Word frequency list
Dear SpanishDict team,
Seasons greetings to you all. I cannot thank you enough for creating such a wonderful Spanish/English learning community with all the useful contents and tools, as well as the helpful culture of the community. I do have one suggestion for the website: Can you create a list of the top 10000 most frequently used Spanish words on your website? I have done extensive google search, and I tried a few of the websites. However, most of them do not use headwords for entry, but rather treat each distinct spelling of a word as a single entry. Some other website does use headwords as entries, however, they stops at the first 1000 or first 2000. It is too short to be useful.
Thanks and happy holidays.
6 Answers
www.wordsgalore.com
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Try this word frequency list:
Happy Holidays to you as well. A suggestion like this should be sent directly to Feedback
Here is a quote taken from SpanDict's 'Blog' on the subject of "Words You Need for Spanish":
"The average person has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words, but it is possible that a person can understand many more words than he or she actually uses. This number is the same no matter what language the person speaks. However, the number of words that he or she actually uses on a day to day basis is much lower."
And in the next paragraph:
"Research shows that in an average day, we use about 1,000 different words. Day to day, the words we use do not vary too much either, meaning we tend to stick with about a basic daily vocabulary of around 1,000 words."
Source ----> SpanDict Blog.
What you have asked for is probably best found by using a good quality dictionary. The preferred Spanish only dictionary often referred to by our user members is "El Diccionario de la lengua española" found here ----> Real Academia Española.
You may also find a good English to Spanish and Spanish to English dictionary to be a great help to you. I use a paper copy of this dictionary and have only just found this version available online. If this online version is as good as my paper copy, you will find it very helpful not only for individual words but also for phrases, idioms and sentences using the individual words. Try this ----> Collins Span/Eng and Eng/Span Dictionary.
A request for a 10,000 word list looks to me to be a request for about 10% of an entire dictionary. Its a very big request. It is probabhly better for you to work with existing good dictionaries.
Muchos saludos/Best regards,
Moe
Thank you Yeser007 for suggesting the feedback forum, I did not know there was such an area yet. I will rephrase this suggestion and post it there.
Thank you Moe also for the useful links and suggestions. You are right 10,000 words maybe too big a request. Maybe a 5000-6000 headwords ordered in usage frequency would be more practical. I have a few dictionaries, but from a dictionary, it is hard to figure out which are the most frequently used words.
However, I do think a word frequency list of 5-6K words with only the headwords as entries is very helpful for beginner and intermediate learners. This is because everyone only has so much time in a day, and if we apply the time to the most frequently used words first, we will be able to comprehend more written and spoken Spanish in a shorter period of time, and such comprehension will not only encourage us to continue learning, but also enable us to learn the more advanced language elements easier. Stephen Kreshen, the language acquisition expert has a theory of "i+1" in language acquisition. For anyone who wants to master new languages, I highly recommend people reading Dr. Kreshen's research results. Here is a short summary: link text
Therefore, vocabulary learning order does matter a lot to the final success of language learning. If anyone find a good source for frequently used vocabulary list, I would love to know. Since SpanishDict is the largest online dictionary lookup site, I do hope this site offers a better solution.
What you are asking is very, very difficult. First of all, Spanish is a language with many different varieties. What is extremely common in one country may not be used at all in another. Secondly just compiling the data to perform the statistics necessary to come to these conclusions would be some serious work.
Its very hard to give numbers, but recently I was talking to the head of my Spanish department and he told me some very interesting facts. If I remember correctly, he said a 2,500 word vocabulary would allow you to express yourself in almost any context, 5,000 is about the number of words a non-educated speaker would use, and 10,000 words is what an educated native speaker would use.
As a Spanish student who is constantly trying to increase the amount of words in my vocabulary, I would recommend a few things. First, buy a real in depth native dictionary. If you can't afford one there are tons of them available online (personally I feel that a real dictionary is much more useful, but thats just me). Secondly, absorb yourself in the dialects you are most interested in learning. Read literature and news from the places you are interested, talk as much as possible with people from these regions, listen to music, etc.
