Top 10,000 Chinese characters

Jun Da of Middle State Tennessee University has a Chinese character frequency list that was made in 2004 based on a very large collection of online Chinese texts. The list can easily be cut and paste into Excel and then put into your favorite memorization program. The explanation of what was included in the corpus can be found here.

Tim Ferriss and language learning

For those of you that haven't stumbled upon it yet, Tim Ferriss's blog is quite an interesting read, but I am of course most interested in his posts about languages, the best of which are:

• How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months
• Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate
• Youse, Y’All, and Other Confusions of Modern English
• How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour
• How to Resurrect Your High School Spanish… or Any Language

Once I get through Street-Smart Language Learning, you'll quickly see that I agree with almost all of his ideas.

And, courtesy of Tim's blog, here's a bonus link to a good article on frequency lists: Why and how to use frequency lists to learn words by Tom Cobb.

Related:
Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German
Word lists based on frequency of use

Top 10,000 words in Dutch, English, French, and German

This page has lists of the top 10,000 words in each of Dutch, English, French, and German. As the page is in German, I've put together a little table to take you directly to the lists. The lists unfortunately do not have translations.

After the jump, the table and a another word frequency list for French.

Read more...

Dutch	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
English	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
French	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000
German	Top 100	Top 1,000	Top 10,000

About.com has a top-100 word frequency list for French here. In contrast to the lists above, About.com's does have English translations.

Using word frequency to teach writing to kids

The other day when I was looking at the word frequency lists that I mentioned in this post, my 4-year-old daughter came up to me and wanted to write, so she started writing down random words that were on my computer screen. When I looked at her paper, she had written "Genius Love Jazz Swing", which were from the children's music album Genius + Love: Jazz & Swing for Kids, one among the many that we have around here.

Having the word frequency list up in front of me and an eager student beside me, I put two and two together and wrote down a bunch of words for her to practice writing that were high in frequency rather than what just happened to be on my screen. A quick glance at one of the lists showed me that pronouns, the verb "to be", and possessives make up a lot at the top of the list, so I wrote "I am, you are, he is," etc., and "my cat, your cat, his cat," etc., and she gleefully ("glee" being a word she recently learned from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) practiced writing out the words I wrote for her.

And how quickly kids get that stuff down. Reading some books with her today, I pointed out words that she had practiced writing that day and, before reading them, I asked her what they were. While she wasn't running 100% by any means, she certainly still recalled a bunch of them. One thing I noticed was that she seemed to be able to better recall items near the top of the lists I wrote out for her. Although those words seem to be a bit more common, I'm curious as to whether there's something to being able to better recall items at the beginning of something that you studied compared to those closer to the end.

Related: Word lists based on frequency of use

Word lists based on frequency of use

Wiktionary has frequency lists of words in various language. There are a variety of languages covered, including English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and others. These are great for focusing your vocabulary efforts in the most efficient way possible.

Japanese kanji by frequency of use

I was searching for a comprehensive list of Japanese kanji by frequency of use, and I managed to track down a list on Jonathan's Japan Journal. The list covers some 3,000 characters in order of frequency, with the data vaguely attributed to a now-dead link from Aichi University. While it's not quite the authoritative source I'd like to have, it looks like the real deal.

For any students of Japanese out there, you'll be quick to note that the list of daily use characters only has about 2,000, and even if you add in the additional name characters you only get a couple hundred in to the 2,000s. This list goes we'll beyond that, so if you're thinking about studying based on this list you may want to limit it to the first 2,000 or so.

And, for good measure, here's a frequency list for Chinese characters.