 study (Milton and Alexiou) makes it look like students at the C1 level have L2 vocabularies of about 3,500 to 4,000 words. Presumably these vocabularies are active use vocabulary and not passive. What's curious about word frequencies in learner's materials is the beginning stuff. The Zipf curves are really weird looking. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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