Jarvik7 Wrote:When talking about the word frequency list that is in circulation, keep in mind it is from a financial newspaper and thus the list has no relation to daily-use Japanese or even to Japanese that you'll find on tv and in books. Frequency lists only help you with the material that the list was generated from. In the case of this list, the sample was much too specific.You might be interested to know that there are a variety of word frequency lists at http://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/
There's one that was done on novels and another that was done on blogs, etc. Those are probably a lot more useful.