This might be of interest.
http://www.askoxford.com/oec/mainpage/oec02/?view=uk
It's an analysis of the OED corpus. Apparently 100 words make up 50% of it!
(The problem would be arranging those words and filling in the other 50% if you were trying to communicate with only those words)
And reading it, I had an interesting experience in the context of the current disscussion.
They use a word lemma that I'd never heard before, but because the first time they use it they explain it with a synonym I now now that word and could understand the passage. Even if they hadn't, I would have understood the word from the context.
Will I ever use lemma? unlikely. But it's now part of my vocabulary.
I think vocabulary works on several levels. Active and passive vocabularies would be different. Day to day speech is probably very limited and repetitive. Writing would have a larger vocabulary. Listening maybe more and reading the most. And I would say reading is how I expanded my English vocabulary. What that vocabulary is I don't know. Maybe it's more useful to measure it as an ability to read and understand the broadsheet newspapers.
So I would then guess that reading is the key to expanding an ability in Japanese.
I would also guess that with a very limited vocabulary you can communicate quite a lot.
As long as two things happen.
The native downshifts their vocabulary to near your level so you can understand the reply.
(As you would with children and as I find I do with non-native speakers)
The second thing is a willingness and ability of the learner speaker to cope with a limited vocabulary. To be able to rephrase to get an idea across instead of concentrating on an inability to translate the English phrase you have in your head.
Similar analysis is made of kanji in Japanese Newspapers
http://nozaki-lab.ics.aichi-edu.ac.jp/n ... kanji.html
with English definitions and other ways of grouping kanji
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japan ... jifreq.htm
"However, according to a recent study (Chikamatsu, Yokoyama, Nozaki, and Long, in preparation), the 500 most frequently occurring characters cover approximately 80% of total kanji usage in newspapers. Furthermore, the top 1,000 most frequent characters covered 95% of total usage and the final 2,000 characters make up only 5% of the total use. Thus, if students know these most frequent 500 characters, they should comprehend the gist of most Japanese newspaper articles."
from
http://www.nuthatch.com/kanjicards/unicode.html
and the Java kanji 500 project is here
http://condor.depaul.edu/~sryner/kanjicards/
Which agrees with something I'd read before that 500 kanji is enough to get you reading. Of course they are base kanji, things get more difficult if you start factoring in compounds. Which starts to ask the question how many words do those 500 kanji make? And what constitutes a lemma
in Japanese ?
But while I've looked at these lists, I'm not sure how useful it might be to just learn this list. My vocabulary acquisition is more about what words I need and what interesting words I come across rather than learning JLPT lists or frequency lists or Vocab lists from my textbook. (I just had a flashback to my schooldays where I had to learn lists of French vocab and the teacher would wallop you if you got a word wrong in an oral test the next day. It was one learning method I suppose but ultimately unsuccessful with me. My incentive was fear and not wanting to be hit rather than learning a language. What a waste
)
Which leads me on to something I've been thinking about recently that words exist in a context. I wonder if it isn't better to learn phrases and sentences rather than word lists.
This is an interesting article about English Vocab teaching. It makes me realise how often a teacher or guide of some sort is needed to
use words.
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think ... ocab.shtml
