low-frequency words that are unexpectedly frequent

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白田龍
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Re: low-frequency words that are unexpectedly frequent

Postby 白田龍 » Mon Aug 13, 2018 3:31 pm

General (balanced) frequency lists are of limited usage other than for selecting a core (about 3000?) of commonly used words, because the frequency distribution of words will vary greatly from author or genre to genre. If you want to use frequency lists to guide your vocabulary learning, you shoud have the frequency counted from a corpora that reflects rather closely the gerna and registers you are getting exposed to, lest you will be missing frequent words and learning a lot of useless words.
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StringerBell
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Re: low-frequency words that are unexpectedly frequent

Postby StringerBell » Mon Aug 13, 2018 4:17 pm

白田龍 wrote:General (balanced) frequency lists are of limited usage other than for selecting a core (about 3000?) of commonly used words, because the frequency distribution of words will vary greatly from author or genre to genre. If you want to use frequency lists to guide your vocabulary learning, you shoud have the frequency counted from a corpora that reflects rather closely the gerna and registers you are getting exposed to, lest you will be missing frequent words and learning a lot of useless words.


I can't tell if this is directed at me or someone else...if it was a response meant for me, then it doesn't apply because I already mentioned that I don't use frequency lists, I decide for myself which words are likely frequent enough to be worth focusing on.
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Re: low-frequency words that are unexpectedly frequent

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 13, 2018 11:32 pm

People who define "headache", "boyfriend", "airport" etc. as two-words combinations may have inhaled too much coca or something ... and their results couldn't be taken seriously if that's how they do their counting. There are combinations which definitely are two words - like "port authority". But then their parts are mostly pronounced as two words, with a weak stress on each word. But even allowing for a grey zone the words on Hashimi's list aren't inside it. I seriously hope that trippingly is right, i.e. that the words are accepted on the frequency list, which would indicate that they are seen as single words.

Apart from that: in my world there is a lot of scientific terms which never would reach the 25.000 word treshold in a general corpus, but that's because I read too much about science...
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