Top 1000 (?) Most Common German Words
Wendy Cornell
used words in German? I have gotten some lists from various FTP
sites on the net, but these are mostly 160,000+ word dictionaries.
Thanks in dvance for any help.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Wendy D. Cornell Graduate Group in Biophysics
Box 0446 (415) 476-2597 (phone)
Department of Parmaceutical Chemistry (415) 476-0688 (fax)
University of California, S.F. cor...@cgl.ucsf.edu
San Francisco, CA 94143-0446 USA
Anno Siegel
Wendy Cornell <cor...@socrates.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>Does anyone have a list of the top 1000 (or whatever) most commonly
>used words in German? I have gotten some lists from various FTP
>sites on the net, but these are mostly 160,000+ word dictionaries.
>Thanks in dvance for any help.
I have a list of the first 8000 most common German word forms in
decreasing order of frequency of usage. It resides on a computer I don't
have immediate access to at the moment. It's extracted from the work
by Meyer-Kaeding, who counted a corpus of about a million words in
the thirties -- manually. The purpose of the Meyer-Kaeding effort was
to provide a basis for the improvement of shorthand notation.
What do you want the list for? If it's for learning German, you'd
probably be disappointed. The first few most common words are not
the words you need for a head start in a foreign language. It is
amazing how little can be done with the first thousand. The first
few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
words denoting anything concrete, such as household items, tools,
clothing, etc. are way outside the first thousand.
Anno
Anthony M. Becker
>I have a list of the first 8000 most common German word forms in
>decreasing order of frequency of usage. It resides on a computer I don't
>have immediate access to at the moment. It's extracted from the work
>by Meyer-Kaeding, who counted a corpus of about a million words in
>the thirties -- manually. The purpose of the Meyer-Kaeding effort was
>to provide a basis for the improvement of shorthand notation.
>Anno
I'd be interested in seeing the list of 8000. Your point is well-taken
regarding the appearance of nouns in the list, but the appearance of
verbs, adverbs and prepositions may be just as important, if not more
so, precisely because they are not necessarily concrete objects.
Would you be able to upload the list to an ftp-server somewhere? I'd
appreciate it.
Thanks.
--
Anthony M. Becker 810/370-2117 | "Rufen Sie meinen Vater an, meine Mutter
Email: bec...@vela.acs.oakland.edu | ist zu beschaeftigt."
| - Chelsea Clinton
Gregor Engelmeier
>What do you want the list for? If it's for learning German, you'd
>probably be disappointed.
Such a list is also interesting for use with automatic indexing
programms. The most frequently used words are normaly the ones which
bear the least information and which generate unnecessary big indexes
(noise-words).
I would be very interested in such a list, too.
Gruesze Gregor
Chris Lawrence Amshey
Anno Siegel <anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
>In article <CJMt7...@cgl.ucsf.edu>,
>Wendy Cornell <cor...@socrates.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>>used words in German? I have gotten some lists from various FTP
>>sites on the net, but these are mostly 160,000+ word dictionaries.
>>Thanks in dvance for any help.
>
>decreasing order of frequency of usage. It resides on a computer I don't
>have immediate access to at the moment. It's extracted from the work
>by Meyer-Kaeding, who counted a corpus of about a million words in
>the thirties -- manually. The purpose of the Meyer-Kaeding effort was
>to provide a basis for the improvement of shorthand notation.
>
>the words you need for a head start in a foreign language. It is
>amazing how little can be done with the first thousand. The first
>few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
>appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
>words denoting anything concrete, such as household items, tools,
>clothing, etc. are way outside the first thousand.
>
>Anno
on a list of about 2000 'core vocabulary' words that should give
a student a basic command of the language. Zeit is of course one
of them, as are many common nouns & verbs, and of course the
articles and pronouns etc. and a fair number of adjectives. If
anyone cares when I get back to school I can find the bibliographic
citation of where the list came from.
--Chris
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Christian Meuser
In article <2hb0t9$q...@brachio.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE>, anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE (Anno Siegel) writes:
|> In article <CJMt7...@cgl.ucsf.edu>,
|> Wendy Cornell <cor...@socrates.ucsf.edu> wrote:
|> >Does anyone have a list of the top 1000 (or whatever) most commonly
|> >used words in German? I have gotten some lists from various FTP
|> >sites on the net, but these are mostly 160,000+ word dictionaries.
|> >Thanks in dvance for any help.
[...]
|> What do you want the list for? If it's for learning German, you'd
|> probably be disappointed. The first few most common words are not
|> the words you need for a head start in a foreign language. It is
|> amazing how little can be done with the first thousand. The first
|> few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
|> appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
|> words denoting anything concrete, such as household items, tools,
|> clothing, etc. are way outside the first thousand.
Is this a feature of the german language or is the same way in other languages?
As i read this i was _realy_ astonished, i allways believed a woardhoard of about
500 words would be sufficent to communicate (in some way :-)
CU
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/ |/ |_(____(___/ \_/_
Anno Siegel
Christian Meuser <meu...@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE> wrote:
>
>In article <2hb0t9$q...@brachio.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE>, anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE (Anno Siegel) writes:
>|> Wendy Cornell <cor...@socrates.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>|> >Does anyone have a list of the top 1000 (or whatever) most commonly
>|> >used words in German?
>[...]
>|> What do you want the list for? If it's for learning German, you'd
>|> probably be disappointed. The first few most common words are not
>|> the words you need for a head start in a foreign language. It is
>|> amazing how little can be done with the first thousand. The first
>|> few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
>|> appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
>|> words denoting anything concrete, such as household items, tools,
>|> clothing, etc. are way outside the first thousand.
>
>Is this a feature of the german language or is the same way in other languages?
>As i read this i was _realy_ astonished, i allways believed a woardhoard of about
>500 words would be sufficent to communicate (in some way :-)
No, I don't think this is peculiar to the German language. These word
counts are usually compiled from a corpus of literary, and business, and
legal, and what have you types of documents. These include a huge number
of words not needed for your basic communication. If someone were to
compile a list of words people use in shopping, asking for directions,
making jokes, etc., the top few hundred would be much more like it.
That's why phrase-books and the like don't just offer the most common
words of a language, they present a vocabulary specially sought out
for its use in basic day-to-day communication.
To put it differently, if you were to take a German text and delete
all the words that are not among the 10 000 (say) most common words, you'd
probably keep something like 90% of the text, but the meaning would
virtually disappear. You'd be left with sentence skeletons with all the
specifics deleted. Specific words are *rare* words, that's what makes
them specific.
Anno
Anno Siegel
Anno Siegel <anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
>I have a list of the first 8000 most common German word forms in
>decreasing order of frequency of usage. It resides on a computer I don't
>have immediate access to at the moment. It's extracted from the work
>by Meyer-Kaeding, who counted a corpus of about a million words in
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The name of the first co-author should be Meier not Meyer.
[...]
>... The first
>few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
>appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
The first noun is indeed "Zeit", but it is in the nineties not tree hundreds.
Sorry for the misinformation, this was all from memory.
Anno
Thomas Fox %Kollman
>
>|> What do you want the list for? If it's for learning German, you'd
>|> probably be disappointed. The first few most common words are not
>|> the words you need for a head start in a foreign language. It is
>|> amazing how little can be done with the first thousand. The first
>|> few hundred don't even contain many nouns at all (the first noun to
>|> appear is "Zeit" - time, somewhere in the three hundreds). All the
>|> words denoting anything concrete, such as household items, tools,
>|> clothing, etc. are way outside the first thousand.
>
>Is this a feature of the german language or is the same way in other languages?
>As i read this i was _realy_ astonished, i allways believed a woardhoard of about
>500 words would be sufficent to communicate (in some way :-)
>
>CU
Well, at least for English, there exists (or existed?) a little book
(I think from Klett Verlag) called 'Englischer Grundwortschatz' [basic
English vocablary]. It stated, that about 50 words (so called structural
words) make up about 50% of an average English text. Of course, these are
'I, a, the, you, of...', so knowlegde of only these gives you an\
understanding of about 0% :-). The next 1000 words account for
about 85% of an average text (please dont ask me,what 'average'
means in htis context), and the next 2500 for additional 10%. So
with 3500 words you have 95% of an English text. From
my experience, with the first 1000 words you get along quite well.
I also have the Italian version of this book at home, and I know of
at least two more (French and Spanish). So I'd be very surprised,
if theredidnt exist a German one...
BTW: Any linguist around, who knows how many different words a
typical edition of the 'Bild' uses? I guess, this might be
a good indication, how many diffenrt German words you need
for basic communication skills :-)
Servus, Thomas
Jochen Ruhland
bundeskanzler, used only about 5000 different words in his speeches -
and remember, he ruled the country for several years!
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Anno Siegel
I <anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
>I have a list of the first 8000 most common German word forms in
>decreasing order of frequency of usage.
This file is temporarily available for anonymous ftp on ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de
as incoming/wordfreq/wordfreq.ger.Z. A README file is also available.
Anno
Anno Siegel
Anno Siegel <anno...@w172zrz.zrz.TU-Berlin.DE> wrote:
>This file is temporarily available for anonymous ftp on ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de
>as incoming/wordfreq/wordfreq.ger.Z. A README file is also available.
This message goes to all the people who have expressed interest in
my file of common German word forms. It will also be posted to
alt.usage.german.
The file has been available for a while for ftp on ftp.zrz.tu-berlin.de
in /incoming/wordfreq as wordfreq.ger.Z. A README file has also been
provided. Unfortunately, the encoding of the German umlauts had been
mangled (the most significant bit had gone lost). I have now provided
a corrected version at the same place where the umlauts are encoded using
the Latex convention ("A..."s).
Since there seems to be some interest in the word list, I will talk to
our ftp admin in about a week (he is on vacation right now). Presumably
the file will find a more permanent place below the /pub directory from
where it can also be mirrored to other ftp sites.
Regards, Anno
noreply.paymen...@gmail.com
I'm sharing a list of 1000+ German nouns (with English translations and explanatory notes to such translations) that I wrote out from SPIEGEL and other German newspapers. These nouns are some of the more useful ones that I came across in spring of 2014, as I began to read the German press and put together what has now become a Mega Word List with over 19000 words. Here's the link where the list can be downloaded: https://germanwordlist.wordpress.com/
Stefan Ram
sauerkraut
sausage
kindergarten
zeitgeist
fraulen
angst
kapot
wanderlust
Stefan Ram
>noreply.paymen...@gmail.com writes:
>>I'm sharing a list of 1000+ German nouns
> I think the most popular German nouns are:
> sauerkraut
> sausage
And then there also is: "wellschmerz",
and "schadenfreunde"!
Patok
GFH
> Does anyone have a list of the top 1000 (or whatever) most commonly
> used words in German? I have gotten some lists from various FTP
> sites on the net, but these are mostly 160,000+ word dictionaries.
> Thanks in dvance for any help.
Lists of the most common 100, 1000, 2000, etc. words.
UVA has a course in German in which no translation is allowed.
All books use the most common 2000 German words. The object is
to break the habit of translating and start thinking in German.
GFH
Arno Martens
wrote:
Patok
GFH
more useful than silly comments.
GFH
Tom P
> With a slight delay of 21 years, here's an answer:
>
> I'm sharing a list of 1000+ German nouns (with English translations and explanatory notes to such translations) that I wrote out from SPIEGEL and other German newspapers. These nouns are some of the more useful ones that I came across in spring of 2014, as I began to read the German press and put together what has now become a Mega Word List with over 19000 words. Here's the link where the list can be downloaded: https://germanwordlist.wordpress.com/
>
alive in the press in 2014.