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Books that make use of a small vocabulary | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | Book | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4035 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 15 10 August 2013 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The idea of this topic is that when the vocabulary used in literary works is limited, the concentration of lemmas and especially the most used lemmas is higher. These books could serve the purpose of "easy reading" in the sense that you don't need an immensely large vocabulary to enjoy them. It would also benefit one trying to advance through the "(upper) intermediate" stage in each language and all.
So in short; simply written works of literature in any language. Edited by Henkkles on 11 August 2013 at 12:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5742 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 2 of 15 10 August 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Re: Moby Dick
Umm....the whale chapters? link 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4972 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 3 of 15 10 August 2013 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
No way! Per page perhaps! Moby Dick is very rich in vocabulary - tough for native speakers, let alone students of English. You must be thinking of a different book. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4035 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 15 10 August 2013 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm very frustrated people got stuck with the mention of Moby Dick. A limited amount of lemmas doesn't mean the vocabulary is poor. I'm trying to find the video but it didn't have any hard data but it's not something you'd just lie about, might be he misremembered but he used it to drive a point home so. In most books you don't have four hundred words per page, let alone lemmas. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5742 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 5 of 15 10 August 2013 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry, but I've got just one more comment on Moby Dick. Found this gem in the wiki
article I linked too: "Though 19th century science is of only historical interest, his command of the English language, or at least of its Yankee version, is unimpeachable, so his definitions cannot be dismissed lightly." hahaha 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5381 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 15 10 August 2013 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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According to this video, you need around 14.000 words under your belt to understand 98% of it. Moby Dick is therefore extremely rich in vocabulary.
Maybe one should have better mentioned something like this. Edited by Cabaire on 10 August 2013 at 11:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4035 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 15 11 August 2013 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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Removed all remarks of Moby-Dick in hopes that the derailment of the thread would cease.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4610 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 8 of 15 11 August 2013 at 2:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Given an e-book converted to plain text, a programmer proficient in text-processing
could probably develop code to calculate the number of different lexemes, lemmas, or, er, words in it, so given a sufficently wide range of available e-books one could find the ones with the smallest vocabulary relatively easily. 400 sounds a bit on the low side though. I would love to see the appropriate respective word-counts for, say, the early Harry Potter books, versus "The Hobbit", and, say, the later Harry Potter books versus "Lord of the Rings". Or, say, any Charles Dickens novel versus any Dan Brown novel. I'll bet there are quite a few programmers here more than capable of knocking up such code in a fairly short time. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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