Even if I hate statistics courses during university years, I strongly believe that it should be used effectively in any area of use. Yesterday, when I am looking for resources to study Russian vocabulary, I have seen an interesting statistics about usage frequency of Russian words. The statistics is compiled from 40 million words and it contains selection of modern fiction, political texts, newspapers, and popular science. The interesting thing was that;
- 1000 most frequent lemmas cover 64.0708% of word forms in texts.
- 2000 most frequent lemmas cover 71.9521% of word forms in texts.
- 3000 most frequent lemmas cover 76.6824% of word forms in texts.
- 5000 most frequent lemmas cover 82.0604% of word forms in texts.
I believe that, this statistics is crucial, because of the fact that by learning just 1000 words (I missed only 12 words in first 500) you can dominate 64 percent of Russian. This result sounds tasty for me. I haven’t lost time and I entered multitran.ru which is the greatest online Russian dictionary. It was not a difficult job to find 5000 most frequent words there. I have created a little booklet from these words and printed. Now I want to share it with my friends who want to learn and study Russian.
You can download it by clicking here.