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Vocabulary Acquisition - common words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5773 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 33 of 47 08 August 2009 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There's a recently published "Frequency Dictionary of French" by Deryle Lonsdale and Yvon Le Bras. Obviously these books have have their limitations as Iversen points out- they don't give you every shade of meaning and I've found that some of the example sentences to be quite strange. But I've found it very useful as a test of my French vocabulary- it contains the most common 5000 words in French, so it's reassuring if you find that you know most of them. I'm working through it sequentially, and when I encounter a word that I don't know, I look it up in a 'proper' dictionary to ensure that I learn its full usage.
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| The Narrator Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5611 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew* Studies: German | Message 34 of 47 09 August 2009 at 10:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's how I do it.
I get a big book in PDF format (I used Harry Potter - 748 pages). I copy the entire book to this word counter website : writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp I get a list of the frequency of the words that appeared in the text. I copy, let's say, all the words that appear at least twice, meaning that they are common enough. Now I have a list of about 4500 words to study. Ingenious, isn't it? If you don't have a PDF book, you can use any text - text you copy from news site, study material, really anything. 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 35 of 47 09 August 2009 at 11:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Oh yes, I regularly thrash the muggles at a game of quidditch.... ;-) Seriously though, what would be more effective would be to take two or more books from different genres and make a list of the words that appear in all of the books -- they're the common ones. Or just stick to the published lists available across the internet -- they've been taken from a far larger number of source texts, so far more accurate. Edited by Cainntear on 09 August 2009 at 11:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Narrator Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5611 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew* Studies: German | Message 36 of 47 09 August 2009 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm made myself a list of 20,000 most common German words using this method. Try finding that on the internet. 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 37 of 47 09 August 2009 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
No, you made yourself a list of 20,000 words -- they're not necessarily common. There's nothing wrong with learning uncommon words if they come up in the sort of books you're likely to read, but don't fool yourself into thinking they're "common". Edit: Besides, the reason you'll not see a list that long is that it's too long for most people to study from. Edited by Cainntear on 09 August 2009 at 12:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Narrator Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5611 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew* Studies: German | Message 38 of 47 09 August 2009 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
They're the most common words in German, since they were collected based on their occurrences in texts. Anyway, 20,000 words are about all the words known to an average native speaker. If anyone wants to be a complete fluent speaker one day, this is a good source to start from. It seems to me you're trying to contradict me, even though you don't know much about what you're saying. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear about using 5 different books for resources, and not just Harry Potter. I don't have names on my lists, just adjectives, adverbs, verbs and nouns. Edited by The Narrator on 09 August 2009 at 1:23pm 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 39 of 47 09 August 2009 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK, so are you saying you took a raw count of words in all books, or did you use only the words that occurred in more than one of the books?
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| The Narrator Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5611 days ago 31 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew* Studies: German | Message 40 of 47 09 August 2009 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I took only words that occurred at least in two books.
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