How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

All about language programs, courses, websites and other learning resources
Mr Dastardly
White Belt
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:59 pm
Languages: English (N)
French (Beginner/Lower Intermediate)
x 50

How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby Mr Dastardly » Tue Apr 27, 2021 4:08 pm

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know of a reliable online dictionary where you can search word frequency (for French)? The Collins online dictionary provides some indication of word frequency, but its ranking system seems to be determined by how commonly words are used within the dictionary itself.
1 x

User avatar
lysi
Yellow Belt
Posts: 98
Joined: Sat Mar 27, 2021 1:34 pm
Location: Ontario, Canada
Languages: English (N), French, Mandarin (Beginner)
x 300

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby lysi » Tue Apr 27, 2021 4:11 pm

I use Lexique3. http://www.lexique.org/shiny/openlexicon/

Be sure to go into the columns list and select lexique3 rather than megalex, because megalex is the default, like in the image.

Image
4 x

Mr Dastardly
White Belt
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:59 pm
Languages: English (N)
French (Beginner/Lower Intermediate)
x 50

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby Mr Dastardly » Tue Apr 27, 2021 4:28 pm

lysi wrote:I use Lexique3. http://www.lexique.org/shiny/openlexicon/

Be sure to go into the columns list and select lexique3 rather than megalex, because megalex is the default, like in the image.

Image


Amazing, thanks so much!

So, to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, the attached screenshot is telling us that "bonjour" is the 570th most frequently found word in a movie subtitles dataset?

Edit: OK I think I'm too stupid to understand Lexique lol
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Last edited by Mr Dastardly on Tue Apr 27, 2021 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
1 x

User avatar
lysi
Yellow Belt
Posts: 98
Joined: Sat Mar 27, 2021 1:34 pm
Location: Ontario, Canada
Languages: English (N), French, Mandarin (Beginner)
x 300

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby lysi » Tue Apr 27, 2021 4:50 pm

Mr Dastardly wrote:So, to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, the attached screenshot is telling us that "bonjour" is the 570th most frequent word found in a movie subtitles dataset?

No, it's counting frequency by million, and if you want to see what x-th word it is compared to other words it's annoying to find, but it's possible. What you have to do is that you have to find the word you want to get, copy down the frequency, then put in that frequency in a range to the maximum range, as well as putting 1...1 to the islem catagory, then removing the word from the search and seeing how many entries there are. So for bonjour it would be the 150th most common word, which actually seems wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's right.

Image
2 x

Mr Dastardly
White Belt
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:59 pm
Languages: English (N)
French (Beginner/Lower Intermediate)
x 50

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby Mr Dastardly » Tue Apr 27, 2021 5:13 pm

lysi wrote:
Mr Dastardly wrote:So, to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, the attached screenshot is telling us that "bonjour" is the 570th most frequent word found in a movie subtitles dataset?

No, it's counting frequency by million, and if you want to see what x-th word it is compared to other words it's annoying to find, but it's possible. What you have to do is that you have to find the word you want to get, copy down the frequency, then put in that frequency in a range to the maximum range, as well as putting 1...1 to the islem catagory, then removing the word from the search and seeing how many entries there are. So for bonjour it would be the 150th most common word, which actually seems wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's right.

Image


Thanks once again mate! Wish I could buy you a beer!
1 x

Mr Dastardly
White Belt
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:59 pm
Languages: English (N)
French (Beginner/Lower Intermediate)
x 50

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby Mr Dastardly » Wed Apr 28, 2021 8:01 am

lysi wrote:...


I was just thinking, is there a particular threshold in word frequency where you no longer bother trying to commit words to memory (unless they are words that have specific relevance to you, of course)? Is there really any practical utility in trying to remember words that appear less than once in every million written?

I believe Arguelles said somewhere that a typical degree-educated French native has a passive vocabulary of roughly 20,000 word families. Presumably a thousand or so of those words would be technical and specific to a given individual's training and professional competency area, but assuming, for the sake of simplicity, they were merely 20,000 of the most frequently used words in popular media, how would that figure of 20,000 translate into frequency per million? i.e, assuming I only wanted to learn the most frequent 20,000 word families and no more, how would I understand that threshold in terms of words per million?
0 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby Iversen » Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:13 pm

Why learn a word that only occurs once out of a million words? Well, because when I use it it will be two out of a million... :lol:

Apart from that, there is rank and there is frequency. You should probably try to learn maybe the 1000 (or 500) most common words, mainly because they are so common, but also because very common words tend to become more morphologically and semantically complicated than rarer words. But above that treshold the rank is totally irrelevant since all words up there are quite rare, but still you might hit upon them - or need them yourself for some purpose. Luckily such words tend to be fairly easy to deal with so learning a few thousands isn't impossible.

Frequency is a more relevant property since it is an absolute property and not just the position on a scale in comparison with other words, but it is still heavily dependant on the corpus used - and if your corpus is articles about botany then the name of some obscure flower may be more frequent than the name of the French president. A native French person who lives in a French town may know 30.000 words from 20.000 word families, but if you just want to take a holiday there once in a while and read Mallarmé in your spare time at home then you don't have to know the same 30.000 words as the French guy/gal - and in practice few learners learn 20.000 L2 word families anyway so just go for the words you find interesting and practical for your purposes..

By the way, if I had a hunch in the good old days that a word I was tempted to use in my log was too rare then I might try to make a search and check the hit count. Unfortunately the idiotic new layout of Google has removed this information. Why is the world ruled by fools?
2 x

User avatar
smallwhite
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2386
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 6:55 am
Location: Hong Kong
Languages: Native: Cantonese;
Good: English, French, Spanish, Italian;
Mediocre: Mandarin, German, Swedish, Dutch.
.
x 4876

Re: How to find out frequency of a given (French) word?

Postby smallwhite » Fri Apr 30, 2021 7:41 pm

Mr Dastardly wrote:frequency per million

Some frequency lists include that information. Here, occurrence out of 29,213,800 words:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktio ... 006/1-1000
1 x
Dialang or it didn't happen.


Return to “Language Programs and Resources”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests