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3000 Words in Target Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 9 of 17 01 April 2010 at 3:24am | IP Logged | ||
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If you decide to learn Mandarin, I highly recommend this dictionary/hot 3000 character list.
Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary (Chinese Edition) (Paperback) http://www.amazon.com/East-3000-Chinese-Character-Dictionary /dp/9576125200 It has traditional and simplified characters and gives the pronunciation in Hanyu pinyin and Bopomofo. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5560 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 10 of 17 01 April 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is true, but in fact learning the first 3000 is harder than learning the subsequent
10,000, so it's not as big a help as you might think. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 17 01 April 2010 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is this notion of "3000 words" generally valid across languages? Some languages may use more or less words on a frequent basis.
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| Icaria909 Senior Member United States Joined 5591 days ago 201 posts - 346 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 17 01 April 2010 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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As far as I know it mostly applies to indo European languages, but that would be an interesting concpt for
the eastern languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5447 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 13 of 17 02 April 2010 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I've tried to learn from frequency lists in the past, and I've run into two issues:
1) The words that are at the top are often "language glue" - they connect the words that give the sentence its actual meaning. In the sentence "The leopard ran after the gazelle," the words at the top of the frequency chart are "the," "ran," and "after." 2) The most common words in a language may have multiple meanings or may be used in a variety of contexts. "Get up," "Get down," "Get out of here!" (expression of disbelief) have nothing to do with getting. This isn't to say that there's no point to knowing the words on the frequency lists. Knowing how they really are used is invaluable! But the task of learning, say, the 100 most common words of a language does not mean mastering 100 lexical items; it requires learning the basic grammar of the language and accepting that a lot of those words will mean different things depending on what words they're adjacent to. The further down the list you go, of course, the more often the words will have fewer meanings and unusual usages. If you've been studying a language for a while and probably already know a thousand words, a frequency list can be useful for identifying common words that you still need to learn. But if I were looking for the most useful words to learn when starting a language, I'd open a phrasebook and see which words were used in sentences related to things I wanted to be able to do and see. Just an observation from someone who learned the hard way that you don't learn a language by memorizing the most common words; you end up knowing the most common words as part of the process of learning a language. 12 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ManicGenius Senior Member United States Joined 5481 days ago 288 posts - 420 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese | Message 14 of 17 02 April 2010 at 5:29am | IP Logged | ||
I second this. Learning from context is the way to go. Unless you're Iversen. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 17 02 April 2010 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||
I can't really agree more with this post. It says something that is very true about frequency lists. If we eliminate the grammatical words that occupy the top of the list, we realize that high-frequency lexical words are there because they have so many meanings. The most common verbs in English include "have, be, do". Any one of these will take up pages in a good dictionary. I prefer to say that under a given phonetic form there may be many different units of meaning or lexical units. What this implies is that a vocabulary of 1,000 words is not really 1,000 units. It's more like 5,0000 lexical units. So, the problem isn't really how to learn 1,000 words but how to master, let's say, the first 100 lexical words that keep coming back all the time. I would like to point out here that conversational language is very different from the written language. The spoken language tends to be very repetitive and very often somewhat ritualized or stereotyped. The perfect example is greetings. The trick here is to learn key phrases and structures that can be easily modified or extended. These "chunks" will be the envelopes in which you will add words as you encounter them. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| brian91 Senior Member Ireland Joined 5444 days ago 335 posts - 437 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 16 of 17 02 April 2010 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I know that one word can have multiple meanings (give the teenager a chance!) and have indeed been learning their
different meanings (although I should have mentioned this earlier). For example, for German a really helpful website is Leo. Here's an example of ''get'' when searched there: lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed§Hdr=on&spell Toler=on&chinese=both&pinyin=diacritic&s earch=get&relink=on">link. Hope this helps. Of course, now it doesn't seem like I'm learning three thousand words but many more, which doesn't help! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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