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Learning Vocabulary By Frequency
Some words are more common than others. This very basic linguistic principle has been researched (warning: PDF) a lot. This research shows a correlation between frequency and vocabulary acquisition, but that was already something taken for granted as common knowledge.
If you ask most people who have successfully learned a language how they did it, they’ll tell you they hit a certain level, then began breaking the language down and targeting each part separately. Vocabulary and grammar are the core parts of a language, so how do you sanely break them down? Grammar is a completely different beast which we won’t get into in this article. For vocabulary though, you see a trend in what is used often, what is used sometimes, and what is rarely used.
Making Sense of Vocabulary
How many words are there in the English language? How do we count or determine a word, and what are the implications of doing so? If we are conservative and use the number of words accepted in the Oxford Dictionary, we end up with 171,476 words. This further gets filtered down per The Economist to roughly 20,000 to 35,000 for the average adult (who took a vocabulary test).
The BBC reported it took about 800 words to function in day-to-day communications, 3,000 to understand film or similar, and 8,000 to 9,000 to understand most…
