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Experimenting with French word frequency | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5239 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 33 of 55 05 September 2014 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@emk. I don't suppose you could dump out the first 5000 frequent film headwords to a text file for me? I used to have a python script that would take a list like that & generate a csv with translations for ANKI. I sure could use 98% coverage! Sod the 300 word limit. (I know you gave the link to the entire corpus, I'm being lazy)
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 34 of 55 05 September 2014 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here you go.
With a large enough movie collection and a tool like subs2srs, you could really have fun with this: Automatically select snippets of dialog from movies that use vocabulary at each level, align them with English translations, and generate audio cards. You could even start out with cards where all the words were common, and gradually make things harder. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5239 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 35 of 55 05 September 2014 at 11:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
YAY! Thanks. ==== Edit Below ===== That was very simple to create basic cards! Google translate accepted the file and did all of them in one fell swoop. subs2srs is a bit of a pain for me, since I don't use Windows. I do have a large collection of French films, but not enough subtitle files. Still ramming 5000 headwords into my tiny brain should help. One thing I think would be really cool would be to take these 5k words and find someway to get a monolingual dictionary definition for each word. I think reading the definition of the word in French, along with a basic translation in English could really boost the reading level at the same time as you memorise the word & meaning. You'd also get to see the other meanings for the words. I've done some definitions for Italian words, but it is a very long slow process because I can't find an API or similar for an online dictionary. Now if I can only find a similar list for Italian! I'm on the hunt for one now. Edited by rdearman on 05 September 2014 at 11:35pm 2 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 36 of 55 06 September 2014 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Le Wiktionnaire. A large, open source French dictionary. It's basically as good as the general-interest commercial dictionaries I've seen. There are example sentences, and decent coverage of everything from slang to archaic language. The raw data is open source, and you can download it using an official BitTorrent. It's a bit of a nuisance to parse, though. 2 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 37 of 55 06 September 2014 at 1:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As I have said before, emk and I keep bumping heads because we approach the question of vocabulary size from radically opposite perspectives. For me the answer to the question, "What can you do with only 300 words?" is two-fold. First, for the beginning learner, 300 words allows you to you start using the language meaningfully. Second, for the advanced speaker, 300 words is enough for spontaneous native-level conversation. From this point on there seems to be a misunderstanding. emk, it seems to me, wants to see that magic list of 300 all-purpose words that will work for all beginners. I don't believe there is such a thing. I believe that every individual's "starter" set is customized to reflect the individual's needs. I don't think that a raw beginner after a few weeks of classes and 300 words will be chatting away at a B2 level. Although I don't make wild claims about what a beginner can do with only 300 distinct words, I do observe at the same time that native speakers of French are able to have spontaneous and high-level conversations with few words. This is what I find fascinating. I have provided two examples of such conversations with 145 and 224 distinct words respectively. I ask, again, Are these A2 level conversations? Are these A2-level speakers? They sound like adult native speakers to me. What are they doing if not conversing with less than 300 words? Right now I'm looking at a transcription of 4 hours of dialogues between a French police negotiator and a holed- up suspect. I might do something with the first 15 minutes. Or maybe just look at the verbs. But it might be too colloquial for our purposes. So, the question isn't whether 300 words is enough or not. The question is how skilled is the user with them? A beginner with 300 words will only go so far. A more advanced speaker can do wonders with 300 words. I try to reconcile the two observations by saying that a good learning strategy is to focus on the core of the language and to radiate from there. This also means coming back to basics and fundamentals regularly. What you want to avoid is the "I've been studying French for years and can't speak it" syndrome that happens often when people look at French like an insurmountable mountain. What I have always noticed is that good learners of French do not wait to know everything before starting to speak. What little they know, they start using it. They get excited because they can make themselves understood right away. I don't think you have to know how to count from one to a thousand to order a bottle of water from the bar. Sure, the person behind the counter make ask you some really weird question. How big a problem is that? That's a nice problem to have. That's better than being deathly afraid to use the language because you haven't studied all the verbs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5239 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 38 of 55 06 September 2014 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You can communicate with 300 words. The entire language of Toki Pona only has 120 words total. But really, who wants to limit themselves to only 300 words of French? Or any natural language for that matter?
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 55 06 September 2014 at 2:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The post would be laughable if it did not illustrate so clearly why comprehension is such a difficult thing to define. Nobody, neither emk nor myself, has spoken about limiting oneself to 300 words of French or any language. The problem, I think, is that people don't follow the discussion and don't know what we are talking about. We are not talking about learning only 300 words of French. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 40 of 55 06 September 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You keep on contradicting yourself on what exactly those 300 words are useful for.
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