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

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.

drivers99 Wrote: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.)

It isn't clear if this is actually favorable or detrimental to understanding the target material. But, you seem to be suggesting it actually is favorable? That knowing 80% of the words might help to understand 90% of the material?

I wonder if there is a threshold of word coverage that gives just enough understanding to pick up all the new words entirely through context, without needing to rely on a dictionary. As a native english speaker, I picked up the vast majority of my vocabulary via reading many books as I grew up, and I never used the dictionary to learn words.