Anki Deck: 1000 Highly Common Chinese Words From News Articles

[Kelby]

Personally, I think this is a great method for someone more advanced. Since reading the newspaper is a more advanced skill anyway, you'll have a lower likelihood to run into the more professional vocabulary used later on in the frequency deck and so by starting further on in the deck you should be able to avoid too much review. Start from a place that feels right, couple it with reading the daily newspaper and use this as a method to increase your vocabulary.

If I were to use this approach straight from the beginning though, I'd do the same thing with a basic frequency list and use a Chinese primary school reader. Something like this might fit the bill if you're not in China, but if you're in the Mainland you can easily find materials with several 300-600 character stories to start working with. This makes the level suitable, and provides an environment where you can see words you come across in their natural habitat.

In either case, it's also greatly important to make sure you're capturing everything you don't know to a deck and studying the new stuff as well.

I realize this isn't the most efficient approach due to the fact that your learning materials and the stuff you capture aren't organized by any sort of frequency, but more importantly this enforces the 'reading with a dictionary' process (which I think is dynamite, BTW).

[Silent]

And the real challenge is to find the right balance between words that are very common in general Chinese and words that are very specific but compulsory if you want to g beyond the general-Chinese intermediary state.

Excellent story, however I've my doubts about the conclusion.Those most frequent words/particles do have a function. Without these you may get the general idea (a couple of people in relation with an event etc), but you've no idea of what is convened. Without knowing or it is about the past, present or future, without knowing or it's negated, etc etc, there is no way you'll understand the text. Basicly you need all words, ok, you may fail a few as (longer) texts tend to contain some redundancy. Hence my plea to start out with beginners texts or otherwise at least limit yourself to a specific subject. Learning all the vocabulary for a wide range of subjects at a adult native all at once is just to ambitious (for most).

[chajadan]

See, from my perspective, I don't care at all if I understand the entire article, and I specifically don't expect to. I mean, with a dictionary, you can pretty much understand the entire gist, a hurricane happened, deaths occurred, a flood resulted, the mayor was involved, etc. But, at least so far in Chinese, I still never understand every part of a particular sentence, something always feels off. But at my level go figure. Sure, I could go with elementary texts and I've looked into a few, it's a good idea I'm certainly not bashing, and yes, I do feel more in touch with the whole sentence, but for me I don't feel a need to be that in touch at this point, so I aim for my personal comfort zone.

Now mind you, the deck I intended to make was just a top frequency list -- that it happened to be pulled from news articles was a complete fluke and I just mentioned it. I'm actually much more likely to do the majority of my reading in novel form, but I do do a lot of news reading and watching in foreign languages. I highly expect this list taken from news to translate decently well to generic material, but the particular focus I see as kind of cool anyway. There are certainly less biased frequency lists.

[Silent]

Now mind you, the deck I intended to make was just a top frequency list -- that it happened to be pulled from news articles was a complete fluke and I just mentioned it. I'm actually much more likely to do the majority of my reading in novel form, but I do do a lot of news reading and watching in foreign languages

I guess for the top 1000 words the corpus it's derived from is not that important as long as the corpus is derived from more than one or two subject specific sources. The top 1000 words are very likely top show up about everywhere.

Maybe I stressed the news too much and irritated you. If so, I'm sorry for that, you mentioned books before. Reading in novel form is imho already a lot better than general news readings. A typical 'simple' novel has 4000-7000 different words in them. Where in a random pick of newspaper articles of comparable size I would expect at least 20000 perhaps even 30000 different words (never really measured it for news). That makes a huge difference. Not only is the number of words to learn a factor 5 less, it also means the words used are on average repeated 5 times as often helping to memorise and to learn some of the nuances. By starting out with general childrens books or simple graded readers another factor 5 or more can be reached. These readers may be attainable in a matter of days or a couple of weeks where the vocabulary of a novel would take maybe a year or more to learn if study is only a side activity, as after a while reviewing the previously learned words will take more and more time.

Where to start out is of course a matter of personal preference and study methods. If you like to start out at novels, news sites or whatever instead of the simpler content that's perfectly fine. I think the approach itself is very good but for the average learner I think a start at a more modest level is more motivating.

[chajadan]

In case anyone is interested, the deck has been updated. Some definitions have been simplified to remove esoteric usages. This deck is still being altered as I go through and see issues. If you use the deck, feel free to post issues about it here.

[rob111]

For any who might be interested, I updated this deck with a couple new fields and shared it on Anki under the name 1000 Most Common Chinese Words in News, update by Rob .  I didn't change any of the existing data.