French verb frequency

[siouxchief]

Hi all,

I guess some of the gurus are familiar with this work but I thought for newcomers learning French it is worth highlighting.

EMK from the old language forum analyzed how frequently verbs turned up in movies by looking at the subtitles and the results are interesting.

Here is his analysis:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Essentially if you learn the ER verb pattern and a few others like etre, avoir, aller, faire, dire, pouvoir venir (26 similar verbs), vouloir and savoir you nearly have 80% of verb occurrences. This is before ever looking at RE or IR verb groups!

Just goes to show the prevalence of ER verbs and the main irregular verbs are! This might help people to focus on certain areas first I guess.

Would be good to hear thoughts on it but for most people maybe not a surprise.

Thanks

[s_allard]

It warms my heart to read this post because back in the old days of HTLAL I had epic arguments with various participants over how many words one needed to "speak" a language like French. Nobody is suggesting that you can speak French with 26 verbs but the idea is that those verbs represent the core or nucleus of the verb system. This is what you have to master because they are used frequently and have many uses. And then you add other verbs as you need them.

Edit: added missing verb "is".