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Learn frequently used words
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Written by Wei-Jing Zhu
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Whether we want our parents to learn English, or our children to learn
Chinese, we can have maximum impact by having them learn the most
frequently used words first (such as top N=100 or N=1000). Here is a
resource that I have prepared just for that purpose.
With the existence of the publically available (open source) CE/EC dictionary, (and other useful resources), I can use the dictionary itself in two ways:
- as a corpus to extract the frequency of the words, and sort the list of words by frequency to get any Top N list I want.
- as a dictionary to translate the top N words into the target language
Depending on the EC or CE direction, I can make two lists,
- the most frequent and hence useful English words (and their translation to Chinese) that our parents should learn first
- the most frequent Chinese characters and words (with English translation) that our children should learn first
These lists are now available as downloads on this site, just choose Sorted_EC or Sorted_CE, both are around 1Mbytes text files.
First Chinese characters to teach
To offer my son the feeling of maximum impact of learning Chinese
characters, I would teach him first a combination of "easy characters"
which have the fewest strokes, but at the same time being the most
common as well, so that he would be able to recognize a lot when
watching Chinese MTV Karaoke subtitles.
I have made such a
list manually, looking through the list of frequent characters and
selecting the simple ones. However, one can imagine automatically
generating such a list with the following approach:
- the ordering of characters by stroke numbers is implicitly in the Big5 character encoding
- the frequency listing has been obtain above
- so a combination of these two, to favor both simple strokes and frequency, can easily be coded.
I will supply such a list in due time. Here are a few online resources:
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