Now that the back-to-school season has settled into its new dorm, I\u2019m going to take an academic concept and drag it into a more practical, hands-on context.<\/p>\n
As the for the academic part, I recently wrote about the so-called \u201c80\/20\u201d rule, which is often called the Pareto principle, named for economist Vilfredo Pareto. More to the point, I also mentioned another scholar, linguist George Zipf. Zipf noted that the most commonly used word in a language is used about twice as often as the second most commonly used word is. The second most commonly used word is used about twice as often the third most commonly used word is. And so on. It\u2019s not exactly winner-take-all for the popular words, but it\u2019s still a very skewed, top-heavy distribution.<\/p>\n
Zipf later applied his observation to other fields, including economics, as a matter of fact. Hey, can\u2019t let Pareto have all the fun! But let\u2019s stick with the linguistic origins of Zipf\u2019s gig. Since no two words in a language are of equal importance (as measured by frequency), it\u2019s natural for students of a language to wonder if this fact can be used to their advantage.<\/p>\n
The strategy, of course, would be to learn words in their order of importance.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure many linguists have studied this angle. Me, I\u2019m just a guy in a beach chair, but I\u2019m always looking for a short cut, so I\u2019ll share my experience with this concept.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll start on home turf, and note that you can easily look up word frequency lists for English. Of course, the data behind these lists will be from various sources and contexts, but let\u2019s ignore that for now and just note the most commonly used 10 words as listed at the World-English.org website.<\/p>\n
The words are: the, of, to, and, a, in, is, it, you, that.<\/p>\n
The word \u201cside\u201d is No. 97 in frequency, while the word \u201cyes\u201d is way down the list at No. 486.<\/p>\n
These kinds of lists are fascinating, since, to me at least, they\u2019re often counter-intuitive. If you look at it with a student\u2019s eye, most of us studying a new language would learn to say \u201cyes\u201d in our first day or two of class, while something like \u201cside,\u201d on the other hand, might be a semester or two down the road.<\/p>\n
The overall picture, to me, at least, is that the notion of building a vocabulary based strictly on statistical frequency might be more elegant in theory than in reality. That\u2019s not a flaw in the lists, of course, since the lists have all sorts of purposes, and we impose our agenda on them, and even misuse them, at our own risk.<\/p>\n
Indeed, anybody publishing data is up against the unfortunate fact that if you point to the moon, people will just look at your finger.<\/p>\n
Anyway, moving into more exotic linguistic fare, it won\u2019t surprise you that some scholars have built impressively-detailed frequency lists of Chinese characters. It also won\u2019t surprise you that many students of Chinese are interested in anything that can improve their studying efficiency. I don\u2019t know anyone who has learned Chinese based on a brute-force approach to memorizing characters by frequency of use, but I\u2019m sure that somebody has done it.<\/p>\n
As for me, having dabbled with Chinese for a few years, I\u2019ve found that the only way I can remember anything is to use the lasso of association to herd related words into groups. This gives my feeble mind some conceptual hooks, some common themes, to aid in recall. Without this approach, things atomize into random points of data, and they are easily swept away, one grain at a time, by the winds of time.<\/p>\n
Not good.<\/p>\n
So this is where we grab the lasso and get on the word fraternity\u2019s party bus. Consider these words: nurse, passport, maintain, hair conditioner, naval escort, and cherish. Pretty random, right? I\u2019d say so.<\/p>\n
Yet in Chinese, these words are linguistically related to each other. Having learned one, it\u2019s a fairly easy step to just adopt the whole bunch of them, even if some of them don\u2019t seem like very high-priority words on their own.<\/p>\n
As a result, whatever progress I\u2019ve made has been lumpy, as I wobble down the street with these lopsided bags of vocabulary that I gathered. It\u2019s hardly the clean and efficient inventory of words I thought I\u2019d build when I started looking into frequency lists.<\/p>\n
Well, such is the difference between sitting in the planning room and actually serving in the trenches. Having escorted your attention to this condition, I hope that you\u2019ll maintain this passport to nursing your cherished learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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