BeaP wrote:Also, I wouldn't draw final conclusions from a study of German textbooks that only includes books written by academics at (mostly) American universities.
See the original study. Deutsch heute, Neue Horizonte and Kontakte are all German only textbooks made in Germany.
BeaP wrote:Maybe there are no 10k lists, because the difference between the frequency of each element is very small (there would be 2000 words at the same place), and it's affected by the type of the texts so much that it can't be done in a scientific way.
Indeed, there's a long tail when all the words have pretty much the same weight. Still, for pedagogical purposes, I think it would be useful to know the number of occurrences in the corpus and I believe you could still do a targeted list for a specific domain (newspapers or fiction, for instance).
For English, there's the COCA project and I don't see the reason why there shouldn't be a similar thing for other major languages.
Ideally, it would be great to have some sort of build-in option in your reading app: you mark a specific topic, or a specific set of books your planning to aspire to read in your target language and every time you use the pop-up dictionary, it will give the number of occurrences of this word in your own corpus. But, given the copyright issues, I doubt we will see anything like that in any foreseeable future. But, who knows, may be one day Amazon will become a monopolist and will be able to do with eBooks whatever it wants