Learning Japanese fast - Why not use frequency lists for 80% coverage?

erlog Wrote:

drivers99 Wrote:Statistics error... knowing 80% of the words that appear in a large collection of newspapers does NOT mean that you only know know 4 out of 5 words per sentence, because the words within that list are NOT randomly used. I don't know what the figures would be though, and my google-fu isn't finding it.

I think everyone in this discussion knows this. We're just making a point about how recognizing 80% of all the words doesn't mean you'll get 80% of the meaning. We're actually making this point for you, but in a different way.

Edit: My point is not to argue with you, but I want to leave this post up because I think it has a good point about how much you can get out of knowing just the most common words.

I take your point though, you're saying that the more rare a word is the more important it would be to the meaning of the sentence. But those words are going to be few and far between, maybe one per paragraph on average (and less than that after the terms related to the subject matter have been established). In that case you would either look it up or get a general idea through context. So, I think studying vocabulary by frequency is a great idea. (I wouldn't stop at 80% of the usual use kanji though... I mean, that's just 400 kanji... just do it.)

Just to prove my point (in English anyway), I just put the above paragraph into this http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teacher...iler?cc=gb (after converting all contractions into their component words, because it doesn't work with contractions for some reason) and the only words it didn't have in the list of Oxford 3000 English words were "kanji" and "paragraph." Also, the word "frequency" was from a specialist list. I didn't intentionally write it with that in mind; it was an afterthough.