I am planning to start learning German soon. I will try to blitz through German grammar and try to get a good grasp of it as fast as possible so I can immediately make LingQ my primary means of acquiring German vocabulary whilst learning the language traditionally.
Should I get a frequency dictionary? Or are they useless when you have LingQ?
The most frequent words are those that you will come across most often. So it is likely that if you read a lot you will memorize a lot of them anyways. A frequency dictionary is probably not that helpful, then.
If you are in the need to know specific vocabulary or if you are interested in specific fields, you could get dictionaries that focus specifically on those matters or you could get a vocabulary workbook. Those usually provide vocab sorted by field, which may also cover some less common words you may not come across often, but which could be important.
More help to me than a frequency dictionary was the ebook collection of all 7 (Spanish) Harry Potter books in a single ePUB. I purchased the Kindle ebook, decrypted it with Epubor and loaded it in Calibre. With Calibre’s ebook reader, I can search the whole thing for words or parts of words and see how popular it is.
I can also see the words in context in an instant. For example, if I’m unsure when/how “hubo” would be used, I just look that up. I can search for part of a verb and see the different tenses that are used - like “recog” for recoger/recogĂa/recogiĂł, etc.
Context reverso is also handy for that, but with the Harry Potter books, I can also slowly read through them and see the conversations, descriptions, and actions happening.
If there is a word I’m having trouble recognizing even when it keeps popping up, I can make an Anki card with the word and several sentences in context from the book. If it’s a word that would be good to be able to remember for speaking, then once I have it learned on sight, then I flip the words and practice remembering the Spanish word.
I think they are usless without context. Grinding through the mini stories what are composed with the purpose of teaching you the most frequent words would be more fun than just grinding through a dictionary.
If you don’t like the mini stories (like me) simplified romans/graded readers is the best to go for. 8-10 A1-A2 books then 4-5 B1 will build a nice base.
I started learning Spanish from scratch here. I’m a native French speaker, so there are tons of cognates.
After 4 months, I was curious and purchased the Refold Spanish Anki deck (1000 words).
I went through half the deck in 20 minutes and I knew all the words. I asked for reimbursement.
I bought a 5k frequency dictionary, and I believe it’s useful to cover all aspects of the language and fill the gaps. We have the tendency to read and absorb content that we like, from the same or similar sources, and forget that there are many other topics.
The problem comes when you want to be sure to cover a broad conversational skill that will make you able to understand and talk about more common aspects of life. For example, understanding and being comfortable with your friend when buying groceries at the local supermarket.
I intend to use it as a filler for the gaps I might have in the language I’m studying, and have some sort of guidance for what I missed along the way.
But if you pay attention to rotate topics, books, articles, and so on, you might not need it. And it also depends on the type of skills that you want to develop with your target language, and so on.
In this context, the combinations are infinite, as usual.
Are they useful? Yes and no.
For a beginner I think I’d probably advise against it. First, as has been mentioned already, you will see the most common words already if you do something like the mini stories, or in something like Teach Yourself German or Assimil German (or other sources).
Secondly, a frequency dictionary is culled from many sources…news, literature, transcripts, etc. Also from a fairly wide timespan. Some of the words are not really commonly used in everyday life or may be outdated. The list also isn’t catered to your needs. Depending on your situation you may never come across or use some of the words that are in a frequency list. Or they may not be as important (to you) as other words that are much further down the list. You’d obviously want to know the words that may help you out the most in everyday life.
I have actually been using a frequency dictionary now to fill in some gaps that I feel I may be missing. It has example sentences which I think are beneficial. However, the sentences sometimes aren’t the best. I’ve actually been taking the words I don’t know and having chatgpt give me example sentences for the most common 2-3 meanings of the word. That is something missing from the frequency dictionary too…at best it will give you one sentence and possibly only one or two meanings which may not even be the most common meaning in some cases (I’ve found this to be the case).
I think something like this would be more applicable for a less related language to the one(s) you know example Hungarian or Thai. Likewise it could prove more useful for languages with a different script where there’s a second level use of the deck like Japanese / Chinese with the character recall. Especially with a LingQ subscription already there’s no extra need for me with Italian having already studied Spanish. As a French speaker it would be even easier as you note. German from English may be in a similar boat and as a popular language online the use of just frequency lists is likely less beneficial.