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Purpose of Word Frequency Dictionaries | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Dictionaries | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5673 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 6 17 May 2011 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today, I was in the bookshop, buying an etymological dictionary. In the same section,
there were three different "frequency dictionaries". I have never looked at such a book before, but peeking inside I was astonished. Two of them devoted half of the book to listing words in alphabetical order, following each word with its relative frequency of use. The second half of each of those two books was the same words, but this time in frequency order. Now, I can certainly see the second half of these book as being of particular use. Particularly, I could imagine somebody scanning the list looking for high-frequency words they are unfamiliar with. What I cannot understand is the value of the first half of these books. Especially confusing is that the third book only contained such an alphabetical list - there was no list of words in frequency order. So, alphabetical frequency lists must have some value - otherwise they would not be published. However, I cannot for the life of me understand the value in thinking of a word, looking it up in an alphabetical list, and finding its frequency number. What am I missing? Edited by Splog on 17 May 2011 at 9:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6947 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 6 17 May 2011 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||
1. When you feel like using the word ambidextrous while teaching remedial English, you can look up its frequency and avoid it. Ditto when deciding whether to enter a word in your own flashcard deck while you are still a relative beginner. 2. It is a modern habit to supply A->B and B->A dictionaries under one set of covers, even though splitting them up would make greater ergonomic sense. Supplying the word->frequency dictionary together with the frequency->word one was thus a compulisve need the publishers could not suppress. 3. Self-diagnostics: check the frequency of the unknown words you encounter in a text and see how far along you are with vocabulary. Edited by frenkeld on 17 May 2011 at 10:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 6 17 May 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with frenkeld's 1. If you look up a new word and you want to know if it's worth bothering, it's a good tool. In any case, that entire alphabetical list was created at the push of a single button, so it's required no work whatsoever. Then the customer pays for the paper...
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 6 18 May 2011 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sure there are linguists that have a great deal of use for the alphabetical lists in their research, for example in comparing the relative frequency of two words.
However, it seems to me that a paper book is a very cumbersome and slow way of looking up such things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 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 5 of 6 18 May 2011 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't use frequency lists, although they might be useful for mopping up operations. There is a core of very common words which you must learn, but because they are so common you are also almost certain to meet them. For the rest I prefer going by my own gut feelings. A word like "ambidextrous" is certainly one I would want to know simply because I could see my self using it.
Of course there are cases where I accidentally hit upon an extremely rare word somewhere, look it up, find it in my dictionary without any warnings and then proceed to use it. And therefore it's fine that some dictionaries indicate rare and/or obsolete words. But the risk of choosing no. 17.987 according to the frequency table instead of word no. 7.987 isn't something that can give me nightmares or cause me to writhe in agony. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6869 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 6 of 6 29 May 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like lexical frequency dictionaries
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