Reading news for information: How much vocabulary a CFL learner should know
Jun Da · 2005
This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study on the vocabulary used in journalistic Chinese. Based on a 20-million character corpus with more than 27,000 news texts collected between mid-2003 and the end of 2004 from various Chinese media sources in different countries and regions, a character frequency list and three word and phrase frequency lists with two, three and four-characters were compiled. With reference to a consolidated 140- thousand vocabulary list from six manually edited word and phrase lists in the public domain, we estimate that the number of two- to four-character words and phrases used in journalistic Chinese is between 80,000 and 90,000. Based on our estimate about vocabulary size and usage in journalistic Chinese, we suggest that CFL learners should first focus on around 20,000 high to medium frequency words and phrases if they want to develop basic ability in Chinese news reading. Further, exposure to around 70,000 low frequency vocabulary is needed if they want to develop full proficiency in Chinese news reading.