Frequency of various conjugated forms: persons and numbers

[yong321]

According to Google Ngram,
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... r_end=2019
I go,you go,he goes,she goes,it goes,we go,they go
show that at least since 2000 till 2019, the frequencies of the above 2-word sentences are in this order (>> here means "much greater"):
"you go" >> "I go" > "we go" >> "they go" > "it goes" > "he goes" > "she goes"
It's not surprising "you go" is high; it merges singular and plural second person forms. But "it goes", "he goes" and "she goes" are so low that even if they're combined, the frequency is still lower than "we go". That surprises me.
Then I checked "do" in place of "go":
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... r_end=2019
The result is about the same except for the first-person singular ("I do"), which is very high, presumably due to the wedding vow.

Let's check the various forms of French "aller" ('to go'), including "on va":

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... &corpus=30

The result is: "je vais" >> "tu vas" ≈ "nous allons" ≈ "il va" ≈ "on va" ≈ "vous allez" > "elle va" ≈ "ils vont". It's interesting to see "je vais" with a much higher frequency. And if we add up "il va" and "elle va", the combined frequency will be higher than "tu vas", but still much lower than that of "je vais".

Lastly, let's check Spanish "ir" ('to go'):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... &corpus=10

Probably due to a problem in data availability, I have to choose the time range of 1990-2007 instead of 2000-2019. Since Spanish is a pro-drop language, I omitted the pronoun so the input is a little simpler. The result is: "va" >> "van" >> "voy" ≈ "vamos" > "vas" > "vais". I don't know how to explain why the third person, especially singular, is very much more frequent. This is quite different from English and French.

Knowing these frequencies is helpful for foreign language education, maybe not so much in English, but in most other languages. For example, we all know we should not strive for memorizing all tenses and conjugated forms with equal effort at the beginning of the study. Prioritizing based on frequencies has practical implications. While tenses, moods and voices are intuitively ranked in frequency, persons and numbers are less so. With the above Google ngram result of frequencies for different persons and numbers, textbook and dictionary writers may choose to give more example sentences in the more frequent persons and numbers to optimize learners' language study.