Most Common Words list

[Laughing Squid]

MDBG has a really nice dictionary; you can lookup words based on the character. This dictionary works wonderfully, but like many dictionaries, it contains many words that are seldom (If ever) used. I have used the dictionary to find a word only to find out after learning that word that it is no longer commonly used. Is there a dictionary that lets me look up words based on characters (Like MDBG), but has a "common words only" filter or option? Or is there a massive list of "Most Common Words" that you know of? I could use "CTRL + F" to find words that had a particular character in it, so such a list might suffice also.

Thanks in advance.

[Gharial]

If you Google 'chinese character frequency list' you'll find at least a few resources.

I myself use paper dictionaries more than online ones, and find the ABC series (esp. the new ABC ECCE) useful for getting some idea of the relative frequencies of characters. (Edit: It also includes the HSK lists that Renzhe mentions in the next post, though those Wiki pages are much more useful than the appendical lists in the ECCE, in that the Wiki ones supply the hanzi right alongside the Pinyin, whereas with the ECCE only the Pinyin is given in the lists, so one has no option but to look the characters up in the dictionary whenever one isn't quite sure what meaning the Pinyin is referring to. But then, one could always just browse through the ECCE's C-E half itself in order to learn the HSK vocab, as such items are indicated by bullets in the dictionary, and the bonus is that one will be getting all the extra information - such as part of speech, register, examples - that the dictionary provides right alongside the indicated items in the(ir) entries generally).

[renzhe]

www.xiaoma.info only shows common words by default, but it's not perfect either. What you want is something like the HSK lists floating around the web, and then learning that, or learning words which you encounter when reading adequate material. Wiktionary has them, sorted in four levels: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:HSK_list_of_Mandarin_words

Also, look at nciku, they give sentences as examples for every word, you might be able to use that to judge whether the word is common or not.

[feihong]

If I remember correctly, the Wenlin dictionary gives information on how common a given word is. However I'm not sure what kinds of texts go into their corpus, so that information might be biased towards specific fields of knowledge.

[Gharial]

@Feihong (and whoever else might be interested ):

 

The statistics employed in Wenlin are based on three studies, by scholars who are to be thanked for their hard work in selecting and entering vast quantities of text, performing the calculations, and publishing the results in these three books:

(1) Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary 《现代汉语频率词典》Xiàndài Hànyǔ Pínlǜ Cídiǎn (Beijing Language Institute, 1986) [Character and word frequencies from a sample of 1,807,389 characters.]

(2) Which are the Most Commonly Used Chinese Characters? 《“最常用的汉子是哪些?》Zuì Chángyòng de Hànzi shì Nǎxiē? (Chinese Writing Reform Committee and National Standards Office, 1982) [Character frequencies from a sample of 11,080,000 characters.]

(3) Cracking the Chinese Puzzles (T. K. Ann, © 1982 Stockflows Co., Ltd., 37 Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong) [Character frequencies from a sample of 1,408,573 characters.]

In addition, at Wenlin Institute we calculated two sets of statistics using electronic Chinese magazines published on the Internet between April 1991 and April 1995:

(4) 华夏文摘 Huáxià Wénzhāi (HXWZ) [sample of 4,189,874 characters.]

(5) 枫华园 Fēng Huá Yuán (FHY) and 联谊通讯 Liányì Tōngxùn (LYTX) [Combined sample of 1,227,883 characters.]

The character frequency ranks in Wenlin were derived by combining and averaging these five sets of statistics.

( http://guide.wenlininstitute.org/wenlin4.1/Frequency_Statistics )