Saturday, May 28, 2011

A fast language learning method based on top recurrent words

A fast language learning method based on top recurrent words


Every language, including the English language  is a living entity that is constantly growing and changing, acquiring new words every year. Some of these words may be imported from another language, some may be from the same language but with modified meaning and use like the word cool in English for example, while other words might be completely genuine. This is due to the fact pointed out by Shanon that the combinations of a language alphabet is not fully utilized.

Concerning the English language, it is found that in spite the increasing size of the lexicon, the most frequent words in English remain the same.

Even though, this subject was extensively covered in literature, we made another visit to the topic. Thirty books were taken that cover several subjects. These subjects include: novels, Romans, history, autobiography, psychology, stories, geography, poetry and other topics from news on the Internet.

The total number of words considered exceeded 2.5 million words. Our findings that are listed in the following table agree with previous studies and highlights the prevalence of the most common words of English language.


Total Number of Words= 2,586,473
Table for Selected First Words, their number of appearance, and the percentage of this number as to the total number of words in these books.



Number of Selected First Words
Number of Words in  the Subset
Percent
30
685383
26.50
50
854403
33.03
80
996872
38.54
100
1063252
41.11
150
1177135
45.51
200 
1257791
48.63
250
1318285
50.97
350
1410478
54.53
500   
1509797
58.37
700
1606602
62.12
1000
1711982
66.19
1500   
1832929
70.87
2000
1920343
74.25
2500
1988075
76.86
3000
2042203
78.96
3500 
2086843
80.68


From the table it is found that most recurrent 50 words constitute 33% of the English language, While the first 250 words constitute more than 50% of the language.

Among the list of the 100 most frequent words in the English vocabulary are restrictive determiners like definite articles and possessive pronouns as well as prepositions, conjunctions, verbs, helping verbs and a variety of other essential parts of speech.

Similarly, the numbers one through six, which function as nouns, pronouns and adjectives, are included among the 500 most frequent words. Helping verbs also called auxiliaries, which include have, had, has and will, was, is, were, etc., consistently rank among the most frequently used words.

International differences between American English, British English and Australian variations, does not affect the most frequent words in English which are extremely consistent.

In addition to the above, it is found that among these 30 books including words that exceeded 2.5 million words a considerable amount of words appeared only once, twice, 3 times, 4 times, 5 times, etc. These words and their frequency is listed in the following table.
Number of Words That appear
Only 1 to 7 times:

appear Only n times
Number of Words
1
24847
2
8388
3
4654
4
3056
5
2265
6
1729
7
1434

The facts described above are utilized to establish a fast learning system for English language.
To avail this system, subscribe. You will receive our news letter on what can be called customer designed learning program. The objective is to enable you to acquire the first 1000 words which constitute 66% of the English language over a period of  3 months, divided as to 50 words, 100 words, 200 words, etc. The newsletter will contain the selected top words together with sentences using them and the vocabulary in these sentences.

Additional sources:


No comments:

Post a Comment