Frequency Dictionaries are ...

[MorkTheFiddle]

Frequency Dictionaries came too late for me for Spanish, French and Ancient Greek. There is a helpful study of verbs used in Thucydides. Once I bought The Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary, but I found it too boring to use.

Helpful too for my reading is not a dictionary per se, but the Perseus website for classical languages allows a user to collect the vocabulary used in a specific or alternatively several works. These lists can range from 50% of the words to 100% of the words, though the webpage can choke if you ask for 100% of the words of several works.

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

Additionally, the Classics Department at Dickinson College has put together a list of the 500 core vocabulary items in Ancient Greek and the 1000 core vocabulary items of Latin (referring to head words, not individual words). I refer a LOT to the Greek list, which includes principal parts of verbs and genitives of nouns and adjectives.

There is however, I think, a point of diminishing returns, where one has to shift the load of vocabulary learning to the text or texts one is currently learning.

As for number of answers, more useful I think would have been a limit of only one. But interesting poll, nonetheless.

[tractor]

Never used one, so I didn’t vote, because I don’t know what to think of them…

[luke]

1) I use them for developing reading skills only.
5) This is extremely important: I read everyday at least 30 min.

The key is to combine your vocabulary review from a frequency dictionary with reading, otherwise it doesn't work.

That makes sense.

I've been thinking about doing more frequency dictionary study in conjunction with a variety of podcasts and reading in a new corpus, Zafón's La sombra del viento.

Frequency Dictionaries came too late for me for Spanish, French and Ancient Greek. There is a helpful study of verbs used in Thucydides. Once I bought The Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary, but I found it too boring to use.

As for number of answers, more useful I think would have been a limit of only one. But interesting poll, nonetheless.

Thanks for the poll tip.

I'm with you on the Big Red Book, although from what I remember, I would like to leaf through it. On a tangent, the Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Vocabulary Building with Suffixes is at the local bookstore, and with its exercises, seems like it could turn on some morphology lights that are still dim.

[einzelne]

It's true you can pick up words even at higher stages, but I can read a novel in French, Dutch or German and I'm not running into anything like hundreds of words, often it is 'zero', sometimes it is a few every 2 or 3 chapters or so. I'm not even running into hundreds whilst reading Spanish and I'm at a much lower level in this. Then again I am using suitable material. Anyone at say A2 or B1 reading a giant native novel or difficult non-fiction to supposedly train vocabulary like that will always be running into hundreds of unknown words - which they won't ever learn at that rate as they just keep accumulating into a backlog.

So on the contrary I'd wager that this ideology has everything to do with it. No graded readers are offering hundreds of unknown words and selected books to the level of the learner aren't either. The idea that someone just forcibly reads themselves to fluency whilst facing a wall of unknown words is fictional. If the person is also trying to listen and/or speak, there are likely more chances to encounter words in contexts for remembering. Otherwise: no.

Well, if I remember correctly you've being reading in these language for decades, right? Otherwise I refuse to believe it. Also, you lived and continue to live your L2 country. And check your privilege ... I mean don't underestimate the deep connection between English, French, Dutch or German.

In fact, I gave you the wrong number. It was about unknown 150 words. Had I read it this book on paper, I guess context would help me to get the meaning for about 50 of them. So you have 11500 words, and 100 unknown. It's 99% coverage! And if you look at the actual pages, it doesn't look so scary — 3-4 highlighted words per page. But again, you read for 2 hours, it's about 60-70 pages. Even if you have a couple of unknown words it can easily get you 150. But it's Levi-Strauss for Christ sake! Sophisticated and fanciful prose à la française. Of course, with easier writers, I won't get that many unknown words. I just mark these words in my reader for statistical purposes. I'm not planning to go back and review them.

But I still remember my first fiction book in French when I started to work systematically on my reading skills in French fiction. By that time I already read a bunch of books on philosophy and cinema, and a half-dozen of easy fiction books (Larsson, Modiano, Camus). My first book was Levy's L'horizon à l'envers and, in spite of my previous experience, it still gave me a whopping 1500 new words in expressions. May be I could read adapted books for a couple of years to get to the comfortable level but I simply cannot stand them. So I preferred to push myself through it.

[einzelne]

I've been thinking about doing more frequency dictionary study in conjunction with a variety of podcasts and reading in a new corpus, Zafón's La sombra del viento.

Funny you mentioned Zafón. I was surfing through Spanish audiobooks yesterday night thinking what could be a good entry point into Spanish fiction when I discovered Zafón and thought that this might be the guy!

[Le Baron]

Well, if I remember correctly you've being reading in these language for decades, right? Otherwise I refuse to believe it. Also, you lived and continue to live your L2 country. And check your privilege ... I mean don't underestimate the deep connection between English, French, Dutch or German.

There is no privilege. Maybe with how I personally initially encountered French, though I can't help that. However German is hard for English natives, the 'same as' notions are superficial. The vocabulary past the basics is...well 'foreign'. The grammar is different, a lot of the word order is different, the pronunciation is entirely different. Language group relationships are no guarantee. There are plenty of those Ecolinguist videos where the Russians fail at fully understanding Ukrainian or people in the Slavic language continuum totally failing to understand other Slavic languages. The 'privilege ought to be operating, right?

In fact, I gave you the wrong number. It was about unknown 150 words. Had I read it this book on paper, I guess context would help me to get the meaning for about 50 of them. So you have 11500 words, and 100 unknown. It's 99% coverage! And if you look at the actual pages, it doesn't look so scary — 3-4 highlighted words per page. But again, you read for 2 hours, it's about 60-70 pages. Even if you have a couple of unknown words it can easily get you 150. But it's Levi-Strauss for Christ sake! Sophisticated and fanciful prose à la française. Of course, with easier writers, I won't get that many unknown words. I just mark these words in my reader for statistical purposes. I'm not planning to go back and review them.

I see. When I'm reading I'm not just ploughing through the pages of one book, or even a book at all. It might be a newspaper or even a magazine. The additional books are fiction/non-fiction and I might knock out a chapter or half of each. I appreciate though that we read to different purposes and that's fair enough and entirely legitimate. As much as literary reading I also want practical material and popular material.
If you say it's only 3-4 words per page it seems much less dramatic to me and more manageable. It might be the counting in hundreds thing that throws me off. A measure per page is meaningful to me. Like saying 'take this pill twice a day' rather than 'take 730+/- of these pills over the course of the year.' It's that weird large-scale counting fetish thing.

[badger]

I'm not sure I understand the "incomplete" option - they are incomplete by definition, otherwise they'd just be regular dictionaries.

[garyb]

I've never seen much point in them. Seems like putting the cart before the horse. If vocabulary is high-frequency then you'll eventually encounter it enough through your normal studies and input to learn it.

I could imagine that periodically flipping through one as a beginner or low-intermediate learner could be quite useful for spotting gaps in your knowledge or reminding you of words you've forgotten, though.

[einzelne]

If you say it's only 3-4 words per page it seems much less dramatic to me and more manageable. It might be the counting in hundreds thing that throws me off. A measure per page is meaningful to me. Like saying 'take this pill twice a day' rather than 'take 730+/- of these pills over the course of the year.' It's that weird large-scale counting fetish thing.

I'm reading it on my Kindle app, so depending on the gadget (smartphone, iPad, or actual Kindle) you would get a different number of 'pages'.

My French is advanced enough, so I just highlight these words just for fun. When I read paper books, I rarely, if ever, check the dictionary.

[zgriptsuroica]

I'm not sure I understand the "incomplete" option - they are incomplete by definition, otherwise they'd just be regular dictionaries.

I chose helpful and overrated, but incomplete would have been a third option if I were allowed. To a certain extent, I think this "incomplete" is simply owing to people not understanding how frequency dictionaries are put together. They are generally accurate given the subset of the language they're based off of. For an example that comes to mind, the Japanese core vocabulary decks are based on a corpus of Japanese newspapers. Because of this, they may be reasonably complete if your goal is to discuss current events and have a cursory ability to speak on economic and political topics, to say nothing of being able to read a Japanese newspaper. If your goal is to read Murakami, play video games or read all your manga/light novels in the original, however, you'll probably waste time learning a lot of vocabulary that isn't necessary for what you want to do with the language while also realizing that lots of common vocabulary for your preferred media is missing from the list. You might go through the whole list and never once encounter the words 異世界 or 機動戦士, despite them possibly being something you would encounter much more often than some political or economics term.

Of course, how much of this is due to the frequency dictionary being actually "incomplete," rather than people not understanding how they are put together and what one can reasonably expect to do with one? People need to make sure they choose a tool that suits their purposes, after all.