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Vocabulary Acquisition - common words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6711 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 25 of 47 04 August 2009 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Those percentages indicate the number of words in a large corpus that are found among the most common words of the language. However you can't expect that you also get the same percentage of the meaning. The rare words are mostly there for a purpose: they give a precise information which may in fact be the reason for the very existence of the message.
My advice would be to learn 'grammar words' like pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and auxiliary verbs. Also keep an eye out for irregular words and words that have a lot of idiomatic uses. But the total number of these words doesn't add up to 4-5000 words, - maybe 500, maybe 1000, I can't set an exact limit. Above that treshold you just find ordinary words which happen to be quite common. There is no reason to learn these by heart, - if they are common enough you will learn them by reading and listening. If not, then you may want to do a "mopping up" operation sometime later, but otherwise concentrate on the words that pop up when you read about YOUR interests. Besides the big problem isn't learning 5000 very common words, but rather to learn a few hundred very common expressions. Edited by Iversen on 05 August 2009 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5677 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 26 of 47 04 August 2009 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
... and how to combine them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6726 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 27 of 47 05 August 2009 at 1:31am | IP Logged | |||||
It has definitely been a long road (3 years feels so long in a single language)! I still find a little frustration at times, when I can't use the exact word I want. Usually I can explain my way 'around' it, but it'd be a lot faster if I just had the words! LOL But I haven't been studying with other languages really (a few plays here and there). I've tried a couple of times to add another one to my study schedule, but it just seems to take 100% dedication to Hungarian alone for me to actually make any progress! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| draoicht Groupie Ireland Joined 6321 days ago 89 posts - 146 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 47 05 August 2009 at 2:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Iversen
This is an interesting quote from that paper by Mark Davies: “As the data indicate, a limited vocabulary of 1000 words would allow language learners to recognize between 75-80% of all lexemes in written Spanish, and about 88% of all lexemes in spoken Spanish (which is due to the higher repetition of basic words in the spoken register). Subsequent extensions of the base vocabulary have increasingly marginal importance. By doubling the vocabulary list to 2000 words, we account for only about 5-8% more words in a given text, and the third thousand words in the list increases this only about 2-4% more. There clearly is a law of “diminishing returns” in terms of vocabulary learning.” Combined with some grammar study, I think acquiring these 1000 words would allow a beginner to quickly move on to native materials and increase their vocabulary in a much more enjoyable way. I don’t think it would be worthwhile or very much fun to use a frequency dictionary to acquire 5000 words.
Out of curiosity I had a look at the first 1000 entries in his book and broke it down by type: Article 2 Conjunction 15 Number 18 Preposition 18 Pronoun 31 Adjective 167 Adverb 72 Noun 397 Verb 280 As you can see the first 1000 words contain most of the function words and a sizable amount of the most common verbs and nouns. Edited by draoicht on 05 August 2009 at 2:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| gbarv Groupie Cocos (Keeling) Islands Joined 5645 days ago 49 posts - 60 votes | Message 29 of 47 05 August 2009 at 3:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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. Edited by gbarv on 16 August 2009 at 3:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| langaddict Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 5599 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 30 of 47 05 August 2009 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is nice to go through that list of most common words to see how many words one knows in their target langugae. I tried to compile my own lists in different languages but if a book of frequently used words is available at a reasonable price i rather buy that and have a go at it.
The price of "A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish by Mark Davies" is very high. Anyone knows of any other reasonably priced book for Spanish learners. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6019 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 31 of 47 05 August 2009 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
I would agree, but I'd add that you can't really learn all of these as vocabulary, but only as part of the grammatical/idiomatic structure. The use of prepositions can be particularly troublesome.
Agreed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6280 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 32 of 47 06 August 2009 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Frequency lists are useful for plugging gaps in your vocabulary. Of course, the better you know a language, the fewer gaps there are likely to be.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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