aldebrn Wrote:I fully appreciate the shortcomings of frequency-based approaches, thanks to erlog, who said back in 2009,There is some truth in in Erlogs words. However I believe all words hold the same amount of importance in a language.
erlog Wrote:A kanji's frequency of appearing has little do with how important it is for understanding. In fact, you could make the case that frequency and importance have an inverse relationship. The less frequent kanji are probably more important because they are only used when they are necessary. The same goes for words.
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How important is the word Monday in this sentence: Monday, my father died. -or- Yesterday, I started choking while eating an apple.
Those mundane words are the most common like Monday, my, father, apple, and eating. The less common words are where the true meaning of the sentence lies.
Whilst its true "Monday, my, father, apple, and eating" aren't the most 'important' words of the sentence, if one doesn't know their meaning then thats 80% of the sentence you don't know.
If I had a choice between knowing all of the common words that are used 80% of the time and only having to research the meaning of 1 'important' word; or knowing the important words, but not the remaining 80% of the sentence I know what I would choose.