Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby BeaP » Mon Jun 20, 2022 4:24 pm

luke wrote:Just trying to understand here. Ms. BeaP, you're saying that language learning materials is often about marketing and sales, rather than producing effective products, right?

I think that the pressure to earn money puts a leash on the creators / publishers. It limits creativity and excludes options like proper shootings of video materials and the recording of extensive audio materials. Also, they can't pay enough experts, and although the method or the concept is good, the material itself is subpar, or the original method gets corrupted to fit the supposed need of the market. If you'd like me to go into detail, just tell me, and I'll write a post about it on my log when I have more time.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby jeffers » Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:59 am

SpanishInput wrote:2) This is why Imron from the "Chinese the hard way" blog (and also administrator of Chinese Forums) says that after you reach 1,200 words (HSK 4), it's waaaay more efficient to focus on words that are frequent in the book you're reading right now.

Here's his blog post, "learning from general word lists is inefficient":
https://www.chinesethehardway.com/artic ... efficient/


Several years ago, one of my students created a program for a Computer Science project that basically did this for French. At its core it has a list of your "known" words, and you give it a text file in French. It converted all words into headwords and worked out the frequency, and then gave you a list of whatever length you choose of the most frequent words in that book that are not on your known list. So for example, I could give it an article and ask for the top 20 words that I don't know. I could then tell it to mark those words as known, and they would then be excluded from future lists. I strongly believe that a tool like this would be the best way to approach vocabulary aquisition, in my opinion. You're going to read a new book in your language? Feed it in, and learn the top 100 words you don't know. You could do the same with TV series on Netflix since it's relatively simple to extract the subtitles.

Unfortunately the project was a proof of concept and so had some issues which made it unusable. Maybe one of these days I should make my own version of the tool.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby rdearman » Wed Jun 22, 2022 12:32 pm

jeffers wrote:Unfortunately the project was a proof of concept and so had some issues which made it unusable. Maybe one of these days I should make my own version of the tool.

You could use something like AntConc which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis. I've used it before to find common words in text files. You can just convert the file to text and the program will generate a corpus from that text. I did a YT video about this a long time ago. Unfortunately, the latest version is crashing on my Linux box. But I've used it before with French and Italian. I am pretty sure it would with Korean (since it is an alphabet) but not sure about Mandarin or other types of scripts.


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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Jun 22, 2022 1:49 pm

↑ A topic with a link to that video must be liked.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby jeffers » Wed Jun 22, 2022 2:22 pm

rdearman wrote:
jeffers wrote:Unfortunately the project was a proof of concept and so had some issues which made it unusable. Maybe one of these days I should make my own version of the tool.

You could use something like AntConc which is a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis. I've used it before to find common words in text files. You can just convert the file to text and the program will generate a corpus from that text. I did a YT video about this a long time ago. Unfortunately, the latest version is crashing on my Linux box. But I've used it before with French and Italian. I am pretty sure it would with Korean (since it is an alphabet) but not sure about Mandarin or other types of scripts.




This looks like a useful tool, and might suit my purposes. But it misses out the clever part of my student's program: ignoring words previously learnt.

In any case, tools like this could be used after learning the first 1000-1500 words from a frequency dictionary, and it would avoid the problem Iversen brought up. When I was a beginner in French, having just finished Assimil I began to try "easy readers" but found a lot of vocabulary I was missing. My solution was to get the Routledge Frequency Dictionary and learn the first 2500 words. I don't regret learning those words because every one of them comes up fairly regularly. However, I think I would have had an easier (and more enjoyable) time if I had learned a smaller core of vocabulary, and then focused on learning words specific to texts I wanted to read. There's one more factor in favour of this method: words learnt in isolation are going to be far less "sticky" than words learnt which then come up several times in a book/article/show. This is one of the cases where the more efficient method is also the more interesting.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby Beli Tsar » Wed Jun 22, 2022 7:21 pm

jeffers wrote:This looks like a useful tool, and might suit my purposes. But it misses out the clever part of my student's program: ignoring words previously learnt.

Anki does this pretty easily - if you import a list of words, you can choose to add only those that are new to your deck.

If you don't like using Anki, you could still import and then export as .CSV and use that list however you liked. Or, of course, you can replicate the whole thing with some determined playing around with Excel.

It's a simple but brilliant feature and one that has saved me many hours. In addition to adding words from a corpus (via Antconc it similar) it's a great way to amalgamate different frequency lists, vocab lists from multiple textbooks, and so on.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby luke » Wed Jun 22, 2022 9:02 pm

Beli Tsar wrote:
jeffers wrote:This looks like a useful tool, and might suit my purposes. But it misses out the clever part of my student's program: ignoring words previously learnt.

Anki does this pretty easily - if you import a list of words, you can choose to add only those that are new to your deck.

It's a simple but brilliant feature and one that has saved me many hours. In addition to adding words from a corpus (via Antconc it similar) it's a great way to amalgamate different frequency lists, vocab lists from multiple textbooks, and so on.

Our dear rdearman did mention Linux. On Linux, it would be fairly trivial to grab the top N unknown words. (using sort, diff, comm, awk and vi).

One could then make personal Anki cards and even use a nice fragment from your source document using the word in context. Since you're doing words by frequency, you'll have plenty of choices for the fragment because it's a frequent word.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby Le Baron » Wed Jun 22, 2022 10:07 pm

I might be wrong (I often am, but there we are), but I get the feeling sometimes that folk put far more energy into constructing ingenious ways to learn words (and other elements), preferably and overwhelmingly with technology, than actually just learning words. I mean doing it.

For all the super-efficient methodologies touted, 99.9% of learners, depending on circumstances, still seem to take the same old average 3-5 or more years reaching all the same goals as those who used books, records, tapes, classes and immersion. How could that be?
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby einzelne » Thu Jun 23, 2022 1:33 am

Le Baron wrote:I might be wrong (I often am, but there we are), but I get the feeling sometimes that folk put far more energy into constructing ingenious ways to learn words (and other elements), preferably and overwhelmingly with technology, than actually just learning words. I mean doing it.

For all the super-efficient methodologies touted, 99.9% of learners, depending on circumstances, still seem to take the same old average 3-5 or more years reaching all the same goals as those who used books, records, tapes, classes and immersion. How could that be?


I think that as long as these technologies keep you engaged with the language, I'm a staunch supporter of Paul Feyerabend's 'anything goes’ philosophy. Now, if after 3 years the only thing you do is playing with some fancy app then I would be worried.
Last edited by einzelne on Thu Jun 23, 2022 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Routledge Frequency dictionaries — 5k limit

Postby luke » Thu Jun 23, 2022 2:01 am

einzelne wrote:
Le Baron wrote:I might be wrong (I often am, but there we are), but I get the feeling sometimes that folk put far more energy into constructing ingenious ways to learn words (and other elements), preferably and overwhelmingly with technology, than actually just learning words.

I think that as long as these technologies keep you engaged with the language, I'm a staunch supporter of Paul Feyerabend's 'anything philosophy.
Paul Feyerabend wrote:Human life is guided by many ideas. Truth is one of them. Freedom and mental independence are others.

Some are looking for an easier way. They're usually give up or are selling something.

Some are just looking for a more engaging or effective way.
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