Frequency Dictionaries are ...

General discussion about learning languages

Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Overrated
7
15%
Helpful
26
55%
Incomplete
9
19%
A waste of time
5
11%
 
Total votes: 47

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einzelne
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Re: Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Postby einzelne » Tue Jun 21, 2022 2:27 am

Le Baron wrote: There is no privilege. <...> The 'privilege ought to be operating, right?


It's operating, without any doubt.

I just finished sifting though Routledge's Frequency dictionary of Spanish. Out of 5000 words, I marked 1300 for learning and review. The rest 3700 were transparent. Sure, some of them are international words like democracy, capitalism etc but the major contributor of my implicit knowledge is advanced readings skills in French and intermediate in Italian.

Sure, an English speaker would have to struggle a lot with training their ear, grammar, and active skills. But when it comes to receptive skills, he or she has an advantage, a speaker of Slavic or Asian languages doesn't have. In the similar way, it would be fairly easy to ramp up my reading skills in Ukrainian, or other Slavic language, in comparison to you. Here you have it. I was only joking about privilege but you get the idea. Lexical similarity is real and it's pretty operative (although sometimes, indeed you need to 'turn it on', as it were).
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s_allard
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Re: Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Postby s_allard » Tue Jun 21, 2022 12:11 pm

I was tempted to choose A waste of time but, considering that some people here seem to find frequency dictionaries useful, I chose Overrated instead.

In my opinion the fundamental problem with all frequency dictionaries and wordlists is the belief that the word – in its various incarnations – is the fundamental unit of a language. So, learning a language consists basically of learning a bunch of words.

This is clearly stated in the foreword of the Spanish Frequency Dictionary Advanced Vocabulary (5001 – 7500 Most Common Spanish Words)

« …The Collins Spanish Dictionary (August 2016 edition) lists over 310,000 words in current use, while you will only need to know 1.62% (5000 words) to achieve 95% and 89% fluency in speaking and writing. Knowing the most common 10,000 words, or just 3.25%, will net you 98% fluency in spoken language and 95% fluency in written texts. »

https://www.amazon.ca/-/fr/MostUsedWords/dp/9492637235/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8&asin=9492637235&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

I believe that these figures are totally misleading. The use of the word fluency instead of proficiency is very irritating to me. But more importantly, there is no definition of what it means to know a word.

What should be emphasized here is that we are really talking about knowing how to use the words appropriately in a multitude of contexts.

In reality, the isolated word does not mean much. Any good dictionary will give example sentences that illustrate the use(s) of a word. The fundamental unit of a language is something along the lines of a phrase.

This is readily apparent when we look at idiomatic expressions that Iversen discusses earlier. This is a whole world of complexity in itself that frequency dictionaries are not designed to handle and for which we have idiom dictionaries.

I thus believe that trying to quantify vocabulary size is a fool’s errand. Proficiency is not determined by a given number of words but by the ability to use the words in your command. Vocabulary size is determined by the topic that one is speaking or writing about and will expand accordingly with exposure. This is exactly what happens in our native languages when we spontaneously acquire new words as we acquire new knowledge.

So the fundamental issue for vocabulary acquisition is exposure. Reading one good book will expose you to all the fundamentals of the language you need to know. Right now I am finishing the Ken Follet's 474-page novel Whiteout. For the English-learner this one book contains all the fundamentals of written and spoken English. Of course, there are other types of English, such as academic and technical language, that are not much present in this work. Obviously, one should read a varied range of material to get exposure to different varieties of the language, but the point I want to make here is that just one good book can give the reader a very complete exposure to the language without having to bother with trying to learn the most frequent words by themselves.

Edit: correct minor typos
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Tue Jun 21, 2022 5:32 pm

einzelne wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Such lists for Ancient Greek have their limits because when you read, say, the aforesaid Thucydides, you have to know ALL the words.


Perseus Vocabulary is, indeed, a wonderful tool. It is also true that when you decide to read a classical text in the original, you want to savor every single sentence, every single word. I cannot imagine how can you practice extensive reading with Greek texts.

If I were responsible for a new edition of classical texts, I would simply gloss every word which occurs only a couple of times in the text.
This is what Reclam tried to implement in their series Fremdsprachentexte with Augustinus' Confessiones — they glossed every word which cannot be find in their frequency dictionary of Latin. They also glossed some tricky grammar points. Basically they did everything to ensure that the only thing you need to read Augustinus is their edition and that's it. They make reading Latin classic as immersive as possible. I wish we had more editions like that.

I have tried to read extensively Greek texts, but for someone at my level at least it is impossible.
And I wholeheartedly agree that glossing every word of Latin and Greek texts has immeasureable value. Something like what Steadman does, though I would make the page glosses in alphabetical order because easier to find. Also, Steadman often recommends a "more in-depth" commentary in addition to his own. But IMHO, Steadman's commentaries are much more valuable. Exceptions exist, I suppose. Currently I am tackling Euripides's Hippolytus, pretty much word by word and line by line. No Steadman for it, but W. S. Barrett's commentary (1964) is very useful and Steadmanlike in its attention to most of the words.
IIRC, before grammarians hijacked the teaching of classics, instructors provided their students with word lists relevant to their reading. But I can't remember the source of this, so don't bet the ranch on it.
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson

ahilan
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Re: Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Postby ahilan » Tue Jul 12, 2022 3:15 pm

I've heard of the idea of lists of most frequently used words, but didn't realise Frequency Dictionaries existed. Does anyone have a link to a site with some? The first thing I arrive are definitions of 'frequency' when I google.

thanks
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Herodotean
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Re: Frequency Dictionaries are ...

Postby Herodotean » Tue Jul 12, 2022 5:49 pm

ahilan wrote:I've heard of the idea of lists of most frequently used words, but didn't realise Frequency Dictionaries existed. Does anyone have a link to a site with some? The first thing I arrive are definitions of 'frequency' when I google.

thanks

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Fre ... series/RFD
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