studying a foreign language based on word frequency
Published by luke June 30th, 2008 in bangkok, language, los angeles, ca, niskayuna, ny, thailand.in studying foreign languages, i’ve often wondered about learning words based on usage frequency. if your goal is to get up and running with basic conversation, then memorizing the most commonly used 300-500 words would probably be easiest. it would obviously leave lots of gaps, but you would probably have enough of a foundation to understand most conversations and then figure out the rest based on context.
wiktionary has created lists of most commonly used words (sorted by language) based on the subtitles from movies and tv shows. i guess that would mean it would apply to the spoken forms of language more than the written ones, but would seem like a good way to decide which words to learn
ohh, this reminds me …. i’m into week three of the new school term, taking spanish, sanskrit, japanese and an introduction to thai literature.
english
ภาษาไทย
Actually memorising a core of 500 frequently used words is the way language is taught in some countries.
I could be a wag and tell you that I could teach you 500 words of the Bavarian dialect of German, and that is really all you would ever need to know. ;-p