kodorakun Wrote:Amazon.co.jp says it will take 2 or 4 weeks to deliver. That usually means they have a record but don't have the book. Sometimes I've ordered books that they, in the end, can't find or deliver and offer a refund. Anyways, if it comes quickly let me know and I'll buy it too!

Maybe so, but you're pretty much sure to get it if you buy it off one of the marketplace sellers, of which there are several.

Sounds like an interesting book. I just ordered it from The Book Depository, they offer cheap worldwide shipping. Of course this also means it will take some time to arrive.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Is that n/v/j column the part of speech? It seems suspicous that 'season' and 'sit' have the same frequency as 'precipice' and 'manatee', but it makes more sense if it's only the verb 'season' and the noun 'sit'.

That 'bro' and 'ugh' are in this range only goes to show that a corpus of written material isn't much help with spoken frequencies.

Even so, there's not a word in there that I haven't read or heard hundreds of times. (Well maybe dozens for manatee.) Then again, I've read a lot of English over the years. A lot more than 4 pages a day or whatever was mentioned.

If I recall correctly, if you're looking at the same chance as the sample size, the odds are just slightly over 50%, so reading 1 million words a year gives you a 50/50 shot of seeing each of these 1 in a million words in a year.

I feel like you'd need to read enough to encounter these words more than once every year or two to become well spoken.

This looks like a better list but it wont copy and paste. It says the frequency of the 20000th word is actually 2 in a million.

http://corpus2.byu.edu/coca/100k_data.asp?query=1

Anyway the fact that these are words used in conversion would mean that we dont actually learn them from reading so the advice to stop actively learning words after 6000 and just read seems questionable.

corry Wrote:Anyway the fact that these are words used in conversion would mean that we dont actually learn them from reading so the advice to stop actively learning words after 6000 and just read seems questionable.

But we didn't learn them from intensive study, either. We learned them from listening, which is exactly what half of one's native media consumption should entail. That's what I think his point was, to stop intensive study (after ~6k) and just go out there and learn from reading AND listening, the good ol fashioned way. That doesn't exclude you from spoken language at all, so you shouldn't have any problem encountering words like "bro" and "ugh" (or whatever the words may be in your L2).

^Thats OK if you are in Japan and can talk to people. Immersion works even before 6000 words. But I dont think that you will learn very much vocab just by passively listening to Japanese.

I started putting together a spread sheet of conversational "connectors". The Japanese parts aren't complete, but it'll get filled in over time. Any feedback would be welcome, or if anyone wants to put this into a wiki or something that is a better way to manage this content that would be nice, too.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?...utput=html

The english phrases are taken from the learning Czech page, but I've already started to augment the list with some phrases of my own:
https://sites.google.com/site/fluentczec...tarterpack

Wouldn't 冗談はさて置き work better for "all jokes aside"?

Thanks Stian, added your comment to the list.

What the "stop at 6k" advice misses is that in Japanese, it's hard to guess pronunciation of unknown kanji even if you are very good at guessing, and from my experience it's hard to remember a word from context if you don't know how to say it. Therefore imo in addition to 6k it's worthwhile to add enough words to cover common readings of the 2k most common kanji. THEN you can actually pick up words from context because most likely they will be made up of common kanji or they will be in hiragana and you won't have the pronunciation problem.

The stop at 6k advice would work quite well for English, for example, where guessing pronunciation is not very hard and anybody who has read and listened to enough English can read out "deleterious superfluity" without knowing what it means.

kodorakun Wrote:Amazon.co.jp says it will take 2 or 4 weeks to deliver. That usually means they have a record but don't have the book. Sometimes I've ordered books that they, in the end, can't find or deliver and offer a refund. Anyways, if it comes quickly let me know and I'll buy it too!

It just shipped today, so not too long a wait, I think...

Seems I've replied to the wrong thread! Disregard.