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Experimenting with French word frequency | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 55 04 September 2014 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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For those who have been following the narrative, I have the final stats for the text Un lycée pas comme les autres.
The total number of words is 224. verbs 33 e.g. aller, arriver, avoir, blesser, changer, connaître nouns 94 e.g. lycée, études, chose, 3e, niveau, envie, l'Armée, etc. adjectives 29 e.g. militaire, fréquent, quelque, scolaire, admis, sage, etc. adverbs 20 e.g. bon, très, là, fort, trop, tout, justement, etc. pronouns 10 e.g ça, ce eux, il, ils, je, me nous, on, vous connecting words 38 e.g. bonjour, donc, de, au, mais, quand même, pas, quoi, pour, etc. The numbers come in pretty much as expected. The big difference between this text and the previous one is in the nouns, as I thought. The readers who are up on their French grammar may question why some words are in certain categories. I looked at their function in the phrase and not at their spelling. For example, bon can appear as an adverb as in bon alors or it can be an adjective. Depending on one's analysis the numbers can move around a bit, but not much. I haven't really done a comparative analysis of the words in this text relative to that of the previous text. We know that the verbs are different and that 59 verbs will allow you to read both texts. The pronouns are nearly identical. I suspect the adverbs and the connecting words are very similar. I couldn't really guess how many nouns are shared by both texts, probably not that many. How many words of French would you have to know to follow these two conversations? I would say around 275. This of course does not change the fact that in one conversation 145 words were used and in the other 224. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 55 04 September 2014 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
These figures are very much in line with all the studies of vocabulary size coverage across all domains. Zipf spoke about this many years ago. We know that a tiny number of words represent a very large percentage of the uses and as text coverage increases vocabulary size increases geometrically. This is all true, but we shouldn't conclude that you need more than 1,000 verbs to watch a movie in French. Again, we come up to this basic issue of methodology that I call the aggregate word effect. If you look at a large sample of different texts, the sum of all the individual vocabularies will generate a large number necessary to provide coverage for all the texts. For example, if you want to read Harry Potter and the Philosophical Stone, you may need 5,000 words. But a study of the vocabulary of the major works of English literature from the 19th century to the present-day will conclude that a vocabulary of 30,000 words is necessary to read all these works with enjoyment. Does that mean that you need 30,000 words to read Harry Potter? Of course not. It's just that with the Harry Potter vocabulary you won't be able to read all the 19th century literature and some other works. It all depends on what you want to accomplish. How big a vocabulary do you need to write a book? Do you need 30,000 words? Hell no. Maybe 3,000 will do, depending on your audience and your style. Of if you are Dr Seus you can write a book with 50 words. This is what I have been trying to show by looking at real conversations by native speakers of French. What I'm seeing is that within the confines of short conversations, people are using very small vocabularies. For Pete's sake nobody is saying that all French-speakers use the same 300 words or less all the time. It's just that it is possible to have a pretty sophisticated conversation with 240 words or even 145 words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 19 of 55 05 September 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm not sure where you read that about the Routledge dictionary, but the numbers of newspaper articles relative to books isn't too bad: 2,015,000 words from newspaper stories, 3,000,000 words from newswire stories, and 4,734,000 words from literature. So they are pretty close. The Routledge dictionary source list is half from "spoken" sources, and the various sources they use are quite interesting. Here is the spoken half of their source table:
Of course, about 40% of the oral corpus comes from political sources, which would probably account for belge being higher than other sources, among other words such as parlement (756) and parlementaire (1214). But then, if you read or watch any news, these words do come up. I think the Routledge dictionary has a good theoretical basis for a wide variety of uses of French, but if you just want to have pleasant conversations then maybe it isn't the right source. Unfortunately, it has several shortcomings as a dictionary (mainly: the definitions are too brief, and no female forms of adjectives are given). Edited by Jeffers on 05 September 2014 at 12:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 55 05 September 2014 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sounds like a good breakdown to try! Is anyone interested in actually roughing in a few of these categories? If somebody would like to try, I've multiplied the size of each category by two, and generated a list to use as a starting point. Please feel free to choose words that aren't on these lists, of course, and to remove any random garbage you find. First, 160 verbs:
Here are 260 nouns from films. This list is weird! But I looked at all the high frequency nouns in Rutledge's dictionary, and that list was pretty weird, too. Also, this list looks dirtier than the others—there are some adjectives that snuck in, probably when Lexique's part-of-speech tagger misfired. Not sure this will be much use to anybody.
You suggested 20 adjectives. Here are 80, just in case:
And 60 adverbs:
An extra-large helping of 60 pronouns, including some junk. It will probably by necessary to fill in the basic pronoun tables by hand.
For the final category of connecting words, I'm going to break it down into sets, and throw in all the remaining Lexique categories. There are way more than 25 here, to give list-makers a good selection. There's a little bit of overlap with the pronoun lists, and a random assortment of numbers. I think a vocabulary list should contain enough number words to count from 0 to 1000, at least if shopping or directions are the goal.
Looking through these lists, my first reactions are: - Nouns will be a challenge, because they have a much flatter distribution than verbs, and you never know which ones you'll need. 130 may not be enough to cover basic shopping, transportation and small talk. - 15 pronouns and 25 connectors seems awfully low, given the lists above. - Almost all of the other categories are going to require lots of hard decisions. There are just so many important words in each category that I can't choose a short list without feeling like I'm leaving out something essential. Very little of the vocabulary above is rare or specialized. We don't need to listen to thousands of hours of movies to hear pardonner "forgive", soirée "evening", sympa "nice, likable", autant "as much as" or ceci "this". But each of these words is at or near the end of one of the lists above, and each list is at least twice as large we need to reach 300 words. So yeah, any given short conversation requires a couple hundred words. But if we look at all the conversations which might appear on an A2 exam, I think we're going to need broader coverage. Overall, Milton's low-end number of 1,700 for the typical A2 student seems pretty plausible to me, actually. I could maybe believe it's possible to get there with 1,000 words if you chose them very carefully and used them well. Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with the Lexique database. This could be useful for quite a few language learning tools, actually. Many thanks to the researchers who released it under a Creative Commons license. Edited by emk on 05 September 2014 at 12:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 55 05 September 2014 at 6:16am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I have no objections to putting any number of possible words in the various categories that I outlined. The difficulty with this approach is that outside a very tiny core of high-frequency words, most of the other words are equally probable. If I look at the list of suggested nouns, I really don't know what to make of that. To me it's pretty useless. This is the kind of problems that stems from approaching the problem in terms of what one needs for vocabulary coverage. I prefer to approach the question by looking at what people actually use. I have to say that we have very few studies of recordings of actual test candidates at the various CEFR levels. We have all kinds of estimates of what candidates ought to know but nearly no studies of what candidates actually used. For example, the widely-quoted study by James Milton, The development of vocabulary breadth across CEFR levels is not a study of actual test results but a study of estimated vocabulary sizes for each CEFR level, using a vocabulary size test. To my knowledge, there is no systematic study of actual CEFR speaking-test results. The only study that offers a glimmer of light in this direction is the well-know study by James Head and Paul Nation of actual recordings of test results for the IELTS English test. Lexical dimension of the IELTS speaking test On page 10 of this study, we see that at the highest level of speaking proficiency, Band 8, the 15 candidates produced a mean or average of 1491 words but only 408.1 different words or types. I have to say that I don't understand how the figure in the last column was calculated. If this figure is correct, the most proficient speakers, the equivalent of our C2 speakers, only used around 408 different words in their test. It should be pointed out that the speaking test is relatively short and consists of a conversation with an examiner. The whole thing takes less than 15 minutes. Regardless of how many thousands of different words the candidates may know and have at their command, the fact is that they only used 408 of them on average. This is exactly what I would expect. Consider that a typical speaking rate is about 200 words per minute and the test lasts 15 minutes. If the candidates speaks around half this time, that a little over 7 minutes X 200 or around 1400 words. Of these words around 400 are unique words. Let's look at our C2 candidate at the speaking test. If that persons speaks for 15 minutes, that's around 3,000 words or tokens. How different words or types will we see? Can we say around 1,000 - 1,200 based on the idea that the longer the speaking period, the more different words will be used? What we see, if it need repeating, that the number of types or different words is quite small relative to the total number of words or tokens spoken. In all likelihood, our C2 candidate will not use more than 1,300 different word or let's say 1,500, to be generous. This does not mean, and I insist, that the C2 candidates needs only learn the first 1,500 words on a frequency list and is guaranteed to ace the exam. What it does mean is that the C2 candidate does not have to know how to use 10,000 words. Instead, a good mastery of around 1,300 words, well chosen, will certainly do. Again, the most common objection is that you don't know what words will come up in the test. Suppose you have to discuss surrogacy in third-world countries and you don't know anything about surrogate mothers, in-vitro fertilization, etc. What are you going to do with only 1,300 words? Consider first that you'll be given a text about the subject with all the vocabulary you need on it. Does knowing only 1,300 words mean that you don't understand a thing, automatically shut up and hang your head in shame? Well if you spent all your time learning 1,300 words and not how to use them, you are dead in the water. But if you have a good command of those words, I see no reason why you can't give a good account of yourself. The fundamental difference between myself and emk is that I believe that is is how one pronounces and connect the words -- fluently and accurately -- is just as important as the number of words. As I have said a gazillion times, I'm not against lots of vocabulary. The mistake I see time and time again is what I call lexical discouragement. It's not the best term but the idea is that learners feel they need a huge vocabulary to do anything in a language. I hear, "I can't speak French until I learn 1,000 verbs, So I have to learn to conjugate three verbs a day for the next year if I want to speak French." If you spend all your time reading great literature in French or reading Le monde in order to speak French, you will get discouraged because there are always new words to learn. Instead, you should concentrate on listening to real conversations and actually practicing speaking, especially if you are in a French-speaking environment. You can be up and speaking very quickly. Edited by s_allard on 05 September 2014 at 6:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 22 of 55 05 September 2014 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This debate makes me think about situations that I have observed quite regularly. A person has applied for a job
that requires bilingualism or, more often trilingualism for international positions. As part of the preliminary interview process, the candidate will be called by a language consultant to assess the candidate's foreign language skills. At this stage, this will be in the form of a 10-15 minute phone call. The interviewer will ask a series of questions to assess various aspects of proficiency. An appointment is set up and on that day the consultant calls. The call starts with the usual pleasantries: identification, how are you? how's the weather? what time is it where you live?, etc. Right from the beginning, during all these pleasantries, the examiner is getting an idea of the candidate's level. The way the person answers to "how are you today?" can tell the examiner how things are going to start off. Is the person stuttering and stumbling or do they come across as articulate and fluent? As Head and Nation point out in the article I mentioned above, high-proficiency speakers are able to provide more nuanced and detailed answers in their discussions. The examiner is not keeping track of the vocabulary being used but they notice mistakes. If the candidate can talk about the weather in a detailed manner without making mistakes, then half the battle is won. By the time the interview really begins, the examiner has a good idea where the whole thing is heading. This is similar to what we see here in the real conversations that I have examined. These conversations are very short and do not contain many words.but they demonstrate pretty high levels of proficiency. These are native speakers. If a learner could come anywhere close to speaking like any of these people in the France Bienvenue conversations, they would probably be at the C2 level. What happens is that the examiner extrapolates. If someone can talk well about certain topics, this person will be able to talk in similar fashion about anything. This is why a small vocabulary can work well in a test situation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 23 of 55 05 September 2014 at 8:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I think it's ironic, but you're really mixing up fluency and proficiency in your argument. In the first paragraph I quoted, you're clearly writing about fluency. But then you write about "high-proficiency speakers" who give "nuanced and detailed answers", and then talking about the weather "in a detailed manner". I agree it doesn't require high levels of vocabulary to be fluent, but these latter two descriptions certainly involve increased vocabulary. The difference between "talking about the weather" and "talking about the weather in a detailed manner" is vocabulary. A "more nuanced and detailed answer" implies more vocabulary. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 55 05 September 2014 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The easiest way for you to convince me that 300 words will take somebody a long way is to actually fill out the list. Claiming a small number of words is enough doesn't make sense unless you actually choose the words. Once the words are picked out, it becomes possible to compare them against a wide variety of typical A2 conversations and see whether they suffice. I'm perfectly willing to help with this project—I can provide lists of candidate words, I can build tools to count the unique words in a corpus, and so on. I agree that the noun list will be the most difficult. It's too subject-specific and the distribution is too flat. The top 2000 nouns only get you 84% coverage of nouns in running text (I find this to be astonishingly low, compared to 90% coverage with 260 verbs): 
Oh, and for what it's worth: I believe you need both a solid vocabulary and high speaking fluency and correctness. And as for picking up the vocab you need from documents during a CEFR exam, DELF B2 oral prompts are normally only a paragraph long, and the student is required to produce a 10 minute presentation and answer questions on the subject for 10 minutes. When the subjects are things like, "Is adolescent rebellion an inevitability?", "Does TV and movie violence cause children to be violent?" and (for writing) "Given a choice, would you rather pay twice as much for your magazine subscription, or have twice as many ads?", you can't get all the vocabulary you need from just a short paragraph. Maybe you can pick up 3 or 4 domain specific words at the most, and if you're going to talk about the subject for 20 minutes, you'd ideally like a dozen domain specific words. This is why I suggest building links between the exam topic and a familiar topic. Vocabulary is not sufficient for broad proficiency, but it's certainly necessary.
I should have been a bit more clear: The Rutledge corpus is actually quite nicely balanced, though I still think it favors writing and political speech over conversation. My only major complaints about this corpus are: 1. It only contains 5000 words. 2. It doesn't provide inflectional forms. 3. It's not available as raw data under an open license. As you can see from the charts above, 5000 words isn't enough to get anywhere near 99.5% of varied real-world text. … And for those who are here for numbers and graphs, here's a combined chart, covering all parts of speech in the Lexique database:
As you can see, if you only need 90% coverage to enjoy extensive activities, you can have free run of the bookstore relatively early. If you need 98% coverage to enjoy extensive activities, you'll need to either work with children's books, or pursue a "narrow reading" strategy, by focusing on just a few authors or subjects at first. Just as a sanity check, various online vocabulary size estimators claim that my French vocabulary is a bit over 20K words. No, I don't really believe this! But when reading in reasonably familiar genres, my transparent+decipherable rate can exceed 99.5%. This actually corresponds fairly well to the chart above. Please keep in mind that all word counts are fairly fuzzy. Actually, now that I think about it, this supports my argument about "cheating" and consolidating. If a particular learner needs 98% vocabulary coverage to tackle native materials, then they're looking at learning ~8,000 words before they get free reign of the bookstore and the movie channel. This represents a truly horrifying number of Anki cards, or a completely implausible number of graded readers. Thus, a learner would be well served by all the tricks mentioned in the other thread: Narrow reading, familiar subjects, pop-up dictionaries, native materials with pictures, children's materials, and so on. By using these techniques to temporarily boost comprehension—and by then consolidating that comprehension through lots of exposure—it's possible to spend much more time watching TV and much less time drilling vocabulary. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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